Could video games be good for your brain?

well just stick a screwdriver in your ear. I mean, I just quoted the song pac Man Fever, which that alone proves that my intelligence has suffered as a result of playing video games. Right after I am done playing a video game, I can't even remember my own name. Right. I have gotten to the point where I will try and make a sandwich and I put the meat on the outside of it. Yeah. I mean sometimes when I'm playing low, I just randomly yell at people outside of

the game for absolutely no reason, in really immature ways. Yeah. The worst is when you're yelling at all the ten or twelve year olds that are in your apartment company. Yeah, yeah, I just I just I just walk outside and I'm like you goat Hugger, shut up right, right. Obviously we're being a little a little silly, mostly because we we've already gotten punchy today. Well, we are echoing some sentiments that probably are fairly widespread in the society that say that,

you know, video games are just stupid. I mean, you might as well be watching Jersey Shore, you might as well be just just completely I mean, it's mindless. It numbs your brain. At worst, it might even make you violent, teaches you to be violent, Yeah, because correlation and causation are the same thing. Best, it just dulls your mind and makes you stupid. Well, here's the thing is there

is there any scientific basis for all this nation. The scientific basis seems to suggest a completely opposite uh conclusion, not that video games are in fact dulling the senses and making us bad at at being able to think or make decisions, but in fact that they can help boost those abilities. So that's what we wanted to concentrate on today was can we use video games to improve our cognitive functions? Can we actually use them not just

to improve basic functions, but to actually learn new stuff? Right, So there's a twofold approach here, can we get smarter via video games? And can we learn better via video games? And uh and spoiler alert, I think the answer to both of those questions is yes. But of course just saying that means nothing. We need to back that up because because science, because science. So what kind of research do we have about this? How about how about the

actual cognitive ability things? Sure? So you know, there have been a lot of studies, actually a lot of study have looked at video games and cognitive function in different and different specific uh perspectives, right, not just overall cognitive function, but sometimes very specific types of cognitive function. Yeah, And I think that's a good method to go about in

in science. So it's not just like you play some Mario and then you take an i Q test, right, They're testing usually how specific cognitive tasks can be changed via video gameplay. Yeah. So there was a study that was published in the Public Library of Science that was partly funded by the Air Force, which obviously yet they want they want to they want to make sure that they have people who are really good at handling lots of things going on at once. So in this case,

they were looking at the ability for people to manage. Uh, well, it's really to see mental flexibility to be able to cognitive flexibility, right, all different kinds of tasks that are happening, and being able to manage multiple ones, all all at

the same time and at a fast pace. Yeah. So in this case, they are looking at things like real time strategy games where you have to manage all the resources that you have while still trying to achieve certain goals whatever the goal of that particular game happens to be and or prevent other people from achieving their goals. Right. So that means that you have to handle lots of different things all at once, and as it turns out, uh, you know, that sort of skill perhaps could translate to

real life skill. That's what they were really interested in seeing. Yeah, they found that games that quote emphasized maintenance and rapid switching between multiple information and action sources were the ones that led to the biggest increase in cognitive flexibility. Right. So that's sort of like having to flip back and forth between lots of different kinds of jobs and pieces of information. Having having to manage all this at once means that you actually train yourself in how to do that.

In general, not just in a video game exactly. So you could have someone who is really adept at this game try and and adapt those skills to a new task, and it was something that was transferable. It's not necessarily

means that. It doesn't necessarily mean that someone's really good at real time strategy game is automatically going to be awesome at this brand new task you give them, but that they can adapt much much more quickly and be able to handle that kind of thing faster than someone who's just doing that without the benefit of increasing those skills.

I can see the Air Forces plan. Mr gamer. Here, we're gonna put you in the cockpit of a stealth bomber, right you were you were so good at Warcraft two that now we're going to make you in charge of this entire group of people. Yeah, that's not quite the way it works, okay. But also there's a lot more than this, right. Studies have shown that that video games can help speed decision making, like accurate decision making. Right.

