Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Be there, and welcome to Forward Thinking. The
Speaker 1: podcast that Looks at the Future says, I have a
Speaker 1: pocket full of quarters and I'm headed to the arcade.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland, and I'm Joe McCormick and people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is just pretty much acknowledged by everyone that video
Speaker 1: games are brain suck, right, Yeah, they just they kill
Speaker 1: brain cells. They make you stupid that you might as
Speaker 1: well just stick a screwdriver in your ear. I mean,
Speaker 1: I just quoted the song pac Man Fever, which that
Speaker 1: alone proves that my intelligence has suffered as a result
Speaker 1: of playing video games. Right after I am done playing
Speaker 1: a video game, I can't even remember my own name. Right.
Speaker 1: I have gotten to the point where I will try
Speaker 1: and make a sandwich and I put the meat on
Speaker 1: the outside of it. Yeah. I mean sometimes when I'm
Speaker 1: playing low, I just randomly yell at people outside of
Speaker 1: the game for absolutely no reason, in really immature ways. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The worst is when you're yelling at all the ten
Speaker 1: or twelve year olds that are in your apartment company. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I just I just I just walk outside and I'm
Speaker 1: like you goat Hugger, shut up right, right. Obviously we're
Speaker 1: being a little a little silly, mostly because we we've
Speaker 1: already gotten punchy today. Well, we are echoing some sentiments
Speaker 1: that probably are fairly widespread in the society that say that,
Speaker 1: you know, video games are just stupid. I mean, you
Speaker 1: might as well be watching Jersey Shore, you might as
Speaker 1: well be just just completely I mean, it's mindless. It
Speaker 1: numbs your brain. At worst, it might even make you violent,
Speaker 1: teaches you to be violent, Yeah, because correlation and causation
Speaker 1: are the same thing. Best, it just dulls your mind
Speaker 1: and makes you stupid. Well, here's the thing is there
Speaker 1: is there any scientific basis for all this nation. The
Speaker 1: scientific basis seems to suggest a completely opposite uh conclusion,
Speaker 1: not that video games are in fact dulling the senses
Speaker 1: and making us bad at at being able to think
Speaker 1: or make decisions, but in fact that they can help
Speaker 1: boost those abilities. So that's what we wanted to concentrate
Speaker 1: on today was can we use video games to improve
Speaker 1: our cognitive functions? Can we actually use them not just
Speaker 1: to improve basic functions, but to actually learn new stuff? Right,
Speaker 1: So there's a twofold approach here, can we get smarter
Speaker 1: via video games? And can we learn better via video games?
Speaker 1: And uh and spoiler alert, I think the answer to
Speaker 1: both of those questions is yes. But of course just
Speaker 1: saying that means nothing. We need to back that up
Speaker 1: because because science, because science. So what kind of research
Speaker 1: do we have about this? How about how about the
Speaker 1: actual cognitive ability things? Sure? So you know, there have
Speaker 1: been a lot of studies, actually a lot of study
Speaker 1: have looked at video games and cognitive function in different
Speaker 1: and different specific uh perspectives, right, not just overall cognitive function,
Speaker 1: but sometimes very specific types of cognitive function. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think that's a good method to go about in
Speaker 1: in science. So it's not just like you play some
Speaker 1: Mario and then you take an i Q test, right,
Speaker 1: They're testing usually how specific cognitive tasks can be changed
Speaker 1: via video gameplay. Yeah. So there was a study that
Speaker 1: was published in the Public Library of Science that was
Speaker 1: partly funded by the Air Force, which obviously yet they
Speaker 1: want they want to they want to make sure that
Speaker 1: they have people who are really good at handling lots
Speaker 1: of things going on at once. So in this case,
Speaker 1: they were looking at the ability for people to manage. Uh, well,
Speaker 1: it's really to see mental flexibility to be able to
Speaker 1: cognitive flexibility, right, all different kinds of tasks that are happening,
Speaker 1: and being able to manage multiple ones, all all at
Speaker 1: the same time and at a fast pace. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: in this case, they are looking at things like real
Speaker 1: time strategy games where you have to manage all the
Speaker 1: resources that you have while still trying to achieve certain
Speaker 1: goals whatever the goal of that particular game happens to
Speaker 1: be and or prevent other people from achieving their goals. Right.
Speaker 1: So that means that you have to handle lots of
Speaker 1: different things all at once, and as it turns out, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, that sort of skill perhaps could translate to
Speaker 1: real life skill. That's what they were really interested in seeing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they found that games that quote emphasized maintenance and rapid
Speaker 1: switching between multiple information and action sources were the ones
Speaker 1: that led to the biggest increase in cognitive flexibility. Right.
Speaker 1: So that's sort of like having to flip back and
Speaker 1: forth between lots of different kinds of jobs and pieces
Speaker 1: of information. Having having to manage all this at once
Speaker 1: means that you actually train yourself in how to do that.
Speaker 1: In general, not just in a video game exactly. So
Speaker 1: you could have someone who is really adept at this
Speaker 1: game try and and adapt those skills to a new task,
Speaker 1: and it was something that was transferable. It's not necessarily
Speaker 1: means that. It doesn't necessarily mean that someone's really good
Speaker 1: at real time strategy game is automatically going to be
Speaker 1: awesome at this brand new task you give them, but
Speaker 1: that they can adapt much much more quickly and be
Speaker 1: able to handle that kind of thing faster than someone
Speaker 1: who's just doing that without the benefit of increasing those skills.
Speaker 1: I can see the Air Forces plan. Mr gamer. Here,
Speaker 1: we're gonna put you in the cockpit of a stealth bomber,
Speaker 1: right you were you were so good at Warcraft two
Speaker 1: that now we're going to make you in charge of
Speaker 1: this entire group of people. Yeah, that's not quite the
Speaker 1: way it works, okay. But also there's a lot more
Speaker 1: than this, right. Studies have shown that that video games
Speaker 1: can help speed decision making, like accurate decision making. Right.
Speaker 1: That's the University of Rochester study you're talking about. It
Speaker 1: was done with the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,
Speaker 1: a very a very fun department. I'm sure the dpcs. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, that this particular study was looking at how
Speaker 1: video games could help make a person's reaction time shorter
Speaker 1: and shorter, that they're able to react faster to changing
Speaker 1: situations and make quick decisions. And then also see are
Speaker 1: those decisions still good decisions or are they trigger happy
Speaker 1: just getting hasty right, the idea being that that you
Speaker 1: are not reacting without having all the information. That was
Speaker 1: the prevailing kind of hypothesis was that people who were
Speaker 1: really good at these games, it wasn't necessarily that they
Speaker 1: were making good decisions. They were making decisions, and they
Speaker 1: were doing it faster than than normal people, but perhaps
Speaker 1: they were doing so without all the pertinent information they
Speaker 1: would need to make a good decision. This study ended
Speaker 1: up looking at a lot of different things, and it
Speaker 1: suggested that perhaps that's not true. It was actually a
Speaker 1: meta analysis, meaning that it looked at numerous other studies
Speaker 1: and drew conclusions based upon the outcomes of those other studies.
