The Destiny of Games

I'd wanted to go to the academic summit at the Game Developers Conference because, for whatever perverse reason, I am still attracted to the academic side of any equation. The summit was mostly about how game developers and academics might work together to further mutual interests.

I won't try to summarize all the speakers' remarks, because those notes will be shortly available on the GDC webpage and in any case, I couldn't do them justice. I'll just comment on a few things which I found most compelling. The theme that resounded most of all to me was the need for communication, not only between the game industry and game academia, but also between academics, between designers and consumers, and among all of us as consumers of this relatively new cultural product. A new shared language might spark an open source grass-roots revolution in the way we think about games and gaming.

More Communication

Warren Spector, of the late Looking Glass Studios and currently at Ion Storm, got things going with a report card of progress since the last academic summit, using a list he and Henry Jenkins had presented last year. By the way, Warren should be a professor. He thinks like an academic, has a magnetic personality, and a passion for teaching. He noted that there were several areas in which academia and the game industry had failed to adequately communicate to achieve their goals. Several of them were obvious, though true; the one which resonated with me was the point that we need to foster intelligent game criticism. "Sadly," he said, "it seems that the 'new game criticism' will reach its full flower outside the United States." He noted the astonishing fact that there are no peer-review game criticism journals founded in the United States.

One reason this remains true even today is something Frans Mäyrä, who runs the Hypermedia lab at University of Tampere, spoke to when he said, "We have islands of scholars, we have islands of researchers." Essentially, there is not yet a unified academic discipline to bring us all together. Mäyrä went on to describe an ideal situation of communication not only between academia and the game industry, but also between pockets of academia who are isolated from each other. We need a shared vocabulary, shared language, shared concepts; we need textbooks, and more inter-disciplinary collaboration. We need to connect all of our islands.

More Honesty

The Futures Panel, moderated by Eric Zimmerman, asked the panelists to envision a future in games. Espen Aarseth, editor of Game Studies, said "Games are more than products." He talked about the importance of research labs' remaining independent from corporate interests. He asked whether we really felt comfortable with the idea that Sony or Microsoft would own the new important social arenas of MMOGs and other online environments. Certain sides of game studies don't mesh well with corporate interests, and that's something we should not fail to address. He touched on the notion which I thought was under-articulated by the panelists as a whole: for all the talk of collaboration and co-operation, there remains a fundamental conflict over how information should be shared. Researchers benefit most of all from shared data; they publish papers publicly because the ethic of academics is above all to share knowledge. Academics recognize that building on each other's ideas will produce results that are far more beneficial, interesting, and true than what one lone research lab could come up with in isolation. Game companies may benefit from such open research, but they capitalize on controlling information - that is how they make their money. Rob Huebner admitted this when he said, "Game companies make terrible academic partners. We call you constantly for six months asking for all your research data, and then once we start production we won't return your phone calls for a year and a half." He suggested that game companies could make older games open source to allow research labs to work with them, maybe relax license restrictions, and distribute games more widely.

This is certainly a wonderful thing to hear, but I have to be cynical and say, I'll believe it when I see it. The clash over open source games on a very basic philosophical level was made obvious by one ponderous fellow in a Neverwinter Nights t-shirt "from a (heh) little company up in Canada (heh) called (pause) Bioware" who said his company couldn't afford to give away copies of their game because that was how they made money. Warren jumped on this immediately, mildly chastising the guy and saying that it cost them so little to donate games, and "if your publisher won't let you, find a new publisher!" In spite of committed, conscientious studio heads like Warren, the fact remains that the economic structures game companies work in usually discourage open sourcing. It's clear that the game industry needs academics; it's not entirely clear whether academia should partner with a mercenary game industry.

