James Paul Gee (Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading, University of Wisconsin)

Ben Sawyer (Co-founder, Digitalmill)

Henry Kelly (President, Federation of American Scientists)

(NOTE: This isn't exactly a transcript, but it comes pretty close.)

Ben: There are a lot of people who can't who think they can produce games. Serious games are a "rounding error" still in terms of total money.

Among our advocates you'll also find a lot of worry warts.

Henry: I see the following challenges:

Funding is a real problem. Education spending is way down.

Serious games also have a number of self-inflicted wounds:

We have an incredibly powerful tool but don't know yet how to use it.

A path forward:

We need to recognize that games aren't a panacea. Need to find where they work best and use them there.

We have a serious opportunities to show how we can solve a problem in education. The gov't wants to improve education in math and science.

James: It's important for serious games to get to the next stage before the enterprise collapses.

I view this as the birth of a potential new field. If it works, we'll look back on it and have a name for it.

In history new fields have arisen, with the same problems this new field has. One thing that happens in new fields is that they come to be defined around paradigms. A product or idea that everyone can point to and say, "Yes, that's a good example of what we're all talking about."

No overwhelming paradigms have yet been discovered. What's been done, this works, and is an example of "what is good". Have to begin to get some shared paradigms. That requires arguing more stuff, seeing who wins. Get more serious games to completion. We need to discuss the emerging common values of our field.

We have to confront central questions, fight over them, to get to the stage of convergence.

What is the power of a game? We don't all agree on that. People try to use it for skill-and-drill, and other pedagogies we already have. The power of games to me is that they put you inside a world and you see the world from an inside-out perspective and find solutions from inside that perspective. A place inside a world from which you have to act, think, and feel within that world.

I believe fundamentally games are a medium, so we respond to them very emotionally. While games do trigger powerful emotions, their key pleasure is cognitive, solving problems.

When games no longer demand you to solve new problems, you go on to a new game. This doesn't negate the emotional impact of the game, but only shows that the primary pleasure is cognitive.

It costs so much money to make commercial games, but the graphics not equal the game. We don't have to compete with Halo 2. The game's graphics have to be compatible with your goals, but the real expense is the gameplay. We have to put game designers together with learning designers.

If we think that the game in the box is what it's about, the whole enterprise will fail. We're not selling the game in the box. But the Big-G game, the interactions of people around the game. This is crucial in serious games. We have to be evaluating the learning systems that games generate. Serious games must be augmented by reality. The player will be moving back and forth from the virtual to the real world, and the game must be built to support that.

Part of my point is that we have to start disagreeing about things and fighting them out to determine paradigms.

A big problem in any new field "those damn X" (where "X" is either "academics" or "game designers"). This enterprise requires a bigger team than commercial games, because you need the game dev team, plus learning designers and they all need to talk a common language. If we don't learn that game design and learning design are compatible, serious games will remain a small space.

We need a killer app that the public sees, a game that makes it real clear that serious games work. We don't have a killer app right now.

A game like Swat 4 could be an absolute killer app in the serious games space. Swat 4 forces you to look at the world in a specific way, to form goals and solve problems based on a set of skills and practices in a world that is engaging.

The trouble is we don't have Full Spectrum Fireman. So in a sense we do have the killer apps, from the video game industry, but we haven't been able to move them off of crime and killing.

The next stage is being able to a) put paradigms on the table;  b) say what we know and why we know it and c) give evidence to back it up. It's too soon for large scale statistical information, but we should be able to provide warrants for our claims. Warrants are going to have to be based on how you substantiated it into a learning system.

My prediction: What will energize progress in serious games is the crisis of innovation, crisis of teaching good skills for the modern workspace. People need to be able to learn traditional content and still be able to innovate in that learning. Content and creativity have to both be supported.

Ben: Is some of our problem basically semantics?

James: Learning is the drug in any good commercial game. We can draw people in by problem solving, and mastery of a domain. Games are the drug we have to offer people.

Henry: The definition of learning is a semantic issue. Learning is not just mastering the facts for a multiple choice exam. To me a lot of these tools help professionals understand what everyone is doing.

Ben: When are we going to stop making excuses, like "it's crappy but it's serious." Eric Marcoullier said it's not necessarily production value. It's based on what you're providing.

Henry: DOD studies have show that some reality isn't necessary. For example, simulating every rivet on the airplane wing was unnecessary, and in some cases too much detail got in the way.

