Video Games and the Future of Interactive Entertainment

Until we are able to create some sort of way to comment on the weekly talks, i thought i would blog the talk summary to offer a place to anchor conversations around the featured dialogue.

This week on Integral Life:

Video Games and the Future of Interactive Entertainment. Part 1. Trojan Horses.

Ken and Moses discuss the artistic, educational, and transformational potential within the medium of video games, and how they can act as "trojan horses" of human development....

Who: Moses Silbiger is an Integral student and practitioner, pursuing an Integral Methodological Pluralism (IMP) approach to video game design. The idea came out from a strong intuitive insight he had while reading Wilber’s Integral Spirituality, when he realized that entertainment, especially video games, could also be a very powerful vehicle to promote transformation through Wilber’s concept of the Conveyor Belt of Growth.

Summary: From the monochromatic minimalism of Atari's iconic game Pong, to the rotund gluttony of the pill-popping Pac Man, to the world's most famous mustache festooned beneath Super Mario's pepperoni-sniffing proboscis, all the way to the adrenaline-soaked frag-fest of today's grizzled Halo warriors—video games have come a very long way in the past thirty years, redefining entertainment for an entire generation.

It is therefore surprising that, almost a full decade into the 21st century, video games continue to be fairly marginalized in American culture, often perceived as a frivolous distraction at best, a menace to society at worst. In many people's eyes, video games are still geared primarily to hormonal, pimple-faced, teenage boys needing an outlet for their pent-up testosterone. However, the facts seem to tell an entirely different story—while the acne demographic continues to be a major force in the gaming industry, recent surveys have offered some fascinating insights into just how deeply video games permeate our contemporary culture. As it turns out, 65% of American households play video games, on either computers or video game consoles such as the Xbox 360. The average gamer is somewhere between 30 and 35 years old, and has been playing for somewhere around thirteen years. 40% of gamers are female, and an astonishing 26% of gamers are over the age of 50. Finally, the growth of video game sales are rapidly beginning to outpace both music and movie industries, and are expected to more than double the revenues from both industries combined by the year 2012, with nine games currently being purchased every second of every day. Following these trends to their logical conclusions, it seems clear that the future of entertainment much more closely resembles Spore, Bioshock, and Grand Theft Auto than it does Jurassic Park, Wall-E, or The Lord of the Rings.

But what new forms will video games take in the future? We have already witnessed the explosive rise of several dozen video game sub-genres, including classic platformers, first-person shooters, military strategy games, epic role-playing games, massively-multiplayer online games, true-to-life flight simulators, open-world life simulators, and many, many more (for a comprehensive list of most known video game subgenres, be sure to check out the accompanying poster, created by Moses, at the end of this summary.) In many ways the video game industry is fueled by innovation, with a constant pressure to outperform last year’s offerings in new and exciting ways—growing from simple pixels, sprites, and 8-bit soundtracks, to a digital symphony of CGI, 3D art, spatial architecture, music, sound effects, acting, physics, artificial intelligence, and interactivity.

As video game technology becomes ever more complex and sophisticated, so does the art of storytelling itself, with new plot devices, narrative structures, and methods of character development being fervently explored by game producers. And while much debate exists within the humanities as to the legitimacy of video games as a narrative medium, or even as bona fide art form, it’s hard to overlook the striking similarity between these discussions and the way cinema was received in the beginning of the 20th century.

Alongside these newly emerging artistic visions, video games also offer enormous potential as educational tools, with a large body of research demonstrating how proficient interactive learning truly is, for kids, teens, and grown-ups alike.  Cognitive development, visuomotor skills, analytical and problem solving skills, and even attention spans have all been shown to be notably enhanced in gamers, causing many to consider gaming as a central pillar in educational reformation.  Meanwhile, certain games are prototyping radically new ways of learning how to play music instruments, to varying degrees of efficacy: while Guitar Hero only currently offers a loose approximation of playing an actual guitar, it still implicitly trains the gamer with many fundamental basics of music theory. And playing with the plastic drums that come with Rock Band effectively teaches rhythm, syncopation, left hand/right hand differentiation, and pretty much everything else you need to actually sit behind a drum kit.

Add to these artistic and educational implications such new innovations as biofeedback, binaural beats, and Wii-style kinesthetic monitoring, and we begin to see a new role for video games in our lives—as a transformative tool capable of supporting state training and psychological development.  As one avid gamer comments, imagine gazing at your opponent through the scope of your sniper rifle, and the only way to stabilize your shot is to actually slow down your real-life heart rate. Or perhaps an online fantasy role-playing games with different "realms" that represent different developmental worldviews, with different value systems actually coded into the gameplay, covertly teaching the player how to interact in a multi-perspectival world.

In this way, games can act as "trojan horses" to deliver sophisticated perspectives, messages, and meanings to the player, without ever knowing he or she is actually learning something worthwhile. As such, video games are rapidly closing the gap between education, recreation, and human development, representing an unparalleled new medium of “enlighten-edu-tainment,” with extraordinary implications for the near and not-so-near future.

For more on this fascinating topic, be sure to check out the following resources, created by Moses Silbiger:

Press Play to Grow! (43-page MS Word document)

From the abstract: "Most of us have played a video game at least once in our lives, or at least watched somebody else play, often a close one. Can you remember what you felt when you played a video game for the first time, or watched another player deeply engaged in one? I invite you now to engage in a brief Phenomenological exploration. Try to access how you were feeling, what were your emotions about it? … Who were you at that moment? Can you identify what “self” was playing, or observing somebody else deeply immersed in the game? What were your thoughts about it? Was there something “magical” or “different” about that? Just pause a little moment and close your eyes to really access and embody that memory…"

Press Play to Grow! (jpg poster)

From the abstract: "In this paper, I explored new and alternative video game designs to promote human development as defined by Integral Psychology, and how to make these video games to be both conceptually, technically, and economically feasible to be developed...."