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Games Everywhere : The Larger Role for Web Platforms and Services for Games & Serious Games
Poziom:
Temat: Media
>>
LANDIS: I'm Matt Landis with Eng Edu. Mark
DeLoura from Developer Relations is away at
the E3, so he's only here in spirit. We're
pleased to kick-off our tech talk series about
serious games and games in education with
this talk by Ben Sawyer. Ben's name is synonymous
with serious games. He's been a well-known
advocate, champion and developer in this space
for over 10 years. He's co-founder the Serious
Games Initiative, Games for Help Project and
Digitalmill, a game design development firm.
In addition, he served as a Serious Games
Summit Chair at GDC. We're pleased to have
him here and we're looking forward to getting
his perspective on the state of serious games
and the needs of large and small game developers
alike.
>> SAWYER: Thanks. Thanks, Matt. And I'll
see Mark soon at E3. So, I'm glad he's here
in spirit. But knowing E3, that spirit is
probably a fairly low level right now in terms
of what he's about to go through, so he's
familiar with that. So the title of this presentation
is Games Everywhere. And within it is the
sort of evolutionary thought pattern that
I've had as I've watched Web services and
other types of cool Web applications come
about and really spent some time in the trenches
trying to build some of this stuff and what
the larger role for those could be. So, I'm
going to go pretty quick because there's a
lot of information to cover and I know that
you're all eager to get back to other endeavors.
But one of my first slides is always this
one. I promise all my game development friends
that I don't throw commercial entertainment
games under the rug when I talk about serious
games. I think its important part of being
human is to be entertained and to entertain
other people. But from a serious side, I think
games have this pretty well solved to entertainment
for that matter. But, it's important to remind
ourselves that just sitting by on a Sunday
afternoon and engrossing yourself in a game
like Spore or Call of Duty or any of the other
great games is an important part. So just
a little bit more about me. I did find this
book one day and I read it. It didn't help
me too much but it was kind of neat to think
that somebody actually had this put into a
book. That's the first computer I ever spent
a significant amount of time programming.
I worked on some earlier computers before
then. Every six-year old should be given a
lightsaber on their sixth birthday, I dug
that out. Those are my two kids. We also--we're
a family of LEGO fanatics. We actually have
a LEGO basement where we keep them all and
build furiously into the evening. Those are
some of the projects that I've done. Here's
a sort of number of games that I've worked
on either as a producer or a designer. What's
important about this is just simply to establish
that. Not only do I talk about this stuff
but I actually get in here and work on the
design and development of it. And I use both
to inform the other. The other thing is that
there's a dissent diversity of work here,
stuff for the military, stuff for STEM education,
corporate training for Cisco, a walking game
for Humana that is about essentially exercise,
a game to help university presidents better
manage their universities, and a number of
conference activities that we do to try and
build the sort of rising tide and best practices
in the serious game space. I also require
this slide of all my speakers whenever I can
at my conferences, it's basically what I'm
playing lately. Again, I play a lot of different
kinds of games. I'm a life-long gamer. And,
you know, it's important as a designer to
play these types of games to really get in
there. And by requiring this slide of my speakers,
many of whom will sometimes be academics or
analysts. It's what keeping everybody honest.
I've sometimes find that people who like to
talk about games, spend more time talking
about them than playing. And this is a way
to sort of say that's kind of a bad way to
be a game's analyst or a researcher. So these
are the goals that I have today to shine the
spotlight on beyond the sort of conventional
forms of games. To deepen your understanding
of serious games in the serious game space,
to link to this future of games and serious
games to the pervasive Web services that we're
really sort of seeing, dealt by companies
like Google, and to elevate games in my opinion
to a larger strategic opportunity especially
for larger organizations. And some of the
key points that I'll make is that the games
are really heading everywhere, if you spend
a lot of time looking at games both on the
commercial entertainment side as well as the
serious game side, you really start to see,
just the incredible explosion of different
types of games for different types of markets
or different types of purposes. And games,
as a result to that, should be the sort of
strategic opportunity. And the evolution and
the larger utility of game design and engineering
patterns, the things that we actually design
processes and ideas that we take from games
are starting to seep in to other walks of
life, even things that we wouldn't extensively
call games. But overall, we need some better
infrastructure if we're going to see this
idea that games could be everywhere and every
day parts of our lives than where we are right
now. Now, why would I spend 10 years of my
life sort of pursuing this idea of serious
games? Well, these are some of the reasons.
I think, and others like me think, that games
have a role in solving our problems. It doesn't
mean that a game is going to be the ultimate
solver of all of life's problems, probably
not. But if there's no--there's no reason
to leave it on the way side. The problems
and the challenges that we face today really
require that sort of, you know, to beat an
often used phrase to death, you know, all
hands on deck. And video games are probably
the most powerful media form that we have
going right now. And to think that we're just
going to leave them alone just for--just for
play seems sort of wrong. And it's proven
through some of the existing work in the serious
game space that games can play substantive
roles. We've seen games that have proven in
research studies to help people with their
health, to help people with their learning,
to change their opinions, to collect data
from people in new ways that we couldn't do
before, to sell products and to do many other
types of things that we do on everyday life.
And we need more accelerants. That's the other
reason I'm here. We need more people sort
of thinking about how this idea of games and
games being everywhere can lead to solving
some of their problems and thinking about
their types of investments that you need to
make at the infrastructure for really all
of our sakes. So, there's my explanation.
So, what do we mean by games being everywhere?
So, right now, games are a huge category of
entertainment. I often say to people if you
want to understand what games are doing within
media, go talk to a television executive and
ask him or some of their audiences. They're
not watching television, they're playing Farmville.
