The Game Based Learning Conference is the only event of its kind currently in existence that deals with all aspects of games in learning.
The huge surge of interest amongst education professionals, game companies, learners, employers, parents, public sector agencies and technology providers over the last 5 years has been demonstrated by the overwhelming success of the gaming strands in the Handheld Learning Conference.
Game Based Learning builds on this success whilst providing more depth by creating stimulating, challenging and provocative dialogue spaces at the intersection between the education, gaming, social media and consumer electronics sectors. Here, policy makers, thought leaders, innovators and key practitioners meet to exchange ideas, knowledge and experiences as part of a unique ongoing conversation.
Speakers include:
Tom Watson, MP, UK Cabinet Minister for Transformational Government
Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari, father of the video game industry
Ian Livingstone, Co-founder, Eidos, Chair, Computer Games Skills Council, Skillset
Alice Taylor, Commissioning Editor, Education, Channel 4
Dr Richard Graham, Clinical Director of Adolescent Directorate, Tavistock Centre
The focus of this vital exploration is the impact that commercial off the shelf video games, “serious” games, virtual worlds and social networks are having on new learning and teaching practice in and out of formal education environments.
Game Based Learning 2009 will:
Examine practical examples of how games and other entertainment software are being embraced in schools, universities and other establishments.
Present and discuss latest market data, trends and behaviors.
Debate the implications of video game and Internet rating systems in the context of learning and teaching.
Provide valuable social and networking opportunities for all delegates.
Create, capture and make available unique reference material for the interactive entertainment industry, policy makers, education professionals and the public.
The rest is up to you.
More than anything else, the Game Based Learning 2009 Conference will be an important, highly stimulating and engaging conversation between traditionally disparate sectors that must now recognize their intrinsic value to one another.
Jeremy Clarkson called Gordon Brown a “one-eyed Scottish idiot” and the whole world cheered. Clarkson was probably referring to Brown’s gross mismanagement of the British economy whilst he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, but this is not Brown’s only idiocy. When he blamed knife crime on video games he was being patently stupid. Studies show that the graphs over time of video game playing and of violent crime by youths tend to be inversely proportional. So the reality is the opposite of what Brown said. No surprise there.
And then there are the other idiots, the ones in the “old” media, who consistently attack gaming. Partly out of sheer ignorance and partly out of fear that their days are numbered. Fox News in America and the Mail in the UK are prime examples of this. What they report would be totally laughable if it weren’t for the fact that some people are gullible enough to believe what the news media say.
How about this for a quote from the report: “Video games can stimulate learning of facts and skills such as strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation and innovative thinking, which are important skills in the information society.” Sounds just like this blog, doesn’t it? So I commend the European parliament on their erudition and judgement.
The fact is that video gaming is merely a communication medium, just like books, television, film and newspapers. The detractors seem to continually fail to get their heads round this one. What video gaming has over the older media is that it is interactive, non linear and connected. It is for these three reasons that we are taking over.
Parents are responsible for bringing up their own children. So allowing kids to have an 18+ game is just the same as allowing them to watch Debbie Does Dallas or giving them a bottle of Laphroig to drink. The politicians and the news media would be far better occupied getting this message over than their current Pavlovian responses to gaming.
You see, what most people don’t realise is that we are still at the very beginning of video gaming. In the near term it will grow to be bigger than TV and Film put together. But over the longer term the three technical advantages it has as a medium will make it all pervasive. It will take over older methods of human communication in many aspects of every one’s lives. Education, certainly, will be far more effective once it fully embraces gaming. As will many areas of business. Just wait and see.
And just so I am not accused of being a propagandist for gaming being the best thing on planet earth, let me say that there is a major problem with what our industry does. A problem that is not properly addressed and a problem that has featured on these pages before. And that problem is game and internet addiction. But I am not proposing that Vaz, Brown etc now jump on this in a misinformed, alarmist tirade. What I am saying is that this is an area that deserves far, far more informed debate.
Sega lose $119 million in the 9 months to 31.12.08. Sales down 15.4%, 560 out of 3,100 global staff to lose their jobs and a 20% cut in “R&D” which mainly means development of new games. Sega really is one hell of a takeover target now, all that fantastic heritage IP just waiting to be used properly. They would certainly be a far better fit for EA to buy than Take Two are. And Microsoft could release a stream of AAA exclusives if they were to be the buyer.
In 2008 more than $823 million was spent marketing video games in the United States. Nothing gives you clout like having budget to spend and it is using this clout that will bring the anti gaming elements of the press like Fox News into line. The industry really should get together to boycott advertising in media that paints an unrealistic or sensationalist picture of gaming in their editorial content, that would sort them out PDQ.
Abertay University to Become First UK Centre for Computer Games Excellence with £3 million from the Scottish government. It is amazing that the Scottish government are so switched on to where the world is going (as I have written here before) whilst the British government are so ignorant about the impending economic importance of gaming (as I have written before). Here is a great quote from this news article: “The global, interactive, creative media sector has a potential market value to Scotland of up to $68 billion by 2012.” And just how much could it be worth to England if our current Labour government weren’t so completely inept?
1.25 million games of FIFA ‘09 played online every day. This is something everyone in the industry should write on a card and put on their mirror at home so they can remind themselves every day when they are shaving/putting on their makeup/both. Our industry has moved online. There is no going back. Unless your plans are centred around online you are going to lose. Boxed products are rapidly becoming just a residual artifact from history.