That's the University of Rochester study you're talking about. It was done with the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a very a very fun department. I'm sure the dpcs. Yeah. So anyway, that this particular study was looking at how video games could help make a person's reaction time shorter and shorter, that they're able to react faster to changing

situations and make quick decisions. And then also see are those decisions still good decisions or are they trigger happy just getting hasty right, the idea being that that you are not reacting without having all the information. That was the prevailing kind of hypothesis was that people who were really good at these games, it wasn't necessarily that they

were making good decisions. They were making decisions, and they were doing it faster than than normal people, but perhaps they were doing so without all the pertinent information they would need to make a good decision. This study ended up looking at a lot of different things, and it suggested that perhaps that's not true. It was actually a meta analysis, meaning that it looked at numerous other studies and drew conclusions based upon the outcomes of those other studies.

And based on those other studies, it looked like the trend was that video game players or v gps as they called them, uh seemed to have a better performance at making fast, accurate decisions than non video game players or in v GPS so and they say it bore out when they looked study after study, like they plotted all the different results and showed that according to that meta analysis, this seems to be a thing that playing these sort of games hones those skills and in fact

allows you to make these decisions faster and with no loss and accuracy. Uh, skills like like pattern recognition for example, that's a big one. And of course you know in the in the case of any sort of military operation, a fast decision could mean the difference between life and death. But you obviously still want to have that accuracy there

because that could also mean the difference between life and death. Okay, so these last couple of things we talked about, we're kind of these minutely focused different aspects of cognition, fast decision making, based on visual cues, and cognitive flexibility. Is there anything sort of more broader and more abstractly measured that video games could affect, Like, how about creativity? That's

pretty abstract, right, So creativity. This is an interesting study of Michigan State University study that looked at creativity in the relationship between that and activities like playing video games, using a computer, using the internet, and cell phone use. And so the study looked at four hundred ninety one twelve year olds across all demographics. I think there were something like of them were girls. Uh. And then they had you know, demographics pulled from different social status as,

different ethnic backgrounds, that kind of thing. And they said that across all demographics, the that playing video games was a great predictor for creativity, that the kids who enjoyed playing video games more also were the ones who were more creative. Uh. Now, I'm really cautious about citing the study for more than that, because this could just be

a correlation, not a causal relationship. It may not be that if you play more video games you become more creative, but rather that creative people are drawn to video games. This is the same sort of thing we have to be cautious about with all those stories about video games and violence. It's not necessarily true that video games promote actual violent behavior. It maybe people who are who tend toward violent behavior are also drawn to video games. You

can't say that one causes the other. Correlation causation are two different things. However, it does bear more study. The idea of are their video games that can promote the sort of creative thinking that could perhaps inspire students who are you know, already interested in exploring creativity. There are certain games we can talk about and some that we will talk about that already do this to some extent.

Like Minecraft is a good one, right. Minecraft is one where people have express creativity through numerous ways because you're telling the story. There isn't already a story in the game. You have to take one up for yourself. Yeah, and you can build whatever you like, digital legos, you could, you con box, you can make it a creative experience where there's no other gameplay element other than the fact that you are building stuff out of you know, digital materials.

Then there's also things like the game Trials. Trials is a game where it's a motorcycle game. You're riding a motorcycle through an obstacle course and your your goal is to complete the course as quickly as possible with as few faults as possible. It's generally the way the game works. And you know, people get bragging, right, so I I beat that level in X amount of time with zero faults. That that's you know, something that gets bragged about. In

the gaming world. But there's also a level design element with many of those trials games, and people have built games that are not even remotely related to motorcycles using the the game building elements in this game where I've seen a pinball game re created where there actually was a little motorcyclist inside a solid like an opaque ball, so you don't see them, But they just used all the the physics of the yeah, the physics and the and the different pieces that the developers put into the

game and reimagined it in some way. So it shows that by creating this outlet for creativity, people sees on it and they make some pretty amazing stuff. So I think, even if there isn't a direct causal relationship between creativity and video game playing, this, uh, this trend of of catering to creativity is really a positive one. Sure, Okay, But but so far we've been talking about some of these these deep, interesting sandbox games let you do whatever