Revolution

Purple Moon founder and current chair of the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design, Brenda Laurel gave a short talk that was straight to the point. She acknowledged the academy had to continue to perform a critical, theoretical role. But she had, I think, a rather positive outlook: Games of the future will be open source, she said. They will be more distributed. They will be more social. Games of the future will have more permeable boundaries between game and real life. "Individual destructive power will get boring," she said, "because there's too much of that in real life right now." Too true. Who needs another FPS? Let's evolve beyond that. Let's think about games as art, as important cultural and social phenomena.

The radicalism that emanated radiantly from Brenda reminded me of something stunning that Gonzalo Frasca wrote on Ludology.org: "Games don't necessarily need to be entertaining." I don't completely agree with this, but it's an intriguing idea which really forced my mind open. It's an extension of the idea that games should be in development which have no commercial possibilities. It's a call for open season on totally experimental games. As Brenda said, let's make less game-y games.

But the real revolutionary was Ken Perlin, Director of the NYU Media Research Laboratory. In a breathtakingly dense five minutes, he critiqued the culture of passivity and argued for universal procedural literacy to combat it. Citizens who can *make* things, he said, would understand that they can affect the world; if we institute programming languages as part of the general education of all, we will be helping to guide a revolution in the way people think and act. Imagine if a child knew how procedural thinking worked - imagine if programming became like writing, like literacy, not a technical skill learned by engineers, but a fundamental language of self-expression naturally used by writers, artists, musicians, anyone. Way beyond open source, it was a manifesto for democratizing access to cultural participation at the most basic level. I felt like giving him a standing ovation.

Alarms

Afterwards I told Ken how inspiring his five minutes were. He smiled self-deprecatingly, and said, "Well, I only had five minutes, I figured I should just go for it." That's exactly the sort of spirit which will transform gaming culture from the ground up. But Ken's vision, like Brenda's, also represents a damning critique of the way things are. We are in danger of becoming passive citizens, being spoon-fed culture. Television culture is not a cause, but a symptom. I remember walking on a mountain with Howard Rheingold last year, when he sounded a similar warning about digital culture. He said that people will give away their right to create, because they are lazy and they don't realize what is happening. Later I met Larry Lessig and read his book Code and heard a version of the same warning: people are allowing their rights as creators of culture to be whittled away. Only corporations are allowed to be culture-creators.

What does this mean? If you look at the game industry as it stands now, you can see what it means. It means a system which favors franchises over innovation; a system which still largely locks out and alienates women and other "others"; a system which resists open source. I don't think academia can rescue it (and us, game players); but I think the academic role as outside participants and sometime partners will foster a healthy skepticism of the industry, as well as the kind of critical thinking absolutely necessary to drive innovation and keep some of the worst impulses of the game industry system in check - at least, theoretically. But it's vital also that academia not alienate the mainstream game culture by being too esoteric, too irrelevant to game experiences. Academia should continue to give all users and consumers and developers the tools to analyze, recognize, and create.

A New Alliance

Finally, I'd like to suggest a third partner to the business and academic sides of video game culture. Perhaps because of my recent law school experience, I'm wondering where the law-makers, policy-writers, and legal theorists fit into the equation. If we are to accomplish these lofty goals, we need a good chunk of legal advice and political reform. Protect games as free speech, protect the gamers' right to free speech in a game. Rewrite horrifying end-user license agreements. Let's get Larry Lessig to work for us. Let's battle the FCC, let's get into constructive dialogue about violence in video games, let's do this before we get summoned to testify in Supreme Court. Let's apply the tenets of our constitution to the project of making games better. Let's make better game makers.

"The destiny of games," said Ken Perlin, "is to move civilization forward." But it'll take all of us to realize this destiny.

Comments

[gleetribe]

We are perhaps limited in conceptualizing the future and potential of games by our very reliance on the word 'game'. I suspect at some point there must will be a leap in intention, a deep transition in how we view our role in interacting with digital content that will ferment bold and creative movements challenging the entertainment trance with new orders of deep, empowering and perhaps shocking engagement with the virutal.