They're playing World of Warcraft. They're
playing Call of Duty. They're playing video
games. Then there's this whole non-entertainment
sector, the place where I spend most of my
time. And I will show you some of the areas
that games are creeping into. There's also
this whole idea of technology transfer. The
technology is from games that are spawned
out of this industry or ending up in all kinds
of different places or our technologies that
have, in general, would have come about, but
come about in a faster pace because me and
my friends who play games spend tons of money
on things like 3D GPU chips. And then, we
have the spread of this design philosophy
and then the rising culture. So, let's look
a little bit at that. From the games everywhere
standpoint, we're most used to the first column,
you know, games at home. This where we play
and we--right now, we're seeing games not
just being played on our PC but we have game
consoles and now we have tablets and now we
have phones. A lot of--my two kids play games
on the phone when the console's not being
used. And then of course, we have the whole
mobile explosion going on and then work where
people are playing games, mostly on PCs but
increasingly on phones, and then potentially
on tablets to the extent that tablets make
it into the workforce. And that person is
playing, actually, a forklift safety game
in that picture. So in the serious games initiative,
we took some effort to kind of build up this
taxonomy of serious games. Because one of
the things that was happening was that the
serious game space was sort of being defined
as a couple of specific areas here to like
"Oh, yeah, that's a game for training stuff,"
or "That's stuff for the military using video
game engines." And so, what we did was we
went out and canvassed and then reorganized
the entire serious game space, across the
top by the types of areas that an organization
might use like health and advertising and
training and education and production and
even work. And then down the left-hand side
looking at the various industrial sectors,
government, defense, healthcare, and then,
creating this sort of matrix. And, you know,
without going into detail of it, the idea
is to show you that there's a lot of potential,
and this potential goes beyond commonly used
area--commonly sided areas like learning and
training. Just to make sure that we weren't
just kind of putting up conjecture, we went
out--and this was about two and a half years
ago. We went out and I said, "Let's find at
least one example for each of those squares
of a project that was either in development
or was part of a research grant or was actually
a shipping product." So you can see, like,
well over two-thirds. And that was over a
couple of years ago. And many of these areas
already had multiple entries, multiple examples
of the work. So, this is not something that's
confined to a couple of squares. But let's
look at the technology transfer. So the video
game industry globally, hardware and software
depending on what you look at, $70 billion
to $80 billion in the next couple of years.
So, if you were to just kind of backtrack
through their revenues and sort of figure
out what their R&D level is, it's anywhere
from $10 billion to $20 billion being spent.
And these key outputs coming from a graphics,
visualization, AI, synchronous networking,
a lot of anti-fraud stuff now and World of
Warcraft and other types of games, not just
looking for credit card fraud but people doing
things like gold farming, sort of asymmetric
behaviors that they want to stop. Things that
they feel will corrupt the game play let alone
or stealing potential money or accounts, so
how do you find those types of behaviors and
their dataset is of great interest to people
who are looking for similar types of activities
in their own datasets. And you can imagine
who they are. So the psychology of games,
interface, virtual human in this rapid innovation,
that's what's going on. I mean the Darwinian
environment of the game's business. If you're--you
can have a string of hit games, have one bad
hit, and your studio closes or your team is
dissolved, it's brutal. So the stress is,
you know, both good and bad, in terms of what
we get out of it. And I've often sort of compared
the video game industry as like a private
version of NASA except we're getting a little
bit more cast off to the rest of us than I
would have thought. And unfortunately though,
it just doesn't include [INDISTINCT], right?
So, one of the other areas, the way to look
at technology transfer when I evangelize,
there are some places like DC and stuff as
I go, "Okay, well, maybe you're not that interested
in games. You just don't understand as deeply
and passionately as I do." But you probably
have like a lot of deep passion in this town
for robotics, especially if I'm over in Virginia.
And they go, "Yeah, yeah, well, absolutely
robotics, we're investing, you know, hundreds
of millions of dollars in robotics." I go,
"Well, then, what is this grey warden inside
BioWare's Dragon Age game? He's a non-player
character. He's in a 3D world. He has to move
around objects. He has to talk to people.
He has to have some sort of visioning as to
what's going on in a dynamic environment.
I mean, he's essentially a robot. He's just
a virtual robot." And the type of things that
they have to work on and game developers spend
their days working on like path finding are
the same things that a lot of people work
in robotics work on. So, the idea that you
could actually get game developers who've
never worked in robotics together and roboticists
who've never work in games and probably find
that there's a lot of common challenges and
common approaches, or different approaches
that could help each other is something that
really hits home to people that haven't quite
thought about it that way. So, we look at
games as a computational form of media. And
it must communicate effectively to the player
or it fails. And when you fail in a game space,
it's pretty brutal. Just go read reviews of
bad game on hardcore gaming websites, its
choice language. And then games, in my opinion,
democratize the power of simulation. They
take something that we call simulation and
they sort of pair it down and make it more
accessible. And so, this is sort of like Will
writes career in a nutshell, right? This is
what he's done and he's done it quite effectively.
And we've seen the kinds of opportunities
that come out of that, you know. Oops, sorry,
we've got a little pop-up problem, okay? So,
he's done and shown what happens when he can
get millions of people to sort of think about
zoning in cities or the way the power, the
scale of the universe. What's that worth?
Even though, it's not as much depth as say
what might go on in the university simulation
lab. What's the upside in byproduct of, say,
10 million people having some level of experience
with that? And there are these crucibles and
Petri dishes of human behavior inside games.