you want. What about something really simple like Super Mario Brothers. Oh, I'm glad you asked. In two thousand thirty, and there was a study conducted and forgive me, folks at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Charity University Hey Medicine, Saint Head vig Kranken House, which examined how video games appear to aug meant brain function in certain regions of the brain, including the regions responsible for spatial orientation, memory formation,

and strategic planning. So what the study particularly did was had a group of adults, So these are not kids, these are adults who would play Super Mario sixty four for thirty minutes every day for two months. I will, I will make sure to reinforce the fact this was a two thirteen study, so they got apparently Nintendo sixty four was big in Germany in twenty thirteen. So they

actually measured brain volume. They used m r I scans, so this is kind of a Over the course of the study, they would have the various participants go and elect to be in an MRI machine and they would have an MRI I performed, a scan performed, and then they would look at the results over the course of the study, and they found that by the end of the study that people started to h get increases in their gray matter, their brains got bigger, yeah, in these

specific regions particularly, and that uh, this seems to show that the activity of the video games was one that promoted this this growth in gray matter because it was it was engaging those parts of the brains of the

people who were participating UM. I would love to read more about the study, to see their control group, to see exactly what their methodology was, to make sure that they were trying to UM to eliminate any other possible factors that could have also resulted in an increase in gray matter, and maybe see if there are any other

studies that have attempted to replicate these results. But it is really interesting this idea that perhaps because you're exercising parts of your brain that you might not otherwise engage, depending upon what your day to day activities are, could in fact make you, at least on some level smarter, or at least make your brain function more effectively and more better, more better. Yeah, so there you go. That's

really cool. But everything we've talked about so far has sort of been aimed at the aptitude of the brain, if that makes any sense. It's more kind of along the lines of your i Q and what your brain can naturally do at its base level. But I'm interested in talking about video games in the context of education and learning, not not just not just increasing our our abilities but actually imparting knowledge. But like we were talking about at the top of the show, what's that other

half about? Yeah, can't can they make us learn more better? I think they can make us learn more better. There's certainly lots of games out there that have catered to this, and it's not a new phenomenon at all. I mean, I remember when I was going to school, when I was in elementary school, and and personal computers were brand new. Um, the Apple too was considered to be an amazing device that was going to change our future, and in many ways it did just that. But there were games that

were coming out. There were for all sorts of of things. There were you know, just the time wasters or whatever, the type of stuff that people have dismissed in the past, that kind of thing. But then there were also games that, yeah, well that you're talking about presophisticated game by that point, actually, and Mind Sweeper also engages your mental abilities because you

have to figure out the logic. But there were other games that were specifically geared towards creating an educational experience. And the one that I have to mention because I'm sure, well I'm fairly sure both of you have experienced this at some point. Oregon Trail. All right, So, Oregon Trail was brand new when I when I was in elementary school. I mean that was I remember playing technology. Yeah, I

remember playing Oregon Trail the beta. No. Um, So, anyone who hasn't played Oregon Trail, I'm sure there are versions online that you can play right now. I know there have to be lots supports of it. Uh And of course I know that they've they've updated it multiple times throughout the years too. Yeah, Like I played Oregon Trail to which started to incorporate full motion video Wow, I'm

sorry the days of full motion video games. Well, Oregon Trail, obviously, it tells the story of maybe not obviously to paying on where you're from, tells the story of the United States during the the Great Expansion West, when pioneers were forging new territory for anyone who wasn't a Native American, Uh,

to and there exactly. Yeah, I mean the there's a dark side to this story that is not explored in Oregon Trail, but they but you could get eaten by a bear, certainly or you know, they their depiction, at least the original original Oregon Trail, their depiction of Native Americans was pretty simplistic and certainly not very uh so culturally Yeah, not culturally sensitive at all, but it also would you know, you had consequences and sometimes like if