Speaker 1: And based on those other studies, it looked like the
Speaker 1: trend was that video game players or v gps as
Speaker 1: they called them, uh seemed to have a better performance
Speaker 1: at making fast, accurate decisions than non video game players
Speaker 1: or in v GPS so and they say it bore
Speaker 1: out when they looked study after study, like they plotted
Speaker 1: all the different results and showed that according to that
Speaker 1: meta analysis, this seems to be a thing that playing
Speaker 1: these sort of games hones those skills and in fact
Speaker 1: allows you to make these decisions faster and with no
Speaker 1: loss and accuracy. Uh, skills like like pattern recognition for example,
Speaker 1: that's a big one. And of course you know in
Speaker 1: the in the case of any sort of military operation,
Speaker 1: a fast decision could mean the difference between life and death.
Speaker 1: But you obviously still want to have that accuracy there
Speaker 1: because that could also mean the difference between life and death. Okay,
Speaker 1: so these last couple of things we talked about, we're
Speaker 1: kind of these minutely focused different aspects of cognition, fast
Speaker 1: decision making, based on visual cues, and cognitive flexibility. Is
Speaker 1: there anything sort of more broader and more abstractly measured
Speaker 1: that video games could affect, Like, how about creativity? That's
Speaker 1: pretty abstract, right, So creativity. This is an interesting study
Speaker 1: of Michigan State University study that looked at creativity in
Speaker 1: the relationship between that and activities like playing video games,
Speaker 1: using a computer, using the internet, and cell phone use.
Speaker 1: And so the study looked at four hundred ninety one
Speaker 1: twelve year olds across all demographics. I think there were
Speaker 1: something like of them were girls. Uh. And then they
Speaker 1: had you know, demographics pulled from different social status as,
Speaker 1: different ethnic backgrounds, that kind of thing. And they said
Speaker 1: that across all demographics, the that playing video games was
Speaker 1: a great predictor for creativity, that the kids who enjoyed
Speaker 1: playing video games more also were the ones who were
Speaker 1: more creative. Uh. Now, I'm really cautious about citing the
Speaker 1: study for more than that, because this could just be
Speaker 1: a correlation, not a causal relationship. It may not be
Speaker 1: that if you play more video games you become more creative,
Speaker 1: but rather that creative people are drawn to video games.
Speaker 1: This is the same sort of thing we have to
Speaker 1: be cautious about with all those stories about video games
Speaker 1: and violence. It's not necessarily true that video games promote
Speaker 1: actual violent behavior. It maybe people who are who tend
Speaker 1: toward violent behavior are also drawn to video games. You
Speaker 1: can't say that one causes the other. Correlation causation are
Speaker 1: two different things. However, it does bear more study. The
Speaker 1: idea of are their video games that can promote the
Speaker 1: sort of creative thinking that could perhaps inspire students who
Speaker 1: are you know, already interested in exploring creativity. There are
Speaker 1: certain games we can talk about and some that we
Speaker 1: will talk about that already do this to some extent.
Speaker 1: Like Minecraft is a good one, right. Minecraft is one
Speaker 1: where people have express creativity through numerous ways because you're
Speaker 1: telling the story. There isn't already a story in the game.
Speaker 1: You have to take one up for yourself. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you can build whatever you like, digital legos, you could,
Speaker 1: you con box, you can make it a creative experience
Speaker 1: where there's no other gameplay element other than the fact
Speaker 1: that you are building stuff out of you know, digital materials.
Speaker 1: Then there's also things like the game Trials. Trials is
Speaker 1: a game where it's a motorcycle game. You're riding a
Speaker 1: motorcycle through an obstacle course and your your goal is
Speaker 1: to complete the course as quickly as possible with as
Speaker 1: few faults as possible. It's generally the way the game works.
Speaker 1: And you know, people get bragging, right, so I I
Speaker 1: beat that level in X amount of time with zero faults.
Speaker 1: That that's you know, something that gets bragged about. In
Speaker 1: the gaming world. But there's also a level design element
Speaker 1: with many of those trials games, and people have built
Speaker 1: games that are not even remotely related to motorcycles using
Speaker 1: the the game building elements in this game where I've
Speaker 1: seen a pinball game re created where there actually was
Speaker 1: a little motorcyclist inside a solid like an opaque ball,
Speaker 1: so you don't see them, But they just used all
Speaker 1: the the physics of the yeah, the physics and the
Speaker 1: and the different pieces that the developers put into the
Speaker 1: game and reimagined it in some way. So it shows
Speaker 1: that by creating this outlet for creativity, people sees on
Speaker 1: it and they make some pretty amazing stuff. So I think,
Speaker 1: even if there isn't a direct causal relationship between creativity
Speaker 1: and video game playing, this, uh, this trend of of
Speaker 1: catering to creativity is really a positive one. Sure, Okay,
Speaker 1: But but so far we've been talking about some of
Speaker 1: these these deep, interesting sandbox games let you do whatever
Speaker 1: you want. What about something really simple like Super Mario Brothers. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you asked. In two thousand thirty, and there
Speaker 1: was a study conducted and forgive me, folks at the
Speaker 1: Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Charity University Hey Medicine,
Speaker 1: Saint Head vig Kranken House, which examined how video games
Speaker 1: appear to aug meant brain function in certain regions of
Speaker 1: the brain, including the regions responsible for spatial orientation, memory formation,
Speaker 1: and strategic planning. So what the study particularly did was
Speaker 1: had a group of adults, So these are not kids,
Speaker 1: these are adults who would play Super Mario sixty four
Speaker 1: for thirty minutes every day for two months. I will,
Speaker 1: I will make sure to reinforce the fact this was
Speaker 1: a two thirteen study, so they got apparently Nintendo sixty
Speaker 1: four was big in Germany in twenty thirteen. So they
Speaker 1: actually measured brain volume. They used m r I scans,
Speaker 1: so this is kind of a Over the course of
Speaker 1: the study, they would have the various participants go and
Speaker 1: elect to be in an MRI machine and they would
Speaker 1: have an MRI I performed, a scan performed, and then
Speaker 1: they would look at the results over the course of
Speaker 1: the study, and they found that by the end of
Speaker 1: the study that people started to h get increases in
Speaker 1: their gray matter, their brains got bigger, yeah, in these
Speaker 1: specific regions particularly, and that uh, this seems to show
Speaker 1: that the activity of the video games was one that
Speaker 1: promoted this this growth in gray matter because it was
Speaker 1: it was engaging those parts of the brains of the
Speaker 1: people who were participating UM. I would love to read
Speaker 1: more about the study, to see their control group, to
Speaker 1: see exactly what their methodology was, to make sure that
Speaker 1: they were trying to UM to eliminate any other possible
Speaker 1: factors that could have also resulted in an increase in
Speaker 1: gray matter, and maybe see if there are any other
Speaker 1: studies that have attempted to replicate these results. But it
Speaker 1: is really interesting this idea that perhaps because you're exercising
Speaker 1: parts of your brain that you might not otherwise engage,
Speaker 1: depending upon what your day to day activities are, could
Speaker 1: in fact make you, at least on some level smarter,
Speaker 1: or at least make your brain function more effectively and
Speaker 1: more better, more better. Yeah, so there you go. That's
Speaker 1: really cool. But everything we've talked about so far has
Speaker 1: sort of been aimed at the aptitude of the brain,
Speaker 1: if that makes any sense. It's more kind of along
Speaker 1: the lines of your i Q and what your brain
Speaker 1: can naturally do at its base level. But I'm interested
Speaker 1: in talking about video games in the context of education
Speaker 1: and learning, not not just not just increasing our our
Speaker 1: abilities but actually imparting knowledge. But like we were talking
Speaker 1: about at the top of the show, what's that other
Speaker 1: half about? Yeah, can't can they make us learn more better?
