Each year, video games offer more challenging and natural experiences, from motion-controlled action to augmented reality. And each year the games are becoming more popular—not only as a form of entertainment but as a medium for education or even as a therapeutic agent for keeping people’s minds sharp. So what lies ahead? In March, DISCOVER and the National Science Foundation gathered a panel of experts at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, to discuss the future of video games. Amos Zeeberg, the managing editor of DISCOVER’s Web site, moderated the wide-ranging conversation (click here for video of the event).
Tiffany Barnes is a computer scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who uses video games as a teaching tool in her college classroom. Jim Bower is a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; he is also the founder of Numedeon, the company that created Whyville, a popular online virtual world where children can play educational games and engage in social activities. Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of the video game developer Maxis, is the executive producer of Spore and many other titles. Anne McLaughlin is an experimental psychologist at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, and the director of the Gains Through Gaming Lab, where she is researching ways in which popular video games can be used to improve elder cognition.
Why have video games become such a pervasive form of entertainment as well as such an enticing tool for education? What is it about the medium that makes it so powerful?
Anne McLaughlin: Play is a very natural place to go for learning experiences. In video games there’s a structure of achievement and reward, and that can be felt in a simulation where you’re trying to understand what the underlying system is, figure out how the gears work, so you can control where the simulation is going. You’re starting to see that more and more, in things like the achievement system that exploded on Xbox Live and has now cropped up in Facebook games. That reward structure makes them different from any other type of activity.
Tiffany Barnes: I think the interaction is the most important part of the games. When I do something in a game and see the effect, that’s where I get to make a new concept, learn something or see something new, explore a curiosity. And that’s the important part that enables learning. There’s not only the motivation of a reward structure, but also an ability to see how other people are doing and compete with them—or maybe cooperate. I think Rock Band is a great example of that, where we can gain more points by everybody’s being in the zone and working together: If someone’s not doing so well, I can rescue him by being really awesome myself.