you wanted to keep pushing really hard as opposed to letting your your pioneers rest occasionally, then you could see pretty nasty consequences, like part of your party ends up dying off in the process. They're there due to illness or injury or both. Usually dysenterry. Dysenterry was a big one. Yeah, dysenterry was a big one. I put tuberculosis in the notes, but then I don't think that necessarily hit Dysenterry was

the one that you would usually run into. I also remember playing an online port version where it was almost guaranteed that you were going to break a bone or someone was going to break a bone in the process and possibly be need to let you don't have to leave them behind or something. I think there was a

lot of snake bite in the game. You could get snake bite, so the interesting of the linguistics were not necessarily it was it was certainly there to kind of give you a historical view of the challenges that pioneers faced during this whole process. Certainly, and lots of other games, especially for um that time. I'm sure. I mean, I'm just out of the out of the children's educational gaming culture at this particular moment. But I mean, but I played.

I played the heck out of some Carmen San Diego. So yeah, learned a lot of geography from Karmen Sandy. I forgot a lot of geography immediately after playing Carmen's. Well, it's also problematic because, depending upon when you played at geography has changed since then. Yeah, there are countries that are no longer countries since when I played is in the USSR? What is she doing in East Germany? Yeah? So, But there were also games obviously that promoted things like

learning math skills, learning spelling, typing. Remember at school I played a lot of like number crunchers or something like that. But skipping ahead, I mean, besides those basic skills type games that we've seen, there's some that are aiming at even more sophisticated type of of topics. Topics. One that I wanted to focus on is games that teach coding like programming languages. Oh yeah, and there are a bunch that are pretty exciting that are being developed now. But

but this is not a new concept at all. There was one called Logo that was created in the nine seventies at M I t uh. It's actually a programming language unto itself for like a family of languages, I guess, because there's a few different versions. Um, But it's it's designed to engage learners with graphical interfaces too, to show how rewarding and fun programming can be. Um. If you've ever seen like a little turtle being moved around a screen to draw pictures, that that is logo. M that's

pretty cool. The example I wanted to talk about was this thing I found on the internet, which I thought was so cool, and it's kind of modest. I think it was just sort of a little demonstration, like they didn't make a huge thing out of it. But it's called code Spells, which was an experiment by the u C.

San Diego Jacob School of Engineering. And I love the idea of it because the basic concept is it's it's a game for beginning programmers, and you play a little wizard who has to do magic spells, but you write the spells in code in Java, right yeah, yeah, and you're helping out these little gnomes and when you cast a spell, it has little fire effects on the screen

and gefty stuff like that. It's really cute. Yeah, And so beyond just this game itself, like the very the concept behind it, the idea of writing magic spells in code is great because that's actually what you do when you write computer code, is you're doing magic. You're bending physics to your will. You know, you get to say

what happens now, Yeah, you're bending the spoon totally. And I just thought that, wow, I mean, what a great way to teach people, to encourage people about the power that they can have by writing code, and also to to give them a skill in a game that translates to a skill in a real world. You know, there are so many ways that you can play a game.

Let's say, you know, back in the day when I was in high school, you'd see your friends just playing every request and they're sitting there leveling up by hacking snakes to death in the forest for a long time and their quote leveling up, but they're not actually like learning anything new they're they're just in a virtual way becoming more powerful. If you're talking about a game where you're like playing as a wizard and you're learning to

develop your coding skills to become more powerful. Power in the games sort of scales to a real world power that you can use to get a career. And you you do have those those small and continual achievements or trophies or you know, just in game rewards saying like, good job, dude, you did that thing right, Let's do another thing. You get that reinforcement over and over again. There are other people who have tried to do this

in more this generation of games. I know there was a whole Kickstarter to bacle about the proposed game Code Hero.