Of course, what's also great about them is
they're measurable. We can measure everything
inside the game. The World of Warcraft economy
is a perfectly measurable economy, which makes
it somewhat better than the one that we have
in real life. And the foundational outputs
in the R&D in games, as I said, have utility
beyond that. So one of these is like sort
of a more amorphous ways that we see this
happening is in this area that we now call
Funware. So this is things like Akoha which
give out these like sort of mission packs,
go take a picture of yourself doing something
silly and upload it and get your friends to
give you points for it. Go buy somebody lunch
today, go give someone a book that you've
never done before. And they sort of couch
it in the terms of a game, and they sort of
think about it that way, or Foursquare, right?
You know, you build enough points and now
you're the mayor of your favorite restaurant.
And now, your friends are competing with you
to see who could be the mayor of your local
bar. So, they're adding this notion--this
spreading notion of games into your application
software or into everyday sort of Web activities.
You know, the question there though is, "Does
Funware really mean score everywhere?" That's
sort of the low level approach that we're
seeing in this term and Jesse Schell's speech
at the DICE conference which is made, you
know, gone viral through the Web and I was
there. A lot of it sort of talks about this
notion at a sort of low level of score being
everywhere and that it's a psychology of score
and what that might do. But is that really
games everywhere? And I would say "It's part
of it." But I think there's a lot more that
we can do there and we'll see where that hits.
Another way that you can look at understanding
this sort of power of games is some of this
is research at Stanford that HopeLab did.
On one side, you have passive exposure to
the game re-mission. So this is basically,
watching the cut scenes in re-mission. And
then on the other side, you see a brain scan
of somebody actually playing re-mission. And
you don't have to be a neuroscientist to see
how much more of the brain is being involved
in the different areas, especially some of
the emotional areas of the brain. And where
that might lead us to believe whether or not
games are doing something special as we're
playing them to the end and especially with
the relationship between the information and
our ability to retain it or do something or
think about it. I think there are certainly
going to be a lot more work here at our Games
for Health Conference. We had three sessions
on fMRI, imaging and games and what they were
trying to find out and learn about it. But
this gives you a sense that there's something
fundamental going on when people play video
games. When you look at the culture of games,
these are blurry screenshots off at YouTube
of commercials in China for Coca-Cola. All
right, Kinky Friedman had a book titled "Elvis,
Jesus, and Coca-Cola" which he claimed were
the most often used words in the English language.
So, it gives you a sense of what Coca-Cola
is. And from a marketing standpoint, you know,
Coca-Cola tying--you know, Coca-Cola picking
your brand to associate itself with. There's
a sort of a testament. And this is in China,
which is--say this is probably their most
competitive market right now. And World of
Warcraft is phenomenon in China. And these
are two commercials that they ran to basically
associate the Coke ran with World of Warcraft.
That's pretty powerful. We've all heard of
the advert gaming, the idea of using a game
like, you know, M&M's and Pacman or Skittles.
But where you play Pacman, you're supposed
to have this sort of casual association. But
where we're going now though is we're seeing
the [INDISTINCT] of games as a cultural force.
And now, you're seeing marketers want to cozy
up to it the way they cozy up to the hit song
of the day. And this is sort of a See Change
that we've seen in the last five years. So
we have this like sort of possibility gap
that comes out of all this. This is a slide
that I use to talk about this, which is--you
have sort of Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law on
one axis and then you have over time on the
other. And what I would tell you about games
when I talk to a lot of people that do learning
is that when you look at the computing power,
you need to do most of the e-learning technologies
that we use today to deliver what we extensively
call e-learning, it's sort of peters out about
circuit 2002 for a computing platform. That's
why Netbooks are probably getting so popular
because most of what students are doing on
them are accessing websites and message boards
and maybe some light Java and flash applets,
and mostly using like things like Blackboard
and Moodle. But the video game world tends
to try and ride that cutting edge. Even Farmville
which is low-end on graphics is extremely
high-end on terms of how it scales its application
framework and how it uses Facebook to generate
collaborative play. So, it may be low on the
on the Moore's Law, but it's high on Metcalfe's
Law. And so we have this possibility gap and
people, like myself, are trying to mine that
possibility gap and see what comes out of
it. And this is why I think you also see organizational
CEOs sort of looking at their learning platforms,
their software platforms, and then going home
to their kids playing Xbox and PS3 and going,
"Something's not right here." They don't quite
know what it is, but they see a lot more engagement
and power and just action on this end, computation
even. It doesn't--they don't have to be computer
scientist to see something's going on there.
And then, they go back and then they watch
a bunch of people staring at spreadsheets.
And they're kind of wondering, "Wait a minute,
you know, where's my IT investment?" So, we
have this notion of games everywhere and,
you know, I just paused for a second to say,
"You know, I'm not going to claim a 100% it's
beneficial." Obviously, I believed in a lot
of it but, you know, I try to catch myself
as much as possible. But I also want to think
about how do we grow this? And really, what
are the best practices? Sorry, I'm not going
to claim to have all the answers here but
I'm definitely following them from a question
standpoint. But I said that I thought games
should be as strategic resource to larger
organizations. So, here's just looking at
games from a strategic resource from a personal
level. So I like to be entertained, I like
to take care of health or I like to I think
I do. Sometimes I need training I need to
learn a new computer language or I need to--or
like right now I'm obsessed about gardening
and so I'm trying to understand and learned
how garden which gardening in Maine is a lot
harder gardening here. I've already lost two
crops to frost. Who would thought frost happened
in May in Maine and what could I think. Education,
collaboration, production, I like to make
things and I do like to work because I sometimes
like to get paid. But organizationally, we
can also see similar things you want to keep
your employees healthy, you want to advertise
your products and services and be known for
them and get business as a result of it. You
need to get people trained up, you need to
keep them educated, and you want to do things
like science and research and RND and production
and games as work. And like I said before
with the serious game Saxonomy, we've seen
examples in all of these different areas either
on a personal level or scaled to an organizational
level. And so much like we look at other media
like books and movies and music and video
as being potentially strategic resources whether
they be in a communication level or n something
deeper, why shouldn't games be part of that.