Game BAFTAs coming up on March 10th. Now BAFTA stands for British Academy of Film and Television Arts and I don’t think the game industry should have anything to do with them. Their old technology is linear, and lacks both connectivity and interactivity. Our industry will soon be bigger than both of theirs put together. Surely we are capable of doing this sort of thing on our own, being associated with them will only hold us back. There is no way that the top people in BAFTA will allow games to overshadow film and television.
EIDOS gives up on casual games. Ho hum, I could write an article about why it is essential to be in casual games, in fact I could write a book about it. Casual games offer a far better business model than boxed console games. And they allow you to do all sorts of things with brands. Let’s hope that Gimme5games, unshackled from corporate restraints and with entrepreneurial juices allowed to flow, prosper and grow.
The Conservatives blast the current government for destroying the once thriving British games industry. This junior politician, Ed Vaizey, seems to be informed and to have the right idea. Which may be too little too late when you look at what we have lost. And far more senior Conservatives like David Cameron and Boris Johnson have said very misinformed and unhelpful things about gaming in the past. So the jury is out. One thing is for sure, if they realised how massive the future importance of gaming is going to be and how big Britain could be in the global industry then they would get their act together pretty quickly. Just don’t hold your breath.
If you go to the American Museum of Natural History in New York they have dioramas of ancient man, one of which is learning and gaming. If you watch the development of other young mammals they are taught by their parents using gaming. It is obviously the natural way to do things, wrapping a bitter pill in sugar. However as mankind developed his society, from hunter gatherer to agrarian to industrialised, education has become progressively more formalised and progressively less fun.
Now with video gaming we have the potential to fix this. People have tried to put formal lessons into game format, but this isn’t the way, it isn’t using the power of gaming. As in so many things it has taken Nintendo to show us how to do it with Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, a seminal product that has sold in millions and led the way for many (so far less successful) derivatives. And increasingly companies and the military are using MMOs to immerse people into potential scenarios before they face it for real. This has been done for Americans going to Baghdad, for instance.
So now the time is ripe. During our lifetimes we consume an immense amount of education. In schools and further education, in the home, in the workplace and even in our hobbies. My SCUBA diving has entailed a huge amount of study on a succession of courses. If all this education could be made into games then the potential for the gaming industry is immense. It could very well become bigger for us than gaming as a recreation.
Now I am not saying that Electronic Arts should abandon the Wii to put 50% of their resources into Moodle. What I am saying is that we have a beginning, a breakthrough of gaming into mainstream education. And also, because it is open source and so widely used, this is bound to develop and grow. So anyone who is involved in the recreational video game industry should keep their eyes open because there are some great opportunities out there in education and they are only going to get bigger over time.
Texas has “Entertainment Software Day” in recognition of what our industry contributes to the state. Can you imagine the current British government doing that? They have watched over the ongoing demise and destruction of the British gaming industry. Because they knew that they could rely on financial services to earn the country money.
ELSPA campaign for online child safety. Now I know that this is well intentioned but is it really the job for a trade body? Surely it is the job for parents of maybe government? So presumably ELSPA are doing this to earn brownie points with the government, they should have learned better by now, the government only cares for what the tabloid press print. And you don’t see the book industry trying to stop 12 year olds getting hold of Portnoy’s Complaint. But then Portnoy’s Complaint doesn’t even have an age rating.
Amazon launch digital game distribution. The biggest news this year. Expect Amazon to be one of the biggest suppliers of games to end users via online some time soon. This is another massive blow to high street retail. I am not a financial analyst but I know which shares I would be dumping on this news. 88 million active customers is a lot of retail presence.
Console game prices coming down. $50 to $60 is still far too much for a game and is surely untenable in the long term. If any one thing holds the industry back now then it must be this. We are now mass market and we should have mass market pricing that compares with other entertainment.
The Japanese game market shrank 13% last year. And the UK could become the second biggest games market in the world this year. How things have changed as the effect of the PS3 traincrash rumble on. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can take up some of the obvious slack in the Japanese market this year.
The above image was posted onto Facebook by someone called Richard Kirby who lives near Farnborough and who doesn’t know me and who has never met me. What he has done is typical of the internet and I am in very good company, you don’t have to look far to find Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa of Calcutta also being vilified. It is now a fact of life that once your name is known much outside your circle of friends and family people will attack you on the internet, usually from a position of anonymity. It goes with the territory.
And it is not just individual people who are attacked in this way. Organisations like soccer clubs attract a constant tirade of the worst possible abuse. And, of course, so does your company and the products that it creates. You cannot escape it. In our industry the three platform holders, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo attract an astonishing amount of vicious abuse. And in the democracy of the internet the voice of the abuser has the same weight as the voice of the reasonable person.
So what can you do to protect your reputation? There seem to be three courses of action. The first is to litigate against your tormentors. For instance in posting the image above Richard Kirby has committed the civil offence of libel for which I could sue him. And I would win. However it really is not worth the time and the trouble, the damages awarded would be trifling and the number of people pouring out abuse on the internet is so great as to make litigating against all of them impossible.
The second is to generate, or have generated for you, a body of “good” content that outweighs the bad. There are actually a lot of mechanisms for this. Social networking sites like Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit. Knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and Knol. Blogs and forums. Reputation management sites like Naymz and Lookup Page. And even the act of issuing press releases which get C&Ped all over the internet. A lot of this is what community marketing is about these days.
The third option is to rely upon the intelligence and judgement of internet users. They are used to seeing all this abuse and so have learned to give it little or no credence. People quickly develop filters which allow them to get what they want out of the internet whilst ignoring the rubbish. So your tormentors are pretty much wasting their time.
We live in an age where the reality of the matter is that internet abuse is ubiquitous. It is an inevitability that comes just from being well known. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there is only one thing worse than being vilified on the internet and that is not being vilified on the internet.