James: What has to be high quality is the gameplay. Deep game play.

Ben: I would argue that the bar of production values is going to be raised.

Henry: I see two issues. First is how to sell the serious game. The second is that production value  must match what you want to communicate. In medical and defense training, too much detail is counterproductive. It's a researchable issue.

Ben: We have to context expectations. But just saying "it doesn't matter" isn't a solution.

Where have we set expectations as of today? Games as "learning crack". Only 1 in 2 commercial video games gets 75% or better reviews in game magazines. How can we improve batting average?

James: Our batting average could exceed commercial industry, because all of them are trying to make the same blockbuster. We're going to make games for many niches. The serious games space is not a zero sum game. Here's a place where we may not have to replicate the zero sum, hit-driven approach to game development. It's crucial that we become a niche industry, not just chasing blockbusters.

Ben: I think we have to give kids more credit. Kids can understand what is put in front of them. It's interesting what is possible even with "low end" graphics.

James: Runescape, a game kids love, but it doesn't look that good. The ability for child to mod your game is probably a really deep learning principle.

Henry: Permission to fail is important. We're at the beginning, and we need to take risks and maybe produce something bad/wrong. The first round of games don't have to all be successes.

Ben: Are we apologists for Grand Theft Auto? Making up for the "ills" of video games? Serious games are not a counterbalance to commercial games.

Henry: Games are a communication tool.

James: We have an obligation to educate policy makers and parents about what gaming is. Show them how to separate different types of game design. Another weakness is how little we've educated the public about what gameplay really is to kids.

Ben: How much of the assessment issue is on the wrong path? People are looking for one-size-fits-all solutions, or have the game as the reason for the project. We seem to spend a lot of assessing the game. We're missing the point of critical game industry assessment of serious games, artistic criticism.

James: The assessment model for things we have for methods that aren't games, like schools, is broken. Games offer us new models to try. One thing that can emerge from this space is a possible huge contribution of new assessment ideas.

Henry: An element of a successful game is the player's knowledge of his position in the game. You,  as a player, always know when you're ready to go to the next level.

Ben: I've heard "I'll know this stuff is working when I see teachers using it."

Henry: If you have the image that the education process will disappear and become software, you're wrong.

Ben: We still haven't told the world how we want to be judged.

Henry: We shouldn't say: We're too new, don't evaluate us. There are a lot of weird concepts in education. You have to hold yourself to some standard to prove you're moving forward rather than backwards. We won't accomplish this tomorrow but we need an idea of where we're going.

Ben: Do we have a body of work that gives us enough star turns?

James: You have to be clear what the rules of your games are. What are the rules of the game you're playing about learning? What would you take as evidence?

Ben: At what point do you think we'll have 20 great serious games?

James: We don't have them, and we better get them soon, in the next few years.

Ben: Do actual gamers matter? In terms of learners.

James: People become advocates when they pay attention to what they're kids are doing, see that the games aren't trivial. Everybody in this space should be a gamer, play, design.

Ben: Does gamer skew show up in studies? Do the study populations isolate for skill level in games?

James: Some studies have already been affected by that. For serious games, you have to teach the players how to be a gamer on your terms.

Ben: Why do people think they can template content at will?

James: There's a tradition in education design that believes in filling in the slots with whatever content people want to teach.

Ben: When are we gonna get more snobby? I see people show me stuff, what they call game-based learning, and it's tech we threw out years ago because it didn't work then and won't work now. There's a reason the game field drops things.

James: I don't want to get too snobby. I want to be Darwinian, get lots of games and see what works. The commercial space has lost a lot of great games because of their emphasis on profits. Let's get rigorous about people proving what they're done.

Ben: Are we in danger of losing our link to the commercial game industry? Was there ever a link? The reason serious games exists is because of the commercial game space. Some people want to separate, differentiate.

Henry: My forecast is that if you do end up with a serious games industry, it's going to be different from the commercial game industry. This is a very different kind of market, a public market. What we can't do is lose the expertise, the insight, but we do need an amalgam with learning experts.

Ben: Would you hire a game developer to fix your sink? Why are we hiring non-game developers to make games?

Henry: Talk to the kids. One of the biggest disasters in educational software, is someone who thinks something is fun, for example is "emotionally moved by statistics", and thinks that's enough to make a game. We need people with the skills to make something engaging, but also technically correct.

-David