Speaker 1: I think they can make us learn more better. There's
Speaker 1: certainly lots of games out there that have catered to this,
Speaker 1: and it's not a new phenomenon at all. I mean,
Speaker 1: I remember when I was going to school, when I
Speaker 1: was in elementary school, and and personal computers were brand new. Um,
Speaker 1: the Apple too was considered to be an amazing device
Speaker 1: that was going to change our future, and in many
Speaker 1: ways it did just that. But there were games that
Speaker 1: were coming out. There were for all sorts of of things.
Speaker 1: There were you know, just the time wasters or whatever,
Speaker 1: the type of stuff that people have dismissed in the past,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. But then there were also games that, yeah,
Speaker 1: well that you're talking about presophisticated game by that point, actually,
Speaker 1: and Mind Sweeper also engages your mental abilities because you
Speaker 1: have to figure out the logic. But there were other
Speaker 1: games that were specifically geared towards creating an educational experience.
Speaker 1: And the one that I have to mention because I'm sure,
Speaker 1: well I'm fairly sure both of you have experienced this
Speaker 1: at some point. Oregon Trail. All right, So, Oregon Trail
Speaker 1: was brand new when I when I was in elementary school.
Speaker 1: I mean that was I remember playing technology. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember playing Oregon Trail the beta. No. Um, So, anyone
Speaker 1: who hasn't played Oregon Trail, I'm sure there are versions
Speaker 1: online that you can play right now. I know there
Speaker 1: have to be lots supports of it. Uh And of
Speaker 1: course I know that they've they've updated it multiple times
Speaker 1: throughout the years too. Yeah, Like I played Oregon Trail
Speaker 1: to which started to incorporate full motion video Wow, I'm
Speaker 1: sorry the days of full motion video games. Well, Oregon Trail, obviously,
Speaker 1: it tells the story of maybe not obviously to paying
Speaker 1: on where you're from, tells the story of the United
Speaker 1: States during the the Great Expansion West, when pioneers were
Speaker 1: forging new territory for anyone who wasn't a Native American, Uh,
Speaker 1: to and there exactly. Yeah, I mean the there's a
Speaker 1: dark side to this story that is not explored in
Speaker 1: Oregon Trail, but they but you could get eaten by
Speaker 1: a bear, certainly or you know, they their depiction, at
Speaker 1: least the original original Oregon Trail, their depiction of Native
Speaker 1: Americans was pretty simplistic and certainly not very uh so
Speaker 1: culturally Yeah, not culturally sensitive at all, but it also
Speaker 1: would you know, you had consequences and sometimes like if
Speaker 1: you wanted to keep pushing really hard as opposed to
Speaker 1: letting your your pioneers rest occasionally, then you could see
Speaker 1: pretty nasty consequences, like part of your party ends up
Speaker 1: dying off in the process. They're there due to illness
Speaker 1: or injury or both. Usually dysenterry. Dysenterry was a big one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: dysenterry was a big one. I put tuberculosis in the notes,
Speaker 1: but then I don't think that necessarily hit Dysenterry was
Speaker 1: the one that you would usually run into. I also
Speaker 1: remember playing an online port version where it was almost
Speaker 1: guaranteed that you were going to break a bone or
Speaker 1: someone was going to break a bone in the process
Speaker 1: and possibly be need to let you don't have to
Speaker 1: leave them behind or something. I think there was a
Speaker 1: lot of snake bite in the game. You could get
Speaker 1: snake bite, so the interesting of the linguistics were not
Speaker 1: necessarily it was it was certainly there to kind of
Speaker 1: give you a historical view of the challenges that pioneers
Speaker 1: faced during this whole process. Certainly, and lots of other games,
Speaker 1: especially for um that time. I'm sure. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: just out of the out of the children's educational gaming
Speaker 1: culture at this particular moment. But I mean, but I played.
Speaker 1: I played the heck out of some Carmen San Diego.
Speaker 1: So yeah, learned a lot of geography from Karmen Sandy.
Speaker 1: I forgot a lot of geography immediately after playing Carmen's. Well,
Speaker 1: it's also problematic because, depending upon when you played at
Speaker 1: geography has changed since then. Yeah, there are countries that
Speaker 1: are no longer countries since when I played is in
Speaker 1: the USSR? What is she doing in East Germany? Yeah? So,
Speaker 1: But there were also games obviously that promoted things like
Speaker 1: learning math skills, learning spelling, typing. Remember at school I
Speaker 1: played a lot of like number crunchers or something like that.
Speaker 1: But skipping ahead, I mean, besides those basic skills type
Speaker 1: games that we've seen, there's some that are aiming at
Speaker 1: even more sophisticated type of of topics. Topics. One that
Speaker 1: I wanted to focus on is games that teach coding
Speaker 1: like programming languages. Oh yeah, and there are a bunch
Speaker 1: that are pretty exciting that are being developed now. But
Speaker 1: but this is not a new concept at all. There
Speaker 1: was one called Logo that was created in the nine
Speaker 1: seventies at M I t uh. It's actually a programming
Speaker 1: language unto itself for like a family of languages, I guess,
Speaker 1: because there's a few different versions. Um, But it's it's
Speaker 1: designed to engage learners with graphical interfaces too, to show
Speaker 1: how rewarding and fun programming can be. Um. If you've
Speaker 1: ever seen like a little turtle being moved around a
Speaker 1: screen to draw pictures, that that is logo. M that's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. The example I wanted to talk about was
Speaker 1: this thing I found on the internet, which I thought
Speaker 1: was so cool, and it's kind of modest. I think
Speaker 1: it was just sort of a little demonstration, like they
Speaker 1: didn't make a huge thing out of it. But it's
Speaker 1: called code Spells, which was an experiment by the u C.
Speaker 1: San Diego Jacob School of Engineering. And I love the
Speaker 1: idea of it because the basic concept is it's it's
Speaker 1: a game for beginning programmers, and you play a little
Speaker 1: wizard who has to do magic spells, but you write
Speaker 1: the spells in code in Java, right yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: you're helping out these little gnomes and when you cast
Speaker 1: a spell, it has little fire effects on the screen
Speaker 1: and gefty stuff like that. It's really cute. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so beyond just this game itself, like the very the
Speaker 1: concept behind it, the idea of writing magic spells in
Speaker 1: code is great because that's actually what you do when
Speaker 1: you write computer code, is you're doing magic. You're bending
Speaker 1: physics to your will. You know, you get to say
Speaker 1: what happens now, Yeah, you're bending the spoon totally. And
Speaker 1: I just thought that, wow, I mean, what a great
Speaker 1: way to teach people, to encourage people about the power
Speaker 1: that they can have by writing code, and also to
Speaker 1: to give them a skill in a game that translates
Speaker 1: to a skill in a real world. You know, there
Speaker 1: are so many ways that you can play a game.