I can actually talk about that a little bit. So this was a game that was supposed to teach uh here in the United States kindergarten through twelfth aid students how to code in a length and unity that was going to be the learning language, the language specifically that this would be geared towards, and it had I think a hundred thousand dollar goal on Kickstarter ended up raising a hundred seventy thousand dollars, So it was overfunded, um and then as a result the the the campaign, the

person running the campaign said that, all right, what we're also going to do is include an MMO element to this game, so it's not just gonna be a standalone single player game, and we're also going to create a documentary about the crowdfunding process. And uh, as is sometimes the case with these kind of projects, it perhaps was a little more ambitious than what they had anticipated, and

that the the goals outstripped the actual funds. I think a lot of people underestimate how much money it takes to develop something like this, particularly if things don't go well and you have to go back and try and rework it. I mean, and and plenty of people who have you know, huge corporations or you know, personal donations funding their games, not kickstarter donations, but like actual facts, rich people just going like here have all the money.

Also kind of squawn. I mean, this is not the first game that's never that's that's become vaporware, right there. There are tons of titles out there that were abandoned for one reason or another. Now, not that this game has necessarily been abandoned, but it certainly hasn't for a minute, are they still working on they as of I think right now that their websites are backup there. They had gone black or gone to poker sites, I think for

for a moment, but they're back now. And so yeah, the right now they're saying that that a full beta is going to be out in the fall um which another year after yet another delay. They had originally said that it was going to be out by packs two thousand twelve, then September one, two thousand thirteen, and now I think maybe September ish, yeah, two thousand fourteen. So it keeps slipping. It's has not to suggest that people behind Code Hero aren't genuine in their concerned to make

this game. We're not trying to them, No, it's it's it's just one of those things some people are but but maybe we don't know enough about it to shame them. Part of it is, Part of it is that you have. Part of it is that crowdfunding, particularly the kickstarter model, UH, in order to encourage people to fund your projects, you are to promise rewards for backing at certain levels. So you've got a lot of people who feel that they

did not get the thing that they paid for. Never mind that crowdfunding is all about funding projects you want to see succeed. It's not about buying something you're receiving for your donation. Right, So you know there are there are projects that don't pan out, and that's one of the things you have to include on your your campaign is what are the risks? Because there are and it's stories like this that require and then make Kickstarter require

you to list what the risks are. Um So it may be that we eventually see code Hero come out. I certainly hope we do, but it has not been a smooth process for that that particular project. Another one we could talk about is Minecraft, which we mentioned before,

but there's there's lots of stuff you can do in it. Yeah, what I wanted to talk about is the fact that okay, so you could have say, a a game like Code Spells or something where it has a very kind of narrow focus, but it allows you to do a lot and it's really cool. It teaches you how to use a programming language. Minecraft, on the other hand, is more like a tool that you could use to create environments to teach all kinds of things, not just programming, I mean,

not just not just working within a programming language. In fact, that's not even the case. It's actually learning how to program like physical circuits, how to create hardware software. For people who haven't played Minecraft, when you should probably try to explain basically, all right, So, yeah, it's a it's an open world sandbox style game where you have all these different types of environments and uh and things that you can mine in the game, different little elements, and

each element will have different effects depending on what sure. Yeah, And and one of those things in there is called redstone, and red stone you can mine and you get these little piles of redstone powder, and you can use those to create lines that are essentially like a wires in a circuit. And then using these redstone torches, which are essentially power sources, you can put power through that that line of red stones. Yeah, and so you can actually

build working circuits. They also have switches, they have um a little relays that can act like diodes and other basic elements like essentially like transistors. So you can build a working macro circuit out of this stuff. And people people have I mean once you could people did. Yeah. I couldn't believe this when I saw it, But I saw a YouTube video of somebody who built a working

sixteen bit computer inside Minecraft. So in this game, you build all these things out of these little blocks, and someone had put together all the blocks to physically make a computer in a virtual environment, and then you can get super meta with it. Right, Yeah, yeah, there's someone who built a computer in Minecraft that you can use to play an approximation of Minecraft. Um, so they they

oh god, I'm trying to phrase this. So they physically, within the virtual environment built a computer that will run the program, not not the full program. I mean, okay, yeah, it lets you create and destroy blocks, and and uh move this little icon in four different directions, and uh you can switch between movement and block manipulation with with a switch, and and okay, you're you're limited in your little playing field to just, um, sixty four tiles on