[Christian McCrea]

Stunning! Quite the call to arms, very lucid and a reminder to would-be academics such as myself that the relationship of games to academia and vice-versa is still up for grabs, something you can forget after 2 weeks of solid writing.

I've heard it mentioned that a potential path to revolutionize the game industry would be to equip its audiences with a 'seed of doubt', something that is perhaps at the centre of Ken Perlin's manifesto; if you know how it works, you can break it if you want to. A shade more of that seed has always had incredible effects on entertainment industries, the only losers being those locked into cut-and-dried sequel modes; lazy accounting turned into lazy production, and frankly, they need a thinning of the ranks.

Christian

[Bowler]

Great, powerful piece!

This makes me *really* wish I was at the GDC right now, and I was pissed I wasn't going to go as soon as I got the reminder in the mail.

I think the largest obstacle we have to overcome is the console system. Right now, it's considered a man's/boy's system, so the hardware manufacturers are marketing it as such. Since the installed base is for men and/or boys, that's the demographic the gaming companies make games for.

What it's going to take is a software giant like EA to say to Microsoft and Sony (and Nintendo), "Hey, we've got these incredible games we developed that our market research says would sell really well to girls and women, but you guys aren't holding up your end of the bargain to get your systems into their hands. Market your system to this other demographic, and include our game as a pack-in title. Hell, ship it in a pink box for all we care. Just sell it to the ladies already, or we'll find another system to sell this title on!"

The other obstacle is making alternative game concepts profitable. EA has proven that you can sell an "experience" rather than a "game" (i.e. Sims), but they have a marketing juggernaut to get the word out. Smaller, more adventurous and experimental companies don't have that luxury.

At any rate, this was a great read. Very exciting stuff!

[Andrew Mayer]

I think it's as much the fault of academia as it is that of corporate culture.

Their need to deconstruct everything means that they can never close up an experience and get it to run properly. They tear apart the clock, and wonder where the ticking sound went. Their research is cool, but when I spent time talking to them most of what they had was useless from a production point of view, because they didn't care if really worked or not. It was the theory that was important.

Microsoft and EA are the only ones putting serious money into creating working dynamic social experiments. They deserve to own it.
Could a university create a playground for hundreds of thousands of users? It just doesn't seem possible.

I'll agree that we are losing a cultural heritage. Entire code bases are irrevocably lost when companies go bankrupt. It would be nice if there was an effort to archive and preserve these things, and eventually releasing them to the public domain. Much as Doom has gone from being a retail experience to a programming resource.

[sarah]

Does anybody know what is up with the product 3D Game Studio? It is around $99 and supposedly contains all the tools and code necessary for novices or programmers to create commercial quality games in original formats (not just templates). wtf? Other solutions list at like $27,000 per seat.

Distribution of cheap and useful tools like that could make a huge difference to the number of people making games as art or hobbies. Even if you know a programming language, games are an enormous and intimidating undertaking without several helper tools.

As much as I would love for the general population to be educated in all kinds of useful concepts, I think there may be just too much specialized knowledge out there. Basic high school science has enough trouble teaching people really basic logic. Maybe that is a function of teaching methods, but it generally is really hard to teach people ways of thinking rather than sets of facts and recipes/formulas/methods.

You don't really have to know how a product works to use it for creation. You just have to know what to do with it. A more efficient and effective way of getting people interested in creating stuff would probably be to give them fun tools. As a side benefit, individuals are usually more interested in trading tips and snippets of code than corporations are.

[Outlandish Josh]

Magnificent. The most astounding excerpt to my mind is Mr. Perlin's explanation that "Well, I only had five minutes, I figured I should just go for it."

In addition to the right-on-ness of what he and you said -- esp. about the relationship between creative agency and the ability to meaningfully interact with and improve the world -- his statement about "going for it" highlights the need for people to make an exegesis from the bullshit vernacular that pervades much of the corporate, governmental and academic realm.