Sure, they might loss out on certain problem
solving areas, they should. You know, maybe
a book is a better way or a website is a better
way to communicate or achieve a certain applications
output. But there will be times and I think
over time we'll hone what these are when games
or properties from games applied to what we're
doing will be potentially the best fit. So
these are some of the agencies in our government
that have looked at games. They've either
done projects or held meetings to specifically
understand them better. So, again, these are
other groups, large organizations trying to
understand strategically where these could
be useful. These are countries that have actually
set up video games--serious game funds with
the dollar amounts and they're maybe more.
These are directs strategic investment. Now,
some of these just to be fair is that they're
worried that their commercial games industry
they're commercial entertainment industry
may not be advanced enough or have a market
opening given how mature that business can
be at times and so they're trying to figure
out how do they diversify they're development
force into markets that maybe more blue sky.
But they're also looking specifically at also
getting some of the residual gains for rethinking
their education in training systems in their
own neck of the woods. So, they've decided
that these are somewhat strategic as well.
And these are some of the large corporations
that have done things with games or had similar
meanings trying to figure out where these
mean. And I don't mean to imply they're endorsing
any of these, I'm just saying they're kicking
these tires as much anybody trying to figure
out what this means or to do things. Of course,
if you just took advergaming, you could probably
go through about 2/3s of the Fortune 500 who
have done some sort of advergame at some point.
And foundations and NGOs are also doing a
quite a bit of work. So let's move forward
to design pattern and evolution. So what's
fueling in my opinion some of this activity,
sure, in some ways it's capital availability
and people with specific problems that are
proven to be hard and thus require that all
hands on deck strategy, but games are these
new part of the equation. However, I think
it's also due to the evolution of many different
types of games specially computer and video
games. So this is sort of just a simple chart,
you know, over here on the left, we have sort
of physical games, card games, classroom games,
board games; these are the games we grew up
with before computers. And you have board
games going all the way back to like ancient
Egypt, Senet, a sort of a--kind of--I mean
color type of game. It looks sort of chess
like as well, being sort of the oldest sided
board game. Then you got sort of role playing
games, this would have been in the 1970s of
all us hankering around tables trying to roll
dice and play Dungeons and Dragons. And you
had some war games, sort of grognards fumbling
around with these like sort of hexagonal chips
and try--and rolling dice and using look up
tables. But then we got computers and they
could do things that we couldn't do. You could
play the computers. Now, you didn't have to
have friends to come over. Well you didn't
have to have friends either, right? Like the
old joke, I think, there's a joke by Demetri,
the comedian Demetri Martin who said the board
games are a way finding out which one of my
friends I hate the most. And I think we've
all been there. But with the computer games,
I know all of the sudden you get an explosion
of gaming because you don't need the logistical
requirements of games, plus the computers
doesn't let you cheat, at least it's not supposed
to. And sometimes that's invigorating from
the game stand point not being able to cheat.
So now you get into that "I really want to
beat it. I can't just cheat my way through
it." And you get this wonderful evolution
where the first kinds of computer games you
see are more sort of stolen from these earlier
games and then they start to evolve to the
point where you're playing things we're your
like, "I'm not sure I could have been playing
this before a computer." A great example,
Tetris; it's not--it's not a game that really
would have work until the computer came along.
Now, in the serious game space, what you have
is sort of the re-envisioning of how games
can be applied to other problems like education.
And now we're stealing more from these internal
computer game design patterns than we were
from those original classroom games that gave
us things like the first wave of things like,
you know, Oregon Trail or Reader Rabbit. But
it's kind of interesting, I would argue that
this complex card games, you know, things
like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic: The Gathering;
these came about because the computer games
have become so sort--not just popular but
had expanded our ability to game, to juggle
multiple factors and to think in an even larger
form about game design. And now all of a sudden
people started reapplying some of those ideas
back to sort of offline games. And, of course,
now with these complex card games, you had
this sort of hybrids, right. You play them
both offline and online trying to gain the
benefits of both. When you look at design
patterns in video games, the important thing
to understand is just how varied they are.
And from a e-learning standpoint these are--it's
kind of hard when you see the e-learning sort
of paradigm, it's--we will take your content
and pour into our templates, but you can't
do that with a video game because the time
management game is not the same way you solve
some other problem. So, each of these becomes
its own little miniature template that you
have to kind of fit perfectly the round--the
round peg into the round hole. And so these
are just, you know, nine common ones. But
what gets interesting is we started to study
design patterns to really understand how much
this really meant to the evolution of games
and the serious game space and the idea of
moving games everywhere. We started looking
in a lot of this alternative design in engineering
patterns because in the serious game space
we don't have to worry about the fact that
interactive fiction has no competitive value
in commercial gaming. It save from a few fans
of the genre. But let's say you're trying
to teach like lawyers, right, who read lots
of case studies, you know, maybe that's the
way to work with lawyers because it's in a
modality that they're most--that in Moscow
that they're most used to. We don't need a
big fancy 3D courtroom. We need something
that might be more kin to the textbooks that
they're using. But maybe interactive fiction
is a way to put interactivity into that and
bring some of those properties that we might
believe in to it. So now we spend a lot of
time going and looking at a lot of these alternative
areas, so that brings me to places like Google
Maps and looking into--who's using Google
Maps to make games because my next client
might be a UPS who says, "I need a logistical
game, and I need it to run in my browser."