Speaker 1: Let's say, you know, back in the day when I
Speaker 1: was in high school, you'd see your friends just playing
Speaker 1: every request and they're sitting there leveling up by hacking
Speaker 1: snakes to death in the forest for a long time
Speaker 1: and their quote leveling up, but they're not actually like
Speaker 1: learning anything new they're they're just in a virtual way
Speaker 1: becoming more powerful. If you're talking about a game where
Speaker 1: you're like playing as a wizard and you're learning to
Speaker 1: develop your coding skills to become more powerful. Power in
Speaker 1: the games sort of scales to a real world power
Speaker 1: that you can use to get a career. And you
Speaker 1: you do have those those small and continual achievements or
Speaker 1: trophies or you know, just in game rewards saying like,
Speaker 1: good job, dude, you did that thing right, Let's do
Speaker 1: another thing. You get that reinforcement over and over again.
Speaker 1: There are other people who have tried to do this
Speaker 1: in more this generation of games. I know there was
Speaker 1: a whole Kickstarter to bacle about the proposed game Code Hero.
Speaker 1: I can actually talk about that a little bit. So
Speaker 1: this was a game that was supposed to teach uh
Speaker 1: here in the United States kindergarten through twelfth aid students
Speaker 1: how to code in a length and unity that was
Speaker 1: going to be the learning language, the language specifically that
Speaker 1: this would be geared towards, and it had I think
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand dollar goal on Kickstarter ended up raising
Speaker 1: a hundred seventy thousand dollars, So it was overfunded, um
Speaker 1: and then as a result the the the campaign, the
Speaker 1: person running the campaign said that, all right, what we're
Speaker 1: also going to do is include an MMO element to
Speaker 1: this game, so it's not just gonna be a standalone
Speaker 1: single player game, and we're also going to create a
Speaker 1: documentary about the crowdfunding process. And uh, as is sometimes
Speaker 1: the case with these kind of projects, it perhaps was
Speaker 1: a little more ambitious than what they had anticipated, and
Speaker 1: that the the goals outstripped the actual funds. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people underestimate how much money it takes
Speaker 1: to develop something like this, particularly if things don't go
Speaker 1: well and you have to go back and try and
Speaker 1: rework it. I mean, and and plenty of people who
Speaker 1: have you know, huge corporations or you know, personal donations
Speaker 1: funding their games, not kickstarter donations, but like actual facts,
Speaker 1: rich people just going like here have all the money.
Speaker 1: Also kind of squawn. I mean, this is not the
Speaker 1: first game that's never that's that's become vaporware, right there.
Speaker 1: There are tons of titles out there that were abandoned
Speaker 1: for one reason or another. Now, not that this game
Speaker 1: has necessarily been abandoned, but it certainly hasn't for a minute,
Speaker 1: are they still working on they as of I think
Speaker 1: right now that their websites are backup there. They had
Speaker 1: gone black or gone to poker sites, I think for
Speaker 1: for a moment, but they're back now. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: the right now they're saying that that a full beta
Speaker 1: is going to be out in the fall um which
Speaker 1: another year after yet another delay. They had originally said
Speaker 1: that it was going to be out by packs two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve, then September one, two thousand thirteen, and now
Speaker 1: I think maybe September ish, yeah, two thousand fourteen. So
Speaker 1: it keeps slipping. It's has not to suggest that people
Speaker 1: behind Code Hero aren't genuine in their concerned to make
Speaker 1: this game. We're not trying to them, No, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's just one of those things some people are but
Speaker 1: but maybe we don't know enough about it to shame them.
Speaker 1: Part of it is, Part of it is that you have.
Speaker 1: Part of it is that crowdfunding, particularly the kickstarter model, UH,
Speaker 1: in order to encourage people to fund your projects, you
Speaker 1: are to promise rewards for backing at certain levels. So
Speaker 1: you've got a lot of people who feel that they
Speaker 1: did not get the thing that they paid for. Never
Speaker 1: mind that crowdfunding is all about funding projects you want
Speaker 1: to see succeed. It's not about buying something you're receiving
Speaker 1: for your donation. Right, So you know there are there
Speaker 1: are projects that don't pan out, and that's one of
Speaker 1: the things you have to include on your your campaign
Speaker 1: is what are the risks? Because there are and it's
Speaker 1: stories like this that require and then make Kickstarter require
Speaker 1: you to list what the risks are. Um So it
Speaker 1: may be that we eventually see code Hero come out.
Speaker 1: I certainly hope we do, but it has not been
Speaker 1: a smooth process for that that particular project. Another one
Speaker 1: we could talk about is Minecraft, which we mentioned before,
Speaker 1: but there's there's lots of stuff you can do in it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what I wanted to talk about is the fact that okay,
Speaker 1: so you could have say, a a game like Code
Speaker 1: Spells or something where it has a very kind of
Speaker 1: narrow focus, but it allows you to do a lot
Speaker 1: and it's really cool. It teaches you how to use
Speaker 1: a programming language. Minecraft, on the other hand, is more
Speaker 1: like a tool that you could use to create environments
Speaker 1: to teach all kinds of things, not just programming, I mean,
Speaker 1: not just not just working within a programming language. In fact,
Speaker 1: that's not even the case. It's actually learning how to
Speaker 1: program like physical circuits, how to create hardware software. For
Speaker 1: people who haven't played Minecraft, when you should probably try
Speaker 1: to explain basically, all right, So, yeah, it's a it's
Speaker 1: an open world sandbox style game where you have all
Speaker 1: these different types of environments and uh and things that
Speaker 1: you can mine in the game, different little elements, and
Speaker 1: each element will have different effects depending on what sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and one of those things in there is called redstone,
Speaker 1: and red stone you can mine and you get these
Speaker 1: little piles of redstone powder, and you can use those
Speaker 1: to create lines that are essentially like a wires in
Speaker 1: a circuit. And then using these redstone torches, which are
Speaker 1: essentially power sources, you can put power through that that
Speaker 1: line of red stones. Yeah, and so you can actually
Speaker 1: build working circuits. They also have switches, they have um
Speaker 1: a little relays that can act like diodes and other
Speaker 1: basic elements like essentially like transistors. So you can build
Speaker 1: a working macro circuit out of this stuff. And people
Speaker 1: people have I mean once you could people did. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I couldn't believe this when I saw it, But I
Speaker 1: saw a YouTube video of somebody who built a working
Speaker 1: sixteen bit computer inside Minecraft. So in this game, you
Speaker 1: build all these things out of these little blocks, and
Speaker 1: someone had put together all the blocks to physically make
Speaker 1: a computer in a virtual environment, and then you can
Speaker 1: get super meta with it. Right, Yeah, yeah, there's someone
Speaker 1: who built a computer in Minecraft that you can use
Speaker 1: to play an approximation of Minecraft. Um, so they they
Speaker 1: oh god, I'm trying to phrase this. So they physically,
Speaker 1: within the virtual environment built a computer that will run
Speaker 1: the program, not not the full program. I mean, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: it lets you create and destroy blocks, and and uh
Speaker 1: move this little icon in four different directions, and uh
Speaker 1: you can switch between movement and block manipulation with with
Speaker 1: a switch, and and okay, you're you're limited in your
Speaker 1: little playing field to just, um, sixty four tiles on
Speaker 1: a little eight by eight grid. So so it's not
Speaker 1: I mean, this is not high deaf. But but it's
Speaker 1: a platform game. Someone created a game that you can play.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, this just I'll just remind you that
Speaker 1: this is another example of that philosophical argument of if
Speaker 1: we're able to build a realistic simulation of a universe,
Speaker 1: we cannot, in fact be certain that we are not
Speaker 1: inhabitants of a realistic simulation of a universe facts. The
Speaker 1: fact that it almost guarantees that we are, so that
Speaker 1: which we view is reality is more likely someone's Minecraft creation. Yes,
Speaker 1: someone playing. That's bottom line. Take away the version of
Speaker 1: eight bit. If you learn nothing else in this podcast,
Speaker 1: you should learn that we're all in a giant game
Speaker 1: of Minecraft. People have actually used Minecraft, like in classrooms, haven't.
