NLGD: Taking Games Seriously

Author: by N. Evan

During his keynote for the Serious Connection at the Dutch Festival of Games, Ben Sawyer of Digital Mill argued developers of serious games should pay attention to gamers when designing serious games, as the communities that they build around games have collaborative and educational meaning. He used the session “to present back to [the industry] what gamers were doing besides just playing them -- think of it as user-led innovation, examined for the purposes of innovation in serious games.” “We often look at what games do for serious games," he continued. "We often look at what game technology can do. We often look at what game developers do. We don’t often look at what gamers do, and so we wanted to be inspired by what they do with the technology.” “If you really want to see what gamers are doing, YouTube has become like the ethnographer’s dream in that regard," he explained. “What do gamers do? They play games. But they also produce media about, from, and with games. They teach others about and with games. If I’m teaching you World of Warcraft, I’m using the games itself as a teaching environment, albeit to teach you how to play the game better.” What else do gamers do, he asked? “They communicate with each other, and they increasingly socialize through games -- or because of games, which is something different. I actually relate to friends because of games, the same way other people relate to friends who like cars, or the same sports teams.” Sawyer said that games can even be work -- giving the example that managing his World of Warcraft guild is more like human relations at a company than it is fun. Of course, that's not to say games couldn't be funny. “There’s a ton of games and comedy around and surrounding games. There’s more comedy in the world of game culture than there is in games. Doing comedy is hard, and we haven’t done it that well [in games].” “Most of all," he argued, "We’re seeing the emergence of a culture that revolves around games.” But what does this mean? Sawyer gave the example of walkthroughs being an example of education disseminated through the community, and explained that this kind of education can easily be expanded. “In Project Gotham, you could almost teach a photo class with all the effects they had in it,” he said, and described a team that replicated Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water in Half-Life 2. “You can have architectural students using the engines as visualization tools.” “If you look at games, the learning communities that exist around games are amazing," he expanded. Not just walkthroughs, but teams practicing together to prepare for raid dungeons (in World of Warcraft): “This is sort of the holy grail for training. You’re getting people who take to the game and become the teacher, not just the student. A serious game may not be the end in itself. It’s the surrounding framework.” In conclusion, Sawyer claimed that Gamers are already doing serious games -- and more so than the rest of us," as a result of the effort and work they were putting in to teaching each other about games and forming communities for education. "I implore you to pick up on some of this stuff. All games are serious, and we can do a lot of other things with games than just educate people if we’ll just expand our minds.”