Well, maybe Google Maps is the best way to
do a logistical game. It's got all the data
right there, all I have to do is graph the
game on top of it and if you're UPS--no problem,
you'll find my email. So you have things like
Fantasy Sports in audio only. So, a lot of
these become new ways to solve problems, and
what's interesting on the web is you could
find small communities for all of these either
the antiquated ones or the emerging ones and
they're all moving that tech within that genre
forward. Another way to look at this design
patterns and to summarize them though, and
this led us to a sort of breakthrough in thinking
about how you move games everywhere; this
notion of how long you play a game and how
long its lifespan is, its game arch. And what's
interesting here is you have sort of short
place, short lifespan games. So, Bejewelled,
you know, Match 3 games; this sort of Ephermeral/Viral
games that go around like the Paris Hilton
stamping license plate game, or four years
ago the Zidane Head Butt Game from the World
Cup, they sort of get an email ha-ha-ha-ha,
you click it and you play the game for 30
seconds. Or game like BoomBlox by EA and Steven
Spielberg's sort of like Jenga on Steroids.
You play these games maybe 15, 30 minutes
at a time. You might play for a couple of
hours over its lifespan or even just five
minutes, and then they're done. You're not
going to pick them back up. Then you have
this like sort of long play-short lifespan
games like Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption,
which is a current favorite; it has about
maybe 80 hours of total game play, but you
play it on long blocks. This is where you
here about Madden Weekend or Grand Theft Auto
like people calling in sick because they're
going to spend about three days staying up
till their eyeballs bleed at night to finish
the game and then that experience is wonderful
as it may be for them is over. But they basically
called in sick, they've gone offline. And
then you have, you know, the danger to all
marriages and other long-term relationships
of value the long play-long lifespan game.
So this is a, you know, "Don't bother me we're
going on a raid, I won't be around this weekend,
I can't watch the kids, I'm going to be busy."
Or Civilization 4, you know, a game that I
just keep coming back to when I go into a
Civ game and, you know, it's like six or seven
hours of effort maybe over a couple of days
and I just keep coming back to that. I think
it was a Cory Doctorow or somebody similar
who said I was born to like write and play
Civilization. But are any of those really
conducive to the way we work in our lives
other than in our entertainment and leisure
time? They're not really. The short play-short
lifespan game might work a little bit for
a part tasks simulator but it's probably not
going to incur a lot of base--a lot of deep
information. The long play-short lifespan
game, you know, 80 hours of game played, that
could probably do it. But how many--how can
you--can you go into a K-312 classroom and
just say we're going to disrupt, you know,
the syllabus and no child left behind scheduling
for six days while everybody plays this game.
You can't go into a modern day corporation
and say, "Oh, yeah, we're just going to take
the sale staff offline for a week." It just
doesn't happen anymore. You can't--certainly
you can't do long play-long life span game,
it's just like--might as well just fire them.
And then so then you come back to the short
play-long lifespan game, and I said to myself,
I said, 'Where were these games?" And a lot
them are sort of this fantasy sports games
and this was pre-FarmVille so you could kind
of put FarmVille in there too. A lot of the
social network games. And it's really interesting
you play this game for about 15 or 20 minutes
to set up your squad in the morning. Then
you go to work you think about it all day
but you're basically productive. You're thinking
about in the back of you mind. Then you make
some more changes before the game starts so
that you could set your roster and then the
game commences and then there's some, you
know, if it's basketball, it's an 82 game
season; and if it's baseball, it's a 160 game
season. And so, you have this really interesting
version of a lot of game play in little amounts
of time over a long arch, which is for organizations
doing planning or thinking in these longer
terms. How do we launch a new product? How
do we do--how do we rejigger our sale strategy?
How do we think through a big problem? This
might be the way that we can get in and be
useful for them. So this in a way of looking
at almost every kind of game made and sort
of organizing your thoughts about where--how
it works to the way people work and live?
So now we get a little bit more into serious
games. So often this is what I'm told. When
I sit in the audience like this and someone
else comes up and I start cringing given what
I've shown you so far and I just want to make
sure that we got that that this is wrong.
When I look at some of the games or done--there's
a Sony camera game for exercise, there's a
heart visualization inside the Unreal 3 Engine,
down in here this is Foldit which is basically
people folding proteins. It's a productivity
game. They're not necessarily--yes, they might
be learning some things but that's not the
point of this. This isn't to raise a new biochemist.
It's to say I don't care what you do in your
regular walk of life, if you can play this
game and fold this protein better than someone
else that's what I care about. I care about
the answer. Exercise doesn't really necessarily
involve learning, unless you want to be a
learning scientist and argue that to every
thing. It's really about getting a heart rate
sustained for a certain amount of time so
that you burn calories and improved cardiovascular
health. Here, you've got a safety game; you've
got sales training, medical training for surgeries
at hospitals from mass casualty events, stuff
done on portable platforms. The person holding
the computer actually used a video game by
Peter Molyneux called the Movies to basically
animate a movie about the French riots and
put it up on the web because he was disturbed
that the media that was reporting coverage
from the French riots was getting the story
wrong and he wanted to get out his story.
He had something about a million downloads
I think on YouTube and otherwise. So he had
used this game to build his film. So this
is a game as a production environment. We've
done some work at my firm as part of our games
for health project with the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation to look at the idea of what happens
when video games and health records come together?
