Welcoming Games as THE Educational Medium Michael Zyda zydausc'edu

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Welcoming Games as THE Educational MediumMichael
Zyda zyda_at_usc.edu
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My Background

• USC GamePipe Lab Director - 2005 - present
• Naval Postgraduate School - 1984 - 2005
• Professor of Computer Science
• Directed, NPSNET Research Group - 1986 - 1996
• MOVES Institute - founded directed - 1996 -
  2004
• USC Institute for Creative Technologies - drafted
  original research agenda operating plan - 1999
• Pioneer in computer graphics, virtual reality,
  modeling simulation, serious games.

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My background continued

• National Research Council - 1992 - present
• Behavioral Social Sciences Education
  Commission
• Computer Science Telecommunications Board
• Aeronautics Space Engineering Board
• Naval Studies Board
• Mathematics Its Application Board
• am Permanent National Associate of the National
  Academies

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Americas Army Game

• Americas Army Operations multiple award
  winning online game, October 1999 March 2004.
• Awards including Action Vaults 2002 Debut Game
  of the Year, Surprise of the Year, and
  honorable-mention Multiplayer Game of the Year
  Frictionless Insights Best Business Model
  (Developer) at E3 2002 IGN Editors Choice Award
  for first-person shooters 2002 IGNs Biggest
  Surprise of E3 2002 Gamespys Best PC Action
  Game runner-up 2002 Penny Arcades Best
  Misappropriation of Taxpayer Dollars Ever
  Wargamers Best of Show, first-person/tactical
  shooters 2002 Well-Rounded Entertainments Best
  of E3 2002 DoubleClick's Insight Awards,
  honorable mention, Best Multi-Channel Marketing
  Campaign 2002 Academy of Interactive Arts and
  Sciences, finalist, PC First Person Action Game
  of the Year February 2003 and Computer Gaming
  Worlds Editors Choice January 2003.
• Served as the principal investigator and
  development director of the Americas Army PC
  game funded by the Assistant Secretary of the
  Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. Took
  America's Army from conception to three million
  plus registered players and hence, transformed
  Army recruiting.

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Clip - Americas Army
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So

• After 21 years at the Naval Postgraduate School
  and my experience with Americas Army, I quit on
  my 50th birthday (my present to myself)
• I decided I wanted to create a science of games
  and an educational program to support the
  formation of that science.

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Why a science of games?
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Why a science of games?

• Why should we create a science of games and an
  allied educational program?
• Games are our first high bandwidth, two-way
  communications medium we need to know how to
  deploy that medium for societal good.
• The game industry is not going to do that RD.

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Some inspiration

• Almost immediately after we announced Americas
  Army, that game became the basis and inspiration
  for a number of deployed training systems -
• All future Army computer-based training systems
  will look like games.

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Game Clip - Training
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Wouldnt it be nice if they could be taught
something more societally redeeming?

• After Americas Army had been out for about six
  to nine months, mothers would state my son is
  playing Americas Army five to six hours per day,
  seven days a week. What is going to become of
  him?.
• The usual answer was that the Army now knew their
  sons were twice as likely to consider a career in
  the Army than the non-AA player upon reaching the
  appropriate age.
• When the mothers were asked if their sons knew a
  lot about the US Army, the response was usually
  they know everything about the Army, having
  learned it from the game. Wouldnt it be nice if
  they could be taught something more societally
  redeeming from games?.

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Clip - Medic Training
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Grand Challenge

• In fact, perhaps the grand challenge is, can we
  put all K-12 science and math education into
  highly immersive, highly addictive games such
  that we can replace teachers?
• Provide individually-directed, human state aware,
  measurable learning with games.
• Turn teachers into Tutors instead of the primary
  education delivery system.
• To make this happen, it is clear that creating a
  science of games, a scientific and engineering
  method for building games and understanding and
  analyzing game play has become essential.

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Americas Army

• Americas Army - 8M registered players.
• Some 20,000 years of game play has occurred in
  this game.
• Americas Army cost 22M over 4 years.

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World of Warcraft

• 8M registered players -
• An average player spends some 12 hours per week
  in game holds a subscription for 6 months, some
  288 hours in game.
• 260,869 years of gameplay!
• Cost about 100M to develop.

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Another metric

• 8M players at 288 hours each --
• LAUSD has about 710K students in it, so ten times
  the number of students in LAUSD in WoW - each
  spent some 288 hours in World of Warcraft.
• How much time would an LAUSD student spend in
  math/science in a 180 day school year?
• Say 45 mins math, 45 mins science, for 1.5 hours
  per day for 180 days is 270 hours!
• So our kids are spending as much time in WoW as
  they spend in a whole year of math/science
  education AND they do that in 6 months, not the 9
  months of the school year.

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So

• With respect to our grand challenge of replacing
  teachers with games, we want to build WoW-like
  successful games with WoW budgets so that we can
  compete for mindshare our kids time.
• What do they learn in Americas Army?
• How to become an infantryman then a special
  forces soldier.
• What do they learn in WoW?
• Command control.
• So both are part of the no child left a
  civilian program

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So the cost of math/science games for K-12

• 13 (each year of K-12) x 100M, about 1.3B is
  the ballpark for development
• Operations, maintenance, are extra
• And the RD so we know how to do this
• Cost of Iraq war is pushing 1T for our so-far
  four year adventure, so give us two days of the
  expenditures of that war for development two
  days for operations/maintenance one day for the
  RD.
• So lets call this the Give America Five
  Program.
• Note - in 2006 dollars, it cost 28B to get to
  the moon.

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So what am I doing to make this happen?
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The USC GamePipe Laboratory Mission

• The mission of the GamePipe Laboratory is
  interdisciplinary research, development
  education on technologies design for the future
  of interactive games their application.
• from developing the supporting technologies for
  increasing the complexity innovation in
  produced games,
• to developing serious entertainment games for
  government corporate sponsors.

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Game Development Degree Programs

• BS in Computer Science (Games)
• The goal of the BS degree is to educate students
  capable of engineering next generation games
  immediately upon graduation. Students in this
  program receive a solid grounding in Computer
  Science in addition to the art and design
  required for functioning in the game industry.
• MS in Computer Science (Game Development)
• The goal of the MS degree is to graduate
  professionally educated students capable of
  engineering next generation games and their
  required technologies.
• Degrees started Fall 2006

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Immune Attack

• Funded by National Science Foundation
• Collaborators
• Brown University, Federation of American
  Scientists, USC
• USCs Game Innovation Lab (Cinema)
• USCs GamePipe Lab (Engineering)
• Topic Immunology
• Platform PC
• Target Audience AP biology students

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Fish Quest
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The GamePipe RD Agenda
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Emotion Modeling Display

• The largest RD challenge in the coming years
  with respect to cognition games is that of
  modeling human emotion
• Emotion modeling
• Emotion display
• Emotionally adaptive games

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Show DVD

• DVD of latest student-built games

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The GamePipe Laboratory

• Michael Zyda, Director
• Zyda_at_usc.edu
• http//gamepipe.usc.edu