I'm referring to the overwhelming general tendency I've observed for people to "not rock the boat," to go to great lengths to qualify their statement, or to so deeply cloak their statements in conditions and caviats that they cease to be statements at all. The human spirit does not invest itself in a false compromise. The language of consensus is only useful when it is engaged to actually create consensus pursuant towards some meaningful action, not when it is used to conjure the perception of harmony with the implicit purpose of buttressing the statis quo. We need more courageous truth-telling radicals.

I don't know if you're familiar with the essay "Jihad vs. McWorld," which explores this essential issue in geopolitical terms. The whole thing is interesting, but the main takeaways for me is the notion that global consumer capitalism exerts something of a stifling and undemocratic influence on the general populace wherever that mode of living reigns.

I've long personally felt that there is a critical imbalance between creation and consumption here in the US, and that this imbalance is a root cause for many negative facets of our society (crushing anome, overwhelming waste, widespread non-participation, apathy, violence, intrenched poverty, etc). By engaging more individuals in a creative, invested capacity, we can engender a more vibrant, resilliant, tolerant, productive, global, integrated, fun-filled culture. Undertaking this end embodies a direct confrontation with the forces of "McWorld," but I believe that it also embodies a significant step forward in terms of what is possible in almost every realm of the human experience. The creative act is a moment in which a person is fully involved in their lives, perhaps only rivaled by the fully-engaged savoring of another person's creation.

Since it would appear that the growth of interactive, networked, multimedia entertainment is showing no sligns of slowing, there's a pressing need to propogate this notion in both the elete and lay game-enthusiast population. I do not think it wise to entrust the value of our future culture to the existing mega-corporations which dominate the current scene. They will play a key role, no doubt, but they must be led along by the nose at every turn.

[Walter]

Great article. Wish like hell I could have been there.

As for the legal theory side of things? Hmm...I smell a potential honors thesis. ;)

[Johy Zuper!]

Be careful not to be to US-centric. And when you are, make sure you do not generalize your observations. Many games are being made outside of the USA. Many games are being made in countries that are far less capitalist than the USA. I admire your enthusiasm to reform the game industry within the USA but many points you make simply don't apply to the world outside of the US.

[Anselm]

Wow I should have gone to GDC after all... I stopped going a couple of years ago because there stopped being any innovation. And I never was able to convince employers to make game authoring tools as games in and of themselves... wrote something myself about the idea - it is a pretty common aspiration of most game developers I think.

Sounds like maybe there is going to be some motion here finally?

Tools like ode may help - and there are many examples of compelling content authoring - ALICE and SODA are two examples (I won't bother with the links on these ones).

Cool stuff anyway.

[Xellos]

Um, I am cannot understand why people would want games more like real life. What, do you want the barrier between cyberspace and reality to blur in a Lain sortof way? Real life and games should not be combined. I don't want a game of me going to college classes, or of cleaning my room. What the heck is fun about that. I can do that anytime I want. Games are about the unreal. About fantastic events or stories where you get to have abnormal control of events and such. I do not mean to exclude other games as long as they are fun, but there is no point to game that simulates my clipping hedges or something...
I think that games HAVE to be entertaining. I don't relax and have fun by doing something that is not interesting, immensive, or entertaining. Now I suppose I should define entertaining by anything that makes you enjoy and appreciate the experiences you had in the game whether that be dialogue, chatting, or blowing a zombie head all over the floor (whatever turns you on). Entertainment is the reason for games. You go to a movie and you want to be entertained, whether it be that it is funny, action-packed, or informitive does not matter. You were entertained, or you would not have enjoyed it. If a game is not entertaining, then why was it made?
If anything should be addressed it is that there lots and lots of good ideas that are poorly implemented or undercut by giant corporations that might choke off creativity in lu for their most recent public opinion polls on which games are more popular. Perhaps open source could address this or at least more dialogue as the article was saying. It is just that there are a lot of bad games that did not have to be bad (ex- when a company is forced to release and then immediately starts patching to make up for the fact the game was not completed).
I have no real issue with that article or anything and did not mean to come off angry or something if I did. Yet, the reason I play video games is to be entertained (in whatever form) and if a game does not meet that requirement, then why are you playing it?