a little eight by eight grid. So so it's not I mean, this is not high deaf. But but it's a platform game. Someone created a game that you can play. I mean, yeah, this just I'll just remind you that this is another example of that philosophical argument of if we're able to build a realistic simulation of a universe, we cannot, in fact be certain that we are not inhabitants of a realistic simulation of a universe facts. The fact that it almost guarantees that we are, so that

which we view is reality is more likely someone's Minecraft creation. Yes, someone playing. That's bottom line. Take away the version of eight bit. If you learn nothing else in this podcast, you should learn that we're all in a giant game of Minecraft. People have actually used Minecraft, like in classrooms, haven't. There's actually tons of examples of Minecraft, like I've seen it from everything from you know there. There are communities

out there. They're dedicated to building Minecraft versions of real world places, So like the Shakespeare's Globe Theater is a

great example. So let's say that you are a student in Atlanta, Georgia who has a little chance of going on a class field trip to London to see the Globe Theater anytime in the in the near future, you might be able to see a virtual representation and get a better idea of what the actual structure looks like and how plays that were played out on this structure, what they would have appeared to have been like for an audience, which is I think is a valuable experience

as you're trying to teach something like the works of Shakespeare to a class, you know, it helps them to visualize what it was really like to have been an audience member, because a lot of us forget when we're studying it in a class that this is really a performance art, not something that you just read as as a scholarly kind of work of art. So, but that's

just one example. I've seen examples of teachers using Minecraft to do everything from teaching city planning, like how do you how do you lay out the city so that it's efficient and that everything works properly share like like sim City but with less Godzilla? Yeah, yeah, and and like what what is what are the what are the

necessary components? Or just teaching a class how to collaborate and cooperate with one another, where you throw them into this virtual world and you give them the basic tools they need, or you tell them how to make the basic tools they need in order to create a structure so that they can survive overnight, and you turn those monsters on where you're like, look, teamwork if you yeah, if your team doesn't doesn't perform, you're gonna get blown

up by a creeper. Or eaten by a zombie. I heard that one teacher was using that kind of team building in a foreign language class to help teach kids how to I mean, like the rule was, you can play Minecraft in class, guys, but you need to speak this foreign language while you're doing it, which again that promoted I've seen that being used where English was the language that they had to speak and they could only speak in English, but they were allowed to play Minecraft

as long as they only spoke in English, which promoted them developing these skills. So in that case, you know, it wasn't so much the game it's health that was the the agent of education, but rather it was it

was the enabler. Okay, I want to transition to something that I think is an even cooler potential for video games to teach us things, which is helping us get an intuitive grasp for things that we cannot get an intuitive grasp in the real world, intuitive grasp for counterintuitive concepts exactly, or things that that are maybe on a scale that's impossible for us to realize in our in

our personal lives. So if you want to teach somebody carpentry, you can give them an intuitive sense of carpentry in in the real world and you know, just day to day life. What if you want to teach somebody about quantum mechanics, Well, I have a question for you. Do they have a cat? Because if they have a cat and a box, there are a lot of reasons quantum mechanics is really difficult for us to understand. There are a lot of different aspects of quantum mechanics that go

completely against what we experience on the classic world. Yeah, so matter at the quantum level does not behave like matter on the scale that we're familiar with. It doesn't behave like baseballs and rocks and trees. You can have mean depending on your three world of baseballs and rocks and trees. Uh, and I throw baseballs at the trees. Yeah, unless you've got some really wiggy baseballs. Um stuff happening at the quantum level is is pretty much guaranteed to

be completely different. Right. Okay, So just one example would be like the idea of superposition. Right. Essentially, a quantum particle can inhabit all states, all potential states simultaneously until observed, in which case it then collapses into a single state, which is the one that you observed again depending on your inter but yeah, this is this is one popular way of looking at at physical reality, and it's also

a really popular way to give yourself a headache. I mean, like like trying to think about that is I mean, like I understand the concept, but picturing it is a little bit physically impossible, right, because again, our stuff doesn't do that, Like we don't have macro objects that are inhabiting multiple opposite states simultaneously. But you know what can do that? Virtual objects and lad brings us back to Minecraft, well Minecraft in one example, but it could go beyond Minecraft.