So not only re-skinning a health record to
look more like the Avatar creation screen
and something like the Sims or Second Life
or indie games like Kudos. But also thinking
about how the devices that are building this
health games and making things like Dance
Dance Revolution and Wii Fit available, how
should they talk for a health record so that
they can actually do something more than just
be this game or be the self contained executable
that's tracking our health. This is where
the sort of world to web services starts to
creep in even more and where it's also clear
that it's not creeping in yet except in our
brains and on our cute little story boards.
We can divide up the serious games space even
more. We can look at how gamers used games
to do something interesting besides play them.
How third-party people like teachers will
take a game and build the syllabus around
it. They don't recode the game; they just
take something like Civilization and then
adjust it as a lesson plan in their history
class. Dealing with the things that Civilization
probably gets wrong but also accentuating
the thematic rule set in Civilization that
really do dovetail nicely with what they're
trying to get students to understand. Developers
will do things that will add non-entertainment
modes of play to their games like what you
see in some rock band like the Drum Trainer
and other types of things, and then we'll
also see just the baseline technologies taken.
This commercial off the shelf related serious
game space, we spend a lot of time looking
at user-led innovation and how the things
that we just--are shift as commercial games
are actually serious game projects. They either
could be modes of famous games or they could
be actual games that have come out on the
market like Yourself Fitness or BrainAge or
My Life Coach or some of these things like
the Movies that allow people to create their
own animations and we've all seen some of
the wiimote hacks all around YouTube and what
people have done with those controlling robots
and everything else; so, again, really looking
long--at a wide gamut of activity. We've even
seen hardware repurposing. I forgot to include
the photo of the military robot that is controlled
by an Xbox controller. So taking that controller
and re-using it. So we've seen a lot of opportunity
there. On the advergaming side, like I said
before, there's a lot of simplistic understanding
of what advergaming is, this is a chart that
we used to build out the space a little bit
more. So we looked both at using games but
also this whole area where you get game association.
Basically, friends, sort of using games so
like in couple of years ago on TV all I would
see is this Volvo commercial where the entire
Volvo car was inside Dice's Rally Sport for
the Xbox. I don't think they were using that
to go after the typical Volvo consumer. They
were using that to say, "Hey, we're hip, we're
cool, we're not just the state old car, and
if you want to finish the race maybe you need
a Volvo." At least finish it in one piece.
So we looked at Games and Production; these
are off the shelf games that either include
modes where you can do things like the Project
Gotham Racing, I guess one of the programmers
was a real video--photography buffed and so
he added all kinds of things like motion blurs
and F-stop and all kind--and basically you
could practice all the different types of
camera settings that you would in like a photography
class inside this video game taking pictures
of high speed car races. And there's artist
who used the Unreal Engine to create art.
So we're seeing all this kinds of media mash-ups.
We're seeing various types of usage statements
around work and so we're seeing things like
direct earnings in games, using games to either
express or assess opinions like prediction
markets and opinion research. And we're seeing
people who work to play. Meaning they put
effort into their play. They're a guild leader.
They're writing walk-through. They're basically
training other players. Or they play to work.
So that'd be like you're sort of gold farmer
or you're professional gamer. This goes well
beyond the sort of, you know, two hour fun
on a Saturday afternoon. And we can look at
work in other form. So exercise is a form
of work and we can be sort of casually involved
in it or we can get really personally invested
in it. We could get really actively engaged
and we can move up this sort of different
levels of activities. So you can go from just
joining a guild to leading a guild. And if
you've ever looked at Constance Steinkuehler's
work mapping the sort of management skills
used to lead a guild and then watching it
mapped directly on top of a inform--middle
level manager in an information oriented company,
its like one-to-one, except one of them is
a 14-year old kid. So we can look at this
progression of work in games--I'm sort of
going quite quickly to make up for time--but
there are different levels that we see. We
see people moving from a sort of novice level
of work to a sort of mastery level of working
games. Then we have this sort of number of
commercial off the shelf activity. We're seeing
things like sports pre-visualization packages.
We're seeing this sort of brain games, sort
of cognitive health stuff. We've seen stuff
taken from games for architecture markets
as well as teaching in education. And you
could look at this as sort of moving force,
you know. On one end we have sort of instructors
and utilizers; people are more interested
in direct education. Now on the other end
we have these game developers really sort
of working on entertainment but also education
in terms of like if you're gamer is starting
to get educated on how to play your game,
if there--they don't level up through that
mastery, they're going to reject your game.
And then we can sort to see this non-entertainment
users and this entertainment and gamers and
we could see that serious games sort of, morphs
beyond just its most core attitude towards
this other types of uses of games depending
on which way it's moving--it's being pulled
from, what direction is being pulled from
the most. As a result of this, you know, you've
probably seen--I hope a big picture argument
that games are evolving in this sort of Cambrian
explosion in many different parts of our life.
Games are also changing their commercial games
level too when new markets are evolving due
to platform changes and other trends. So what
are some of those shifts? So we're seeing
organizational video games requiring different
approaches and sort of creating a different
need for game so that would be, you know,
where I spend most of my life really trying
to reformulate what games are going to look
like in web browsers because it's really hard
to think that were going to have a lot of
video games working at the edge of the network
inside this large organizations. They can't
secure it. They don't want to manage. They
can't even put GPUs at the edge of that network
enough, depending on what we're trying to
do. So you're seeing these supporting elements
also. Supporting elements like Xbox Live,
Playstation network, the things that wrap
around the game, not just the game itself
and these are becoming even more important
at times than the games. We're seeing how
mobile devices and their proliferation are
requiring a whole new take on how cross-platform
developments going to work. And we're seeing
this interface novelty. The things like the
Wii, things like WiiFit, things like Sony's
new move platform or Project Natal changing
the way we use games and creating new opportunities,
as well as free--free game models, advertising
supported models, digital download pricing,
spurring this growth in what I called good
enough games by changing some other element
of the value proposition of the game creating
a Wii controller or creating a free game with
the--with the in-game transaction models.