[Jasper Johnson]

Interesting. I usually stop reading most of these long articles about half way through. This one kept my attention all the way to the last letter that was written. Although interesting, I do not believe that we can take people away from the gaming industry and make them teachers of procedural thinking to our young generation, let alone make required to know the basic knowledge. The Western culture is pretty much taking over the gaming industry and to think that we can totally change people's attitute not only about life (spoiled laziness), but getter one's ass out of the coach to go work on something that requires us to actually think for ourselves? Hmmmmm?

[Linc]

RE: Ken Perlin, Director of the NYU Media Research Laboratory. Purhaps, rather than teaching programming schools should be teaching Sybolic Logic. Programming classes in American schools would strikes me as something programsers would enjoy, but would be useless for most people. Symbolic Logic on the other hand is useful for any sort of critical thinking.

[Asmodeous]

Xellos, my response to that comment is....

Have you ever played The Sims? Now, mind you, I'm not a big fan of The Sims, I find it a monotonous and relatively tedious game, but whereas YOU may not enjoy the game, it was and is a best seller for a very important reason.

It's a game that non-gamers and gamers alike can enjoy. That, imho, is what they mean when they say games should be more like real life.

Speaking ahead on that account, I concur with that statement. They should. Should they be, like The Sims, a direct mirror of reality? Not necessarily, but then again, that depends on the mirror it's in. Making a game more open-ended, giving the player more choice in what occurs within the gamespace is making the game more like reality. It's making the direct action of the player, and their thought process, have a direct impact upon the game.

As an aside, I do believe that a large portion of the lack of creativity and the increase of apathy pertained in the US, and in many cases in nations abroad, stems from the current educational system. Somewhere along the lines the educational system shifted from teaching people how to think to teaching them what to think. The : This is how it is, no other method is right syndrome.

I'll use myself as an example in that remark, my school career consisted almost entirely of me having to prove to my teachers, math and science specifically, that my method of doing things wasn't wrong. It was just different than theirs. The fact that I always got to the same result was shadowed by the fact that I used a different method to get to that result.

I watched it happen to a considerable amount of other students as well. There is no reason that this should happen. The knee-jerk reaction that a good number of teachers have to say, "No you're wrong. It's done this way, there's a step you're missing," needs to be stemmed so that the teacher in question can take the time and see if the student may have figured out something that they may not have before.

The current school system make-up seems to stifle creativity with supposed fact. It's depressing to see.

Me.

[George Soropos]

"He asked whether we really felt comfortable with the idea that Sony or Microsoft would own the new important social arenas of MMOGs and other online environments."

Um, I think Microsoft and Sony can have them. Important social arenas? Have americans all become meat robots or something? There's a Sun outside, surf's up, birds are singing. Go and enjoy it. You guys seem to love getting academic about anything and everything you can get your hands on. Thank God Susan Sontag isn't a gamer! Seriously, if people want it bad enough indy game designers will continue to exist, as indy bands exist. All this intellectual talk is just people who've been seen as nerds all their life suddenly realising they could be really cool, if they can just convince enough people that they're at the 'cutting edge' of culture. Big deal, so is Date Rape. The real future of indy gaming lies in the collectivisation of development, not in pseudo intellectuals whining about the problems inherant in a capitalist economy. It's a hell of a lot harder to make a game than write and record a song but with a big collective of volunteers each doing a little bit indy game development can be a reality.

[CEH]

Asmodeous:
Standardized teaching methods represent one apparent path to the post-industrial ideal of efficiency in education. Teach people the "basics" and kick them out the door, goes the rationalization. Oswego county McHigh School, 30 thousand diplomas served and counting. Finding a way to integrate equal opportunity education into a system where individuals clearly differ in aptitude and still turning out enough learned people to fill the society's needs is one of the great tasks to be achieved in this century, if not the next.