Speaker 1: There's actually tons of examples of Minecraft, like I've seen
Speaker 1: it from everything from you know there. There are communities
Speaker 1: out there. They're dedicated to building Minecraft versions of real
Speaker 1: world places, So like the Shakespeare's Globe Theater is a
Speaker 1: great example. So let's say that you are a student
Speaker 1: in Atlanta, Georgia who has a little chance of going
Speaker 1: on a class field trip to London to see the
Speaker 1: Globe Theater anytime in the in the near future, you
Speaker 1: might be able to see a virtual representation and get
Speaker 1: a better idea of what the actual structure looks like
Speaker 1: and how plays that were played out on this structure,
Speaker 1: what they would have appeared to have been like for
Speaker 1: an audience, which is I think is a valuable experience
Speaker 1: as you're trying to teach something like the works of
Speaker 1: Shakespeare to a class, you know, it helps them to
Speaker 1: visualize what it was really like to have been an
Speaker 1: audience member, because a lot of us forget when we're
Speaker 1: studying it in a class that this is really a
Speaker 1: performance art, not something that you just read as as
Speaker 1: a scholarly kind of work of art. So, but that's
Speaker 1: just one example. I've seen examples of teachers using Minecraft
Speaker 1: to do everything from teaching city planning, like how do
Speaker 1: you how do you lay out the city so that
Speaker 1: it's efficient and that everything works properly share like like
Speaker 1: sim City but with less Godzilla? Yeah, yeah, and and
Speaker 1: like what what is what are the what are the
Speaker 1: necessary components? Or just teaching a class how to collaborate
Speaker 1: and cooperate with one another, where you throw them into
Speaker 1: this virtual world and you give them the basic tools
Speaker 1: they need, or you tell them how to make the
Speaker 1: basic tools they need in order to create a structure
Speaker 1: so that they can survive overnight, and you turn those
Speaker 1: monsters on where you're like, look, teamwork if you yeah,
Speaker 1: if your team doesn't doesn't perform, you're gonna get blown
Speaker 1: up by a creeper. Or eaten by a zombie. I
Speaker 1: heard that one teacher was using that kind of team
Speaker 1: building in a foreign language class to help teach kids
Speaker 1: how to I mean, like the rule was, you can
Speaker 1: play Minecraft in class, guys, but you need to speak
Speaker 1: this foreign language while you're doing it, which again that
Speaker 1: promoted I've seen that being used where English was the
Speaker 1: language that they had to speak and they could only
Speaker 1: speak in English, but they were allowed to play Minecraft
Speaker 1: as long as they only spoke in English, which promoted
Speaker 1: them developing these skills. So in that case, you know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't so much the game it's health that was
Speaker 1: the the agent of education, but rather it was it
Speaker 1: was the enabler. Okay, I want to transition to something
Speaker 1: that I think is an even cooler potential for video
Speaker 1: games to teach us things, which is helping us get
Speaker 1: an intuitive grasp for things that we cannot get an
Speaker 1: intuitive grasp in the real world, intuitive grasp for counterintuitive
Speaker 1: concepts exactly, or things that that are maybe on a
Speaker 1: scale that's impossible for us to realize in our in
Speaker 1: our personal lives. So if you want to teach somebody carpentry,
Speaker 1: you can give them an intuitive sense of carpentry in
Speaker 1: in the real world and you know, just day to
Speaker 1: day life. What if you want to teach somebody about
Speaker 1: quantum mechanics, Well, I have a question for you. Do
Speaker 1: they have a cat? Because if they have a cat
Speaker 1: and a box, there are a lot of reasons quantum
Speaker 1: mechanics is really difficult for us to understand. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of different aspects of quantum mechanics that go
Speaker 1: completely against what we experience on the classic world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so matter at the quantum level does not behave like
Speaker 1: matter on the scale that we're familiar with. It doesn't
Speaker 1: behave like baseballs and rocks and trees. You can have
Speaker 1: mean depending on your three world of baseballs and rocks
Speaker 1: and trees. Uh, and I throw baseballs at the trees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: unless you've got some really wiggy baseballs. Um stuff happening
Speaker 1: at the quantum level is is pretty much guaranteed to
Speaker 1: be completely different. Right. Okay, So just one example would
Speaker 1: be like the idea of superposition. Right. Essentially, a quantum
Speaker 1: particle can inhabit all states, all potential states simultaneously until observed,
Speaker 1: in which case it then collapses into a single state,
Speaker 1: which is the one that you observed again depending on
Speaker 1: your inter but yeah, this is this is one popular
Speaker 1: way of looking at at physical reality, and it's also
Speaker 1: a really popular way to give yourself a headache. I mean,
Speaker 1: like like trying to think about that is I mean,
Speaker 1: like I understand the concept, but picturing it is a
Speaker 1: little bit physically impossible, right, because again, our stuff doesn't
Speaker 1: do that, Like we don't have macro objects that are
Speaker 1: inhabiting multiple opposite states simultaneously. But you know what can
Speaker 1: do that? Virtual objects and lad brings us back to Minecraft,
Speaker 1: well Minecraft in one example, but it could go beyond Minecraft.
Speaker 1: So what what is What did Google's Quantum AI lab
Speaker 1: do with this concept? They created a mod for Minecraft,
Speaker 1: which is no unusual. The PC version of Minecraft has
Speaker 1: many different mods that are based on the various builds,
Speaker 1: so you can go out there and find mods that
Speaker 1: are that that alter the world's physics dramatically, or create
Speaker 1: new textures or whatever. I mean pretty much anything you
Speaker 1: can think of, someone has probably made a mod for
Speaker 1: it for Minecraft. In this case, what Google did was
Speaker 1: they created a quantum mechanics mod called que Craft, which
Speaker 1: would introduce these quantum effects that we're talking about, including
Speaker 1: superposition but also entanglement, also that idea of once you
Speaker 1: observe an object, or you observe something on the quantum level,
Speaker 1: you affect it and thus it ends up making a
Speaker 1: more concretes the wrong word, but but settling into a
Speaker 1: specific state. So uh, it ends up in letting you
Speaker 1: kind of encounter this world that to us would be
Speaker 1: very alien because it is so different from the world
Speaker 1: of the classic physics that were familiar with on the
Speaker 1: day to day basis. But you could actually start to
Speaker 1: encounter these things that perhaps would be almost impossible for
Speaker 1: you to really imagine if all you had was a textbook.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're just reading text that's saying, in
Speaker 1: the quantum world, this thing can inhabit to states simultaneously.