So what what is What did Google's Quantum AI lab do with this concept? They created a mod for Minecraft, which is no unusual. The PC version of Minecraft has many different mods that are based on the various builds, so you can go out there and find mods that are that that alter the world's physics dramatically, or create new textures or whatever. I mean pretty much anything you can think of, someone has probably made a mod for

it for Minecraft. In this case, what Google did was they created a quantum mechanics mod called que Craft, which would introduce these quantum effects that we're talking about, including superposition but also entanglement, also that idea of once you observe an object, or you observe something on the quantum level, you affect it and thus it ends up making a more concretes the wrong word, but but settling into a

specific state. So uh, it ends up in letting you kind of encounter this world that to us would be very alien because it is so different from the world of the classic physics that were familiar with on the day to day basis. But you could actually start to encounter these things that perhaps would be almost impossible for you to really imagine if all you had was a textbook. You know, if you're just reading text that's saying, in the quantum world, this thing can inhabit to states simultaneously.

But since you can't see that on the classical world, that may be difficult for you to really get on a on an actual comprehension level. This is to give you that experience of some of the elements of the quantum world and help you understand the better, or to make that less alien to you. However, I should say quecraft does not incorporate all the elements of quantum mechanics. No, certainly not and it's also when I observed it, I was I thought it was really really cool. But it

also it's a very basic kind of interpretation. It's more just kind of like to help you say, like, Okay, here's what this concept is to uh. In the video that I wrote for this episode, I imagined that, Wow, I wonder how far you could go with something like this. Could you could you create like a like a quantum mechanics platform or action game where you're playing as a photon and you're you're playing as an electron hopping between different energy levels of an atom and uh, and you're

in a world that's dominated by quantum effects. I don't know if that's possible, but if it is, that want that game right now. I think that could be so cool and so counterintuitive and fun and weird. You're just hoping it's a little bit like Portal to Me, except just turned up to well, not eleven, but like superimposed eleven.

You would have to you would have to be really lucky that the game studio wouldn't meddle about with that so much that they end up either dumbing down the quantum effects or or turning it too much into a gaming element. And I mean there's a balance you have to make, right, you want the game to be fun.

Because the game is not fun to play, no one's gonna play it, and thus no one learns anything anyway, Well exactly, I mean, I think one of the major appeals of games for learning is that it motivates you to learn. Right. Well, besides the world of the very very small, the quantum world, games could also let us get take a look at things that in our our experience take course over so much time that there's no way for a person to observe it in a lifetime, right,

Like the idea of evolution. You you have this this theory of evolution which explains how creatures have evolved over time, but we can't actually see it within the span of a lifetime, at least not on a macro organisms. No. No, I mean you can observe it in bacteria so well, or you know, you can create a whole bunch of

generations of fruit flies. But right, but you're not. But even then, you're seeing pretty small variations and mutations, right, so you can you can see that ecole I have come to metabolize a different kind of sugar or something like that. Or that bacteria are you know, no longer

affected by antibiotics. Yeah, sure, Yeah, you could see these sort of uh kind of genetic uman advantages, taking more of a precedence in a population, but actually seeing an an organism evolve on a way that's easy for you to observe. That takes so much time. We're talking millions, millions. Yeah, that it's not practical, but a video game could perhaps do that. Yeah. There's a game that I've actually never played, but I saw advertised and maybe y'all if you have

played it, you can comment a little bit. It's a game called Spore. I have not played it. I haven't played it either, but I do know about this game. The idea being that you could create essentially a virtual organism, and you could have this virtual organism evolve over time and even evolved by kind of cross breeding it with other people's virtual organisms, so that you are kind of