George Soropos:
As far as integrating an academic forum for game development theorists goes, I believe that strengthening the gaming academic community would serve to increase their works' accessibility to both corporations and independent people with questions about various issues in gaming. It's too early to know what form "gaming" will take in the future, but it's quite apparent right now that many people are living a "gaming" lifestyle. As long as it's legal to take this slightly self-destructive life path (gaming beats alcoholism hands down in my book), I don't think that it is unreasonable to strengthen the forum for independent research on these people's behalf. If the people who want to form this round table sound a bit pretentious, it's still secondary to what they might accomplish: better games. The corporations are swinging blind in a lot of their ventures these days; just like in television and music these days, a lot of genre-mired, unimaginative material is being created. If a few gamer geeks can get together and make me something better to play with for a few hours in the evening, I don't much care *what* they call themselves. That's my consumer statement.

[Durandal]

First of all, I'd like to say what an amazing article this is, and what an amazing site it's posted on. I'm a... 7... hour reader, first time writer, and I love the place so far, Insightful commentary and an easygoing community could've kept my big sister interested after she finished the Marathon series, instead of leaving her hanging afterwards, losing her tech skillz. *sigh*.

That out of the way, the specific article is great. Of course, Ken's comments stuck out most to me. lifting the veil of internet anonymity, i'm a typical gamer in most respects: 16, male, geek. However, I happen to have grown up around, and grown to use, Macs. I get maybe one good game per year, and i can deal with that, limited funds mean that's probably what i would be getting regardless. This does put me in an interesting position, though: i want to make more of what i like. I also have a reason to do so: because the game companies aren't. I've also seen a web replete with examples of small groups of dedicated gamers producing amazing things, Escape Velocity from Ambrosia Software is just one example. Don't worry, this is all going somewhere.

The point is, I have friends who, when they were my age (they are now 33 and 35, respectively), had taken apart and rebuilt most of the electronics in their home, they were experimenting. I don't have the option to do that. Though through my own efforts I have developed some rudimentary programming skills, I haven't achieved near what i should be able to. This is why I agree with the statements Ken makes. There was nothing to help me to become an astute programmer, there weren't even serious computer courses availible until I turned 14. Regardless of how difficult it is to teach children programming, the most simple concepts are easy to grasp, and even at a young age, and frankly, it can't hurt those who want to actually affect their environment, whether or not gaming is the specific aspect that interests them.

The fact is, almost all of tech culture nowadays is "black box", I can't look at what makes my computer tick, Jt costs more than most of the objects I own combined. I'm actually interested in learning more about technology, and I've been more hampered than helped.

It isn't just that people need to be taught, It's that the idea that it's okay to help children become more able to manipulate technology needs to be spread.

I'm a gamer, I want to help the community that has formed around gaming while also expressing my own ideas, indy game development, even at a pre 90's level, is the easiest way to do so unless i want to just mod. It is no longer okay to depend on the fact that kids "Pick these things up", and "Just learn them", as the world of gaming and computing becomes more complex, so must our view of how to instruct our children on how to use and manipulate the environment they were born in. just because I can use a ubiquitous electronic device without succumbing to the urge to destroy with a crude bone club doesn't mean I UNDERSTAND it.

When games were first created all It took was dedication, a quick mind, and a reason to create. It still requires all of these things, It just may also require something else: education.

P.S. Seriously, what's with the white on white text motif for all of the comments? Is it some sort of art Deco thing? 'Cause if it isn't, it needs fixing.

P.P.S. That's my family E-Mail, so contain yourselves if you want to contact me.