Speaker 1: But since you can't see that on the classical world,
Speaker 1: that may be difficult for you to really get on
Speaker 1: a on an actual comprehension level. This is to give
Speaker 1: you that experience of some of the elements of the
Speaker 1: quantum world and help you understand the better, or to
Speaker 1: make that less alien to you. However, I should say
Speaker 1: quecraft does not incorporate all the elements of quantum mechanics. No,
Speaker 1: certainly not and it's also when I observed it, I
Speaker 1: was I thought it was really really cool. But it
Speaker 1: also it's a very basic kind of interpretation. It's more
Speaker 1: just kind of like to help you say, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: here's what this concept is to uh. In the video
Speaker 1: that I wrote for this episode, I imagined that, Wow,
Speaker 1: I wonder how far you could go with something like this.
Speaker 1: Could you could you create like a like a quantum
Speaker 1: mechanics platform or action game where you're playing as a
Speaker 1: photon and you're you're playing as an electron hopping between
Speaker 1: different energy levels of an atom and uh, and you're
Speaker 1: in a world that's dominated by quantum effects. I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's possible, but if it is, that want
Speaker 1: that game right now. I think that could be so
Speaker 1: cool and so counterintuitive and fun and weird. You're just
Speaker 1: hoping it's a little bit like Portal to Me, except
Speaker 1: just turned up to well, not eleven, but like superimposed eleven.
Speaker 1: You would have to you would have to be really
Speaker 1: lucky that the game studio wouldn't meddle about with that
Speaker 1: so much that they end up either dumbing down the
Speaker 1: quantum effects or or turning it too much into a
Speaker 1: gaming element. And I mean there's a balance you have
Speaker 1: to make, right, you want the game to be fun.
Speaker 1: Because the game is not fun to play, no one's
Speaker 1: gonna play it, and thus no one learns anything anyway,
Speaker 1: Well exactly, I mean, I think one of the major
Speaker 1: appeals of games for learning is that it motivates you
Speaker 1: to learn. Right. Well, besides the world of the very
Speaker 1: very small, the quantum world, games could also let us
Speaker 1: get take a look at things that in our our
Speaker 1: experience take course over so much time that there's no
Speaker 1: way for a person to observe it in a lifetime, right,
Speaker 1: Like the idea of evolution. You you have this this
Speaker 1: theory of evolution which explains how creatures have evolved over time,
Speaker 1: but we can't actually see it within the span of
Speaker 1: a lifetime, at least not on a macro organisms. No. No,
Speaker 1: I mean you can observe it in bacteria so well,
Speaker 1: or you know, you can create a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: generations of fruit flies. But right, but you're not. But
Speaker 1: even then, you're seeing pretty small variations and mutations, right,
Speaker 1: so you can you can see that ecole I have
Speaker 1: come to metabolize a different kind of sugar or something
Speaker 1: like that. Or that bacteria are you know, no longer
Speaker 1: affected by antibiotics. Yeah, sure, Yeah, you could see these
Speaker 1: sort of uh kind of genetic uman advantages, taking more
Speaker 1: of a precedence in a population, but actually seeing an
Speaker 1: an organism evolve on a way that's easy for you
Speaker 1: to observe. That takes so much time. We're talking millions, millions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that it's not practical, but a video game could perhaps
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah. There's a game that I've actually never played,
Speaker 1: but I saw advertised and maybe y'all if you have
Speaker 1: played it, you can comment a little bit. It's a
Speaker 1: game called Spore. I have not played it. I haven't
Speaker 1: played it either, but I do know about this game.
Speaker 1: The idea being that you could create essentially a virtual organism,
Speaker 1: and you could have this virtual organism evolve over time
Speaker 1: and even evolved by kind of cross breeding it with
Speaker 1: other people's virtual organisms, so that you are kind of
Speaker 1: guiding the evolutionary path of this creature. And the original
Speaker 1: um the original pitch of this was perhaps grandiose, is
Speaker 1: is being unfair, but it was very ambitious, and from
Speaker 1: most accounts that I have read, the eventual game did
Speaker 1: not quite live up to those ambitious goals. It reminded
Speaker 1: me a lot of how people were um excited about
Speaker 1: the game Fable before it came out, because I had
Speaker 1: it was supposed to have this very rich kind of
Speaker 1: gameplay element that would allow you to guide to really
Speaker 1: make your own choices, right. Spore was kind of similar
Speaker 1: to that, except on a micro organism level, where you're
Speaker 1: you're evolving up into more and more advanced organisms. But
Speaker 1: from what I have read, it was somewhat of a
Speaker 1: failure in that, at least according to a lot of
Speaker 1: the critics that I follow. Cool. Well, maybe we don't
Speaker 1: need to talk about that game specifically, but I liked
Speaker 1: the idea behind it, that that it's a game where
Speaker 1: evolution is taking place, because a game, a video game,
Speaker 1: a virtual environment is sort of the perfect place to
Speaker 1: start to get an intuitive sense of the macro scale
Speaker 1: vision of what evolution looks like in biological organisms. So
Speaker 1: I was imagining, Man, what if you could create like
Speaker 1: a real time strategy game where instead of like I'm
Speaker 1: the Red team and I'm trying to destroy the Blue
Speaker 1: team's space, I am this particular gene pool and you're
Speaker 1: trying to evolve your set of organisms within your gene
Speaker 1: pool to compete with the other organisms for the same resources.
Speaker 1: I think that would be fascinating. I think the end
Speaker 1: level there is becoming a t rex. So, so in
Speaker 1: your game, are the way that you guide evolution? How
Speaker 1: would you go about that? I don't know yet. Maybe
Speaker 1: it would be I guess what would seem obvious is
Speaker 1: that if if the other players and the environment are
Speaker 1: your your natural selection forces, maybe you would have the
Speaker 1: ability to cause certain mutations. So if mutation is the
Speaker 1: random element in biological evolution in this game, maybe you'd
Speaker 1: make that non random. So you could say, I want
Speaker 1: to try to mutate this gene in this way. Interesting. See,
Speaker 1: my approach would be the opposite, where I would want
Speaker 1: the ability to control the environment and try and introduce
Speaker 1: environmental factors that I think would promote certain mutations from
Speaker 1: being uh from either mutations from either be expressed or
Speaker 1: promote other mutations to be expressed more frequently. Sure, well,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you could do it both ways. But I mean,
Speaker 1: wouldn't that be you know, I remember when I was younger,
Speaker 1: I saw people playing Civilization, where you go from you know,
Speaker 1: very very primitive to very technologically advanced to the point
Speaker 1: where you are developing future technology seven future technology because
Speaker 1: they've run out of real ones for you to talk about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: wouldn't it be so cool to actually be, you know,
Speaker 1: owning a species. This is my player. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: push their descendants far and make them win the game.