You're seeing gamers around the world sort
of get into games that normally might have
been rejected under the old critical sort
of aspect, "Oh, is this the latest, greatest
thing?" They're being brought in, in different
ways and they're finding different ways to
sort of decide that a game is really cutting
edge. Wii Tennis is punk on a--on an old sort
of leveled graphics platform, but it is phenomenally
fun because of the way that controller works.
And so we're getting the sense of good enough
games. I'm starting to see a lot more gamers
not too worried about having the latest and
greatest, just, is it good and why is it good?
And that access of why it's good it's just
becomes so much more proliferated. But this
games as service is kind of interesting because
as you get more into the idea that games become
services. You start to see the struggle sort
of playing out in front of your eyes in the
games industry, which is the more that a game
is a--and always present, always available,
cross platform, plugged in to your social
network and all kinds of other sort of elements
of your digital life, the more it's like a
service. And the more it's like a service
the more it's sort of has to live in the Cloud.
And so where we see is where most games are
but where I think we're heading. And this
battle over processing is kind of interesting.
There's Call of Duty modern warfare. This
is a game that you need an Xbox control, you
know, or Playstation to play because the graphics
are so rich. But when you look at where games
are going the--those games are always be present
but they're being sort of drowned out by a
lot of this other games running in browsers,
running on lighter weight mobile platforms
and that is really, really interesting because
it's that--those types of games are going
to get games everywhere, because we need different
types of games. This is a chart that just
shows the organizational interest in the games
industry interest. And basically, if you look
at that just starting with the language issues,
you could see these people are at [INDISTINCT].
And the game industry or all of us gamers
are going to have to kind of adjust if we
want to see games really become useful for
this large organizational interest. This could
be formal organizations or informal organizations,
groups of us around the world trying to solve
a problem or need. So they have this sort
of different games because an individual tends
to want to be close to the hardware, has lots
of time and the organization wants to be close
to the web. They have security and they don't
have lots of time and then both of them are
dealing with this on the go pervasive access
question. So we get this sort of usage gap
that goes on in the serious game space, which
is that when we look at the commercial off
the shelf game market for things like Exercise,
the game existing is--is interesting but--and
when you look at the sales, but when you go
and look at the usage it's not quite there.
In other words, there's more Wii Fits in the
world than there are people playing Wii Fit
or staying on Wii Fit like in adherence principle.
So what I have to spend time in is thinking
about how do I close that gap, because the
Wii Fit or other next generation exergames
are going to be incredible tools for health.
But they're not going to be incredible tools
if we can't hook them up to health records,
if we can't hook them up to remind our systems
they can't. If we can't hook them up to all
this things that I've learned in studying
behavior change and that people in the behavior
change industry are using. So until we can
connect those two pieces together we're not--we're
going to have more of that gap. So you think
about what types of behavior changes we want
to work on, improving study habits, health,
productivity habits, raising people's self-esteem,
and where you get that is where do those traits
come from? They come from the surrounding
elements. Sometimes even more so than the
game itself, even if the game is tremendously
great in involving you in something and getting
you to think differently or act differently
as a result to play or even during play. But
when I think about it, here's our game, but
here are the surrounding elements or some
of them that I can envision putting around
the game that I'm looking to actually have
the far more effective than just from an entertainment
standpoint. And what I'm saying is that if
we probably have to look at simplifying some
of our games, I think this is actually what's
happening anyways, and then adding complexity
and services and robustness in these outer
edges and connecting these two things together.
And that will make our games even more effective
and create the need or the ability for them
to be real deep solutions in other areas.
The funny thing is that when you do this you're
basically applying all that leverage to the
other side of things. These things tend to
be reusable irregardless of the games and
so you get a sense of providing more value
for the dollars. So you can potentially drive
down the cost and the risks of your game as
a result of that and increase points of sale
and reduce piracy even. So with these new
models, we have new needs. And so what creates
games everywhere? So there's, sort of, two
paths, one is the browser and not just the
browser from four years ago, but browsers
that allow us to run rich web applications
that render out in HTML form like Neptune's
Pride, a really kind of interesting strategy
game built on top of GWT. Lords of Ultima,
this is EA doing sort of the same thing. This
is an HTML rendered game. Soren Johnson who
is involved in Civilization and Spores has
built to GWT level project for strategy games
and he's level--he's building this out. And
I've seen the work that's being done here
where you basically put a Quake II with HTML5
over to--on top of GWT and created basically
the Quake II running inside a browser. So
Quake II is kind of like Hello World, the
3D engine, game engine. So if you can get
it to run on anything and some people spend
their time doing this. There's also this remotely
rendered secure gameplay model. This is where
we render the game inside a server area and
then basically pumped out encrypted mpeg and
then back basically a remote--basically a
joystick at the long end of a long, long,
long, long wire. Now, there's two companies
kind of working on this, there maybe some
others, you know, there some issues with latency
but a lot of--a lot of games as we've seen
very successful games don't need--don't have
latency problems. Who cares if your FarmVille
has a little bit of latency? You still got
away to day for your crops anyways. And we're
seeing games meeting people, the other, [INDISTINCT]
to meet people where they are. So not just
move to a new platform but to think about
where they're working. So there's a game in
Gmail, I may have--I'll be at the--a demo.