[Daniel McMillan]

The Destiny of games can provide some reality to "evolution" when the technology is used not only for entertainment but education and awareness. Of course, this involves the awakening of intelligence so that it is good business to vest in such a hybrid. For instance, our Frontier 1859 MMORPG project recently fostered some Cherokee Indians to join the online community and teach about their language and culture. If a project such as this - whose community comes from all corners of the globe ( see the international flags on the forum) and shares about an instance in history ( The American Frontier in 1859 ) then this is a sign of how the power of gaming technology can step up toward healing old wounds ( such as the Native Americans vs. the European Emigrants ). With the proper overlay - we can help people be accountable for their actions in a virtual west-world and recreate the instances that allow us to look into our selves, and see if we are a beast at heart - or worthy of surviving another century with all our toys.

After all, many civilizations came before us, and greed, immorality, and that archeologists enjoy now.

The future of games involves much more than meet the eye, and is greater than Sony and Microsoft.

[Daniel McMillan]

The Destiny of games can provide some reality to "evolution" when the technology is used not only for entertainment but education and awareness. Of course, this involves the awakening of intelligence so that it is good business to vest in such a hybrid. For instance, our Frontier 1859 MMORPG project recently fostered some Cherokee Indians to join the online community and teach about their language and culture. If a project such as this - whose community comes from all corners of the globe ( see the international flags on the forum) and shares about an instance in history ( The American Frontier in 1859 ) then this is a sign of how the power of gaming technology can step up toward healing old wounds ( such as the Native Americans vs. the European Emigrants ). With the proper overlay - we can help people be accountable for their actions in a virtual west-world and recreate the instances that allow us to look into our selves, and see if we are a beast at heart - or worthy of surviving another century with all our toys. After all, many civilizations came before us, and greed, immorality, and that archeologists enjoy now.

The future of games involves much more than meets the eye. It is greater than Sony and Microsoft, and yet their success provides the resources needed to fund such projects as this.

[Daniel McMillan]

The Destiny of games can provide some reality to "evolution" when the technology is used not only for entertainment but education and awareness. Of course, this involves the awakening of intelligence so that it is good business to vest in such a hybrid. For instance, our Frontier 1859 MMORPG project recently fostered some Cherokee Indians to join the online community and teach about their language and culture. If a project such as this - whose community comes from all corners of the globe ( see the international flags on the forum) and shares about an instance in history ( The American Frontier in 1859 ) then this is a sign of how the power of gaming technology can step up toward healing old wounds ( such as the Native Americans vs. the European Emigrants ). With the proper overlay - we can help people be accountable for their actions in a virtual west-world and recreate the instances that allow us to look into our selves, and see if we are a beast at heart - or worthy of surviving another century with all our toys. After all, many civilizations came before us, and greed, immorality, and that archeologists enjoy now.

The future of games involves much more than meets the eye. It is greater than Sony and Microsoft, and yet their success provides the resources needed to fund such projects as this.

[Johnny Quest Punk]

Durandal makes a clear call for help. I'm 27 and I have always had to pull teeth to get someone to teach me something about programing and game moding. I took me some time before I could get a college course that had a good teacher and who could teach beyound the "Hello world" stage.

Kens points' about giving kids the ability to speak and write code will be key in following years. When I first got a chance at Basic I could get my head around the syntax quicker then anything I was learned about Enlgish gramer. A kid in 4 or 5 grade could learn and use the concepts and reasoning behind basic quantive logic.

I know for fact that I learned more about programing as an intern on a game project then in any 2 programing classes combined, But all this tells me is that there needs to be more coures available or maybe a living code game that students can play with.

In the end programing helps me in my Spanish courses, Math, Astoromy, and the countless other classes. I know that if I was armed with knowledge of how to program at earlier age I would of probly not be eighth year senior now.

I can also add that I plan on working in the gaming idustry and then going to work in the public school system, because awhile ago I decided that the only way to get a better teacher is to become one.

So if there is any tech teachers reading this you had better get up to speed because Iam coming for your job.