Speaker 1: But you're going from say, a microbe, to some kind
Speaker 1: of some kind of fungus or something, you know, not
Speaker 1: a fungus, but all the way up the biota scale
Speaker 1: until you you have macro organisms with legs and trunks
Speaker 1: and teeth and or whatever it is they happen to have,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe just huge scorpions. Maybe a virtual computer they
Speaker 1: can play Minecraft. There you go, that's the ultimate goal
Speaker 1: of any games anyway. I just thought that'd be so
Speaker 1: interesting and that would give you a kind of perspective
Speaker 1: on evolution that you can't normally get. I've gotten this
Speaker 1: kind of perspective just from watching videos of adaptive landscapes.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of these? Yeah, they're sort of
Speaker 1: computer simulations that will help you. You can have little
Speaker 1: objects within them that are representing different organisms within within
Speaker 1: a gene pool, and the computer simulates how they would
Speaker 1: respond to different environmental pressures and you. You just watch
Speaker 1: them behave over which ones are going to wipe them out?
Speaker 1: That kind of thing. You know, we talked about using
Speaker 1: games like Minecraft to learn to work together. There's some
Speaker 1: great examples of how uh the and they're hilarious. They're
Speaker 1: not necessarily to teach you anything, although they are sometimes
Speaker 1: built as a social experiment. But how working together it
Speaker 1: could sometimes be impossible. And I'm talking about Twitch plays Pokemon.
Speaker 1: So the concept year was that you have some people
Speaker 1: who created a a Pokemon game, and they essentially coded
Speaker 1: it so that people could put in commands for the
Speaker 1: game within a chat room in a twitch dot tv
Speaker 1: live stream, so you can watch the game being played
Speaker 1: live by the audience. That's that's there. So you type
Speaker 1: in your commands and the commands get translated into in
Speaker 1: game commands, and you're you know, you're just playing a
Speaker 1: Pokemon game. So you're I gotta catch them all. I
Speaker 1: want to understand. You gotta get all the pokemons. And
Speaker 1: then you put those pokemons up against other people's pokemons.
Speaker 1: Is it not pokemons? I'm being big purposefully. Is it pokemons? No,
Speaker 1: it's Pokemon. It's not pokemons. But I will continue to
Speaker 1: say pokemons, So yeah, you collect your pokemonsum. But in
Speaker 1: this case you've got you've got commands coming from a
Speaker 1: growing audience. Like when it first started, you had a
Speaker 1: group who could conceivably progress through the game in a
Speaker 1: kind of a d h D but fairly normal way.
Speaker 1: But as the audience grows, you have more and more
Speaker 1: commands coming in. There's a lag of between twenty and
Speaker 1: forty seconds between when you type something in and when
Speaker 1: it gets translated into the game, meaning that you see
Speaker 1: something happened on the screen, you're typing in the next
Speaker 1: thing to happen, But between the time when you saw
Speaker 1: it and the time you're typing, stuff has already continued
Speaker 1: to happen in the game. There's there's almost no way
Speaker 1: for you to get it to do exactly what you
Speaker 1: wanted it to do. It does, however, mean you've affected
Speaker 1: the game in some other way that you had not
Speaker 1: perhaps intended. This This reminds me of the board game
Speaker 1: Robo Rally. If you guys have ever had not played that, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's so frustrating, it's wonderful. You have
Speaker 1: this little robot that you're trying to control, and you
Speaker 1: can give it. You have to put down a bunch
Speaker 1: of different instructions for it, all at the same time,
Speaker 1: and then it plays out those instructions and it's like
Speaker 1: the worst game of chess that you've ever played. So
Speaker 1: instead of it doing all of your instructions and sequence,
Speaker 1: it goes from player to player and builds it that way.
Speaker 1: It'll do all of your instructions in sequence, but the
Speaker 1: other players will have meanwhile been moving around the board
Speaker 1: mucking things about, so by the time your instructions play out,
Speaker 1: anything can happen. I'm sorry, that was a big tang. No,
Speaker 1: it's fine. Well, the only other thing I play it
Speaker 1: or give it to your enemies. The only thing I
Speaker 1: have to say about play it with your enemies, which
Speaker 1: plays Pokemon, is that the the community that has grown
Speaker 1: up around this has created a mythology for this game
Speaker 1: where there's this one for example, there's this one object
Speaker 1: in the game that has a purpose, but once you
Speaker 1: use it, it's that's it. It's useless. You still have it,
Speaker 1: but you can't do anything else with it some kind
Speaker 1: of key or something sort of. So what happens is
Speaker 1: that whenever anyone was there was this one case where
Speaker 1: he kept on the character Red kept on opening up
Speaker 1: his inventory and looking at this one thing over and
Speaker 1: over and over again, because that's just the way that
Speaker 1: the commands were coming in, and it was happening so
Speaker 1: frequently that people started to joke he was actually consulting
Speaker 1: an oracle that was that took the form of this object,
Speaker 1: and then they essentially deified this object. So now this
Speaker 1: is like the the overarching god of that game. I
Speaker 1: can't remember. I don't play the pokemons. It's some sort
Speaker 1: of helix thing, think of a bob So anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: they also have named certain Pokemon after various uh characters
Speaker 1: that are theological. Um. So like they they've created a
Speaker 1: whole kind of mythology and religion based upon the activities
Speaker 1: that happened within this game. And it's very much tongue
Speaker 1: in cheek, but it's also kind of interesting to see.
Speaker 1: Like I said, it is a social experiment. In this case,
Speaker 1: we're again we're learning more about people than the people
Speaker 1: within it are learning any other like valuable skill or
Speaker 1: or or any other kind of knowledge. Um. There was
Speaker 1: also a paper that was a Stanford research paper published
Speaker 1: about the social interaction of massively multiplayer online games. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this also seemed to find in general that perhaps players
Speaker 1: were not as connected by the multiplayer element as we
Speaker 1: might assume. Well, the whole concept behind something like World
Speaker 1: of Warcraft was that people are playing characters within a world,
Speaker 1: and that, you know, if you're going to like the
Speaker 1: the the purest of experiences, based upon the way it's marketed,
Speaker 1: you are playing a character. You you are inhabiting the
Speaker 1: role of a character within this virtual world. So you
Speaker 1: are a virtual a virtual member of this world. Right,
Speaker 1: And rather than being forced to interact only with computer
Speaker 1: response characters or or non player characters the way that
Speaker 1: you would on a single player game, you have the
Speaker 1: enrichment experience of being able to interact with uh, goat
Speaker 1: huggers all over the world. It's not necessarily they're not
Speaker 1: all Leroy Jenkins, but uh at any rate, the idea
Speaker 1: was that, uh, you could actually have a role play experience.
Speaker 1: Anyone who has ever gone on any of these things
Speaker 1: knows immediately that role playing is almost always highly discouraged
Speaker 1: on except on specific servers. And if you go to
Speaker 1: one of those servers, I think the main reaction for
Speaker 1: most people, not all, but most is y'all this is
Speaker 1: a goofy game. I cannot believe the way people are
Speaker 1: walking around in character and doing this kind of stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: it's very very much true of any sort of role
Speaker 1: playing game though. I mean, if you've ever played any
Speaker 1: kind of pencil and paper role playing game or gone
Speaker 1: out to a live action role playing game, there are
Speaker 1: very different types of players. There are players. There are
Speaker 1: players who talk about their characters completely in the third
Speaker 1: person as a way of saying, like they're playing a game,
Speaker 1: they're just going through statistics, essentially saying, all right, statistically speaking,
Speaker 1: my character is more likely to defeat that enemy monster
Speaker 1: than the enemy monster is to defeat me. Therefore, I'm
Speaker 1: going to engage in combat. It's this very kind of
Speaker 1: high level, detached approach. Then they're the other games where
Speaker 1: people are are trying to inhabit their character, they're trying
Speaker 1: to are doing a they're incorporating a storytelling element in
Speaker 1: addition to the physical game play. There's some theatricality there.