There's seriosity which is basically embedding
a social economy on top of email, so embedding
itself in a Microsoft Outlook and mail.app
and other types of mail programs to create
a new type of social network game in organizations.
The NetOnNet which was a startup that went
bust but has open source all its code is a
toolbar, is a browser-based game using a toolbar,
and then there's Ribbon Hero from Microsoft.
But we need this GameApp Engine, something
that looks like this. That includes things
like YouTube and Google Maps that takes this
APIs and allows us to turn out rich games
within this context so that we can push them
everywhere for all kinds of problems. I thought
this was really cool because they se YouTube
basically for the cut scene inside this browser-based
game. And then, you know, DDR hooked up to
Google Health. And so I started thinking about
all these different pieces of the web services
that surround the game. I started thinking
about how web browsers and different types
of consoles even have web browsers and, you
know, you start to see WebKit showing up more
and more. I started thinking about these types
of ideas where I'm just playing with what
would that whole stack of technologies look
like and how would they interact and how would
they create games that could even involve--moves
where I could anything because humans are
in the loop to judge the game not just the
computer. So, I look at Google Wave and I
say, "Wow, I could build really rich role
playing and decision making games in a corporate
environment in that short play-long lifespan
mode. And how could we apply that? So I think
about things like Foldit and Citizen Science,
you know, a Citizen Science on top of Google
Wave using Google Maps and all these technologies
that could be really, really interesting.
And it could be the kind of tool set that
we could use over and over again. So what's
needed? In order to get there, we need to
drive down the cost of the surrounding infrastructure
in the first playable. A lot of organizations
have trouble green minding games. It's hard
to say, "I'm going to do this to my boss--for
my boss." And so we need to drive down that
that ability for them to get something up
on the screen where everybody in the organization
goes, "Yes, that is what we want and it's
going to work." We need specialized engines,
not just general purpose and we want to think
about how these games can move everywhere
in our infrastructure both our personal life
and our and our entertainment and the other
kinds of causes that we take in life. So,
that's my sense of games everywhere. Thank
you.
So I believe I'm around for a little bit to
talk. I know it's maybe not questions. I can
take some questions and then I know I'm going
to be meeting with Matt's team who's working
on some game ideas within their group, that
sound really interesting as well, and so I'd
be happy to provide perspective or anything
while I'm here today, so E-3 tomorrow, so.
>> Yeah. I wonder if you could talk about
badging--oh, the mike. I wonder if you could
talk about badging reward systems. It seems
to be all of the craze. Is there longevity
in that and...
>> SAWYER: In which things?
>> In badges such as for score ...
>> SAWYER: Oh, badges in for score, yeah.
So, I mean, you should certainly Jessie Shell's
speech at Dice. I mean he's sort of really
put that forward in a big way and talked about
some things that a lot of us have been thinking
about. I think that there's a need for a sort
of a system that could allow us to bring those
ideas to almost any application or frame of
work, not just one that's embedded inside
a particular application. I worry about whether
or not we end up in a situation where every
thing's badged and everything has a score
and what does that mean. It probably means
some of us have to be more creative. It's
hard to say what's going to happen when badges
and score are everywhere. A lot of gamers
don't necessarily respond a score. I'm a lifelong
hardcore gamer; sometimes I respond to score,
sometimes I respond to narrative or just moving
through levels. But it's clear, looking at
Xbox LIVE that it's kind of like a learning
management system. It has a lot of--a lot
of similarities. In fact, it has a lot of
things that it exceeds learning management
systems at. So there's a lot we can learn
from, you know, I think we're in the early
stage.
>> You didn't mention Second Life; can you
tell us something about them?
>> SAWYER: Sure. So the question was I didn't
necessarily mentioned Second Life in virtual
worlds, those sorts of close cousins to games.
What I found at least in the moment, the current--virtual
worlds have lots of opportunity. I'm finding
that many of the ones--Second Life aside--are
fairly week environments compared to what
my game development friends and I could build.
Some sort of puzzle to us as to why that's
come about. I think part of it because they--the
people who built those were sort of thinking
more from a go to meeting standpoint as opposed
to rich environments for activity. The other
part of it though is that, I think some of
that area has fallen victim to social networking
applications in games where the virtual world
really is a little bit more virtual but it's
much more highly social and asynchronous.
The video game industry is really been obsessed
by synchronous communication in activity,
and it's only when we start at asynchronous
stuff which is really the way work a lot more
that we're starting to I think see a lot more
opportunity in that vein. And that's been
kind of interesting to watch the games industry
to deal with that. Spore is called a massively
single player game and it really is a big
asynchronous game and I think that may actually
hold more value to us going forward. So, I'm
glad to see that actually.
>> Why didn't you say much about you [INDISTINCT]
and strategies for monetizing games?
>> SAWYER: Yeah, at the--one of the things
that I think we need a little bit and that's
helping this are all these different business
models around not only virtual occurrences
but, like, small transaction games; anything
that sort of provides the ability for the
value, for the game just get involved, the
attention, so to speak, and that's been quite
helpful. The problem is that we don't really
have a lot of robust systems for individual
developers to kind of play at that to build
that infrastructure as easily. I think as
we do, we'll start seeing, you know, more
of this Cambrian explosion, because it's the
smaller indie groups, the universities, the
organizations that have problems that are
turning to this and they're the ones who sort
of lacking the infrastructure. So, perhaps,
as we see those platforms come into play,
we'll see more of this. Thanks.
>> LANDIS: So everyone's welcome to come over
to Charlie's, few of us are going over there
to have lunch and you can bring some of your
questions over there. We're going to finish
up now.