[eli]

Outlandish Josh is so right... Just look at all the great games and gaming platforms that socialism has brought the world! For example... Wait, let me think of some. I'll get back to you on that. Anyway, those Capitalist Pigs at Sony, Nintendo, EA, Microsoft et al have not an ounce of creativity in their souls: they should know that all creativity comes from the Noble Proletariate, which merely wishes to rise up and destroy McDonalds in order that their true arty-farty-ness may be expressed.

"I do not think it wise to entrust the value of our future culture to the existing mega-corporations which dominate the current scene. They will play a key role, no doubt, but they must be led along by the nose at every turn."

Preach on, Comrade. Culture must be mandated from on-high, and those who have a different idea of how culture should be, or even what culture is, are socially insignificant. I recommend we send them to reeducation camps.

Josh's inane commentary proves why academia is perhaps best left out of the gaming world.

[Ronin Tetsuro]

Everyone is so quick to rule academia out of the gaming scene, but we have to realize something: our current education system simply isn't working. Like someone else already mentioned, pre-secondary schools here in the US are chimping their students through their classes, slapping a diploma in their hands, and then LYING to them, telling them they are prepared to cut it in the real world. Their skill sets haven't even been properly assessed, much less challenged. Sure, there are Nobel laureates and such that are alumnus of Ivy League schools, but for every laureate who makes it to the top of the heap, how many mill workers are out there, simply lacking the options to expand their horizons? How many people are there who have the potential to create great things, but simply didn't have to opportunities or the contacts to get the resources they needed to succeed?

If 'educational gaming' can be a cheap, widespread, engaging way to get people technical knowledge early on in their academic careers, then so be it. A child who grows up programming and LIKING it could do wondrous things with language by the time they are in their mid 20's. Think of it, 25 year olds who code out of their heads the way we type e-mails, creating in minutes what whole teams can't do in months now. The growth and innovation of technology and related fields due to these wunderkind indie coders in massive numbers would be an exponential curve. And these persons could prove to become the quintessential engineers of our society when their talents are applied to mathematical and scientific fields, and in another capacity, entertainment. Look at how the web has evolved since it stopped being just an academic/military utilized tool. It became a powerful tool for society because grass roots interests were given the chance to create in a mostly unhindered fashion. In order to get to this future, however, we have to teach these basic concepts young, so that talent has time to mature and enjoy a long blooming phase on average. And in order to accomplish that, we have to make learning these concepts not only fun, but something that these kids are excited to learn about. We're already starting to see it now in more basic forms, where we have self taught 14 year olds who are creating models in Maya that rival professional studio work and 17 year olds who are hacking financial databases created by our society's leading security experts in search of credit card numbers. Let's give them the arena to focus this creative energy into something positive and earth-shattering, and make what they create not only receivable of the praise it potentially deserves, but give work done in this arena real world repercussions. Teach responsibility, honor, and for god sakes accountability, while you teach code and naming conventions.

I used to work in an electronics store, and I'd always see little kids eyes light up when their parents carried them past a computer. We're talking kids that could barely even walk yet, could barely hold a mouse correctly. But they're changing the background and color schemes to meet their personal preference. Surfing the web, searching for info about their favorite cartoon or game. These kids have the ability to grasp the concepts, that much we can make no mistake about. I think we can, and should, give our children innate coding ability as a second language, not only for the aspects that are directly related to coding, but for the secondary reasons as well. Much like martial arts, technical proficiency requires a way of thinking which combines multiple concepts and theories. How could it possibly hurt our society to give kids this option early on? Do we dare deny or limit ourselves to the possibilities of what the children might construct as adults? Has anyone found a more feasible, simple, and realistic way of salvaging what is left of the human drive to evolve in a forward manner? Because if they have, lay it on me. If not, I say we get to work on this concept, because it's got potential.

I'm not saying force things on them. I'm just saying that the wild eyed 6 year old in the electronics store deserves the early jump on changing our world that the rest of us didn't get at that age.

By the way, great site. First time reader, first time poster.

[fjd]

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