Speaker 1: It may not be physical, it may all be in description,
Speaker 1: and they could be throwing little packets of bird seat
Speaker 1: at each other. So there's there's no I mean, I've
Speaker 1: played both types of games. And I enjoy both, and
Speaker 1: both of them have valid places. But it shouldn't come
Speaker 1: as much of a surprise that the Stanford research paper
Speaker 1: found that there weren't these really super deep social interactions
Speaker 1: going on within this game. You had people who had
Speaker 1: grouped together essentially in order to further the goals of
Speaker 1: their own characters, possibly to further the goals of whatever
Speaker 1: guild they were in, or whatever group they were in,
Speaker 1: or or possibly well I'm not speaking to the paper,
Speaker 1: but um, but certainly I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: who use that kind of game as almost a chat room.
Speaker 1: They're like, well, let's go kill a dragon, but also
Speaker 1: how are your kids doing? But see, those are the
Speaker 1: social interactions that standard. The Stanford paper was really interested
Speaker 1: in seeing, like, are there these thing is going on?
Speaker 1: And while there are, there is some of that, it's
Speaker 1: not the most prevalent of So it was one of
Speaker 1: those deals were we're talking about, uh, you know, the
Speaker 1: world of social gaming, the world of online gaming turns
Speaker 1: out not to be so social after all. Uh, And
Speaker 1: then I guess we can talk about using games to actually,
Speaker 1: you know, do science. Yeah, that's the weirdest part. So
Speaker 1: we have games improving your cognitive capabilities. We have games
Speaker 1: teaching you stuff, we have games showing that we're not
Speaker 1: necessarily learning how to work together, and you can maybe
Speaker 1: use games to do science. So there was a two
Speaker 1: thousand ten paper in Nature that explored whether an online
Speaker 1: gaming paradigm could be used to help solve technically difficult
Speaker 1: problems in science. And specifically what they looked into was
Speaker 1: predicting protein structures with a game called fold it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because protein folding is is this very complex, very unknown
Speaker 1: to us branch of genetic expression, and and the problems
Speaker 1: involved there are not easily solved by computers because they
Speaker 1: involved just too many variables to really get through it.
Speaker 1: It kind of helps to have a human elements sitting
Speaker 1: there and puzzling it together. Yeah. The authors of the paper,
Speaker 1: they ended up saying that integrating in the sort of
Speaker 1: human problem solving method with traditional computer based algorithmic problem
Speaker 1: solving could actually be a big boost in in certain
Speaker 1: types of problem solving. If you can create a game
Speaker 1: that harnesses human brain power and creativity, we could actually
Speaker 1: solve some problems that computers alone can't solve. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, and that idea is just so beautiful.
Speaker 1: You know, rather than just like crushing candy or whatever
Speaker 1: the kids are doing these days. Right, solving science sounds great? Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this is not a huge surprise to me,
Speaker 1: mainly because I've also followed in the artificial intelligence world
Speaker 1: the the the progression of not just computers that are
Speaker 1: good enough to beat chess masters at chess, but this combination,
Speaker 1: this rising combination of computer human players where it's a
Speaker 1: human and computer with it's a human playing with computer assistance,
Speaker 1: and uh there are several tournaments they use this approach.
Speaker 1: And part of the reason is because humans are really
Speaker 1: good at coming up with things that are not necessarily
Speaker 1: a mathematically logical approach but are still effective. That there
Speaker 1: are very creative approaches to problem solving that computers are
Speaker 1: not good at. So a human player might be really
Speaker 1: good at fainting on you know, fainting as an f
Speaker 1: ei n t I n g uh, fainting another player
Speaker 1: so that they are drinking. Yeah, they're drawn out, not
Speaker 1: not not like oh my stars, uh no, but drawing
Speaker 1: out another player so that you can then uh act
Speaker 1: upon a vulnerability that has been opened up. So same
Speaker 1: sort of things you mean, killed the player, well not
Speaker 1: in chess. You don't you put them in checkmate. It's
Speaker 1: not that violent. I mean, you kill all the other pieces,
Speaker 1: but the king you just put in checkmate? What kind
Speaker 1: of chest do you play? Play it different? I don't
Speaker 1: play Russian roulette chess. I don't know. You guys played
Speaker 1: from way higher stakes than I do. But at any rate,
Speaker 1: it's it's not just trying to extrapolate this to online
Speaker 1: first person shooters. Okay, well, fair enough, but the point
Speaker 1: being that, you know, using that human element, that ingenuity,
Speaker 1: that creative approach to a problem that computers are not
Speaker 1: very good at simulating, um could really make this sort
Speaker 1: of thing effective. So it's not just that we're again
Speaker 1: it's not the player necessarily who's learning something new. We
Speaker 1: are learning something new because of the players interactions with
Speaker 1: this game. So there are a lot of different, very
Speaker 1: subtle variations on learning and video games. It's not necessarily
Speaker 1: player game relationships. Sometimes it's it's outside of that. It's
Speaker 1: a more meta approach, but still a really cool one,
Speaker 1: and I hope that we get to see more applications
Speaker 1: of this sort of thing where you match a person's
Speaker 1: sort of unpredictable creative approach to problem solving and a
Speaker 1: computer's ability to crunch really hard numbers very quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe a really neat thing to see. Continue absolutely before
Speaker 1: you go into the outro, because I feel like the
Speaker 1: outro is pending. I just want to say, rob A
Speaker 1: Rally is not a terrible game. I just hate it.
Speaker 1: I have never played it, so now I'm I'm curious,
Speaker 1: and also I kind of want to avoid it like
Speaker 1: it's It's almost one of those things that I would
Speaker 1: rather have it occupy a certain place in my brain
Speaker 1: than to either confirm or deny it. I don't want
Speaker 1: that quantum state to break down into either I love
Speaker 1: this game or I hate this game. A lot of
Speaker 1: people love it. I'm just very impatient. I can understand that. I,
Speaker 1: you know what, I actually do get very frustrated in
Speaker 1: game playing as well, So it probably be the kind
Speaker 1: of game that would drive me bonkers pretty quick. If
Speaker 1: you're the kind of person who's ever someone else's controller,
Speaker 1: back when controllers had plugs or ever, I don't know,
Speaker 1: flipped a table that had a full game on it.
Speaker 1: I'm not naming names, but someone sitting at this table
Speaker 1: has done that. It's me game of Monopoly too, I mean,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of pieces on that board. I
Speaker 1: am not proud of it, but I did do it.
Speaker 1: I have to own up, all right. So anyway, that
Speaker 1: wraps up this discussion about video games and learning. I
Speaker 1: think we all learned something today. I think you learned
Speaker 1: a little more about me, for example, what I think
Speaker 1: I learned the most? All right, that's fair. Well, guys,
Speaker 1: if you have any suggestions for future topics on this
Speaker 1: Future Looking podcast, let us know. Let drop us a
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Speaker 1: All three is f W Thinking. We are eager to
Speaker 1: hear from you, and we look forward to talking to
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