guiding the evolutionary path of this creature. And the original um the original pitch of this was perhaps grandiose, is is being unfair, but it was very ambitious, and from most accounts that I have read, the eventual game did not quite live up to those ambitious goals. It reminded me a lot of how people were um excited about the game Fable before it came out, because I had it was supposed to have this very rich kind of gameplay element that would allow you to guide to really

make your own choices, right. Spore was kind of similar to that, except on a micro organism level, where you're you're evolving up into more and more advanced organisms. But from what I have read, it was somewhat of a failure in that, at least according to a lot of

the critics that I follow. Cool. Well, maybe we don't need to talk about that game specifically, but I liked the idea behind it, that that it's a game where evolution is taking place, because a game, a video game, a virtual environment is sort of the perfect place to start to get an intuitive sense of the macro scale

vision of what evolution looks like in biological organisms. So I was imagining, Man, what if you could create like a real time strategy game where instead of like I'm the Red team and I'm trying to destroy the Blue team's space, I am this particular gene pool and you're trying to evolve your set of organisms within your gene pool to compete with the other organisms for the same resources. I think that would be fascinating. I think the end level there is becoming a t rex. So, so in

your game, are the way that you guide evolution? How would you go about that? I don't know yet. Maybe it would be I guess what would seem obvious is that if if the other players and the environment are your your natural selection forces, maybe you would have the ability to cause certain mutations. So if mutation is the random element in biological evolution in this game, maybe you'd make that non random. So you could say, I want

to try to mutate this gene in this way. Interesting. See, my approach would be the opposite, where I would want the ability to control the environment and try and introduce environmental factors that I think would promote certain mutations from being uh from either mutations from either be expressed or promote other mutations to be expressed more frequently. Sure, well,

I'm sure you could do it both ways. But I mean, wouldn't that be you know, I remember when I was younger, I saw people playing Civilization, where you go from you know, very very primitive to very technologically advanced to the point where you are developing future technology seven future technology because they've run out of real ones for you to talk about. Yeah, wouldn't it be so cool to actually be, you know,

owning a species. This is my player. I'm trying to push their descendants far and make them win the game. But you're going from say, a microbe, to some kind of some kind of fungus or something, you know, not a fungus, but all the way up the biota scale until you you have macro organisms with legs and trunks and teeth and or whatever it is they happen to have, maybe maybe just huge scorpions. Maybe a virtual computer they can play Minecraft. There you go, that's the ultimate goal

of any games anyway. I just thought that'd be so interesting and that would give you a kind of perspective on evolution that you can't normally get. I've gotten this kind of perspective just from watching videos of adaptive landscapes. Have you ever heard of these? Yeah, they're sort of computer simulations that will help you. You can have little objects within them that are representing different organisms within within a gene pool, and the computer simulates how they would

respond to different environmental pressures and you. You just watch them behave over which ones are going to wipe them out? That kind of thing. You know, we talked about using games like Minecraft to learn to work together. There's some great examples of how uh the and they're hilarious. They're not necessarily to teach you anything, although they are sometimes built as a social experiment. But how working together it could sometimes be impossible. And I'm talking about Twitch plays Pokemon.

So the concept year was that you have some people who created a a Pokemon game, and they essentially coded it so that people could put in commands for the game within a chat room in a twitch dot tv live stream, so you can watch the game being played live by the audience. That's that's there. So you type in your commands and the commands get translated into in game commands, and you're you know, you're just playing a Pokemon game. So you're I gotta catch them all. I

want to understand. You gotta get all the pokemons. And then you put those pokemons up against other people's pokemons. Is it not pokemons? I'm being big purposefully. Is it pokemons? No, it's Pokemon. It's not pokemons. But I will continue to say pokemons, So yeah, you collect your pokemonsum. But in this case you've got you've got commands coming from a

growing audience. Like when it first started, you had a group who could conceivably progress through the game in a kind of a d h D but fairly normal way. But as the audience grows, you have more and more

commands coming in. There's a lag of between twenty and forty seconds between when you type something in and when it gets translated into the game, meaning that you see something happened on the screen, you're typing in the next thing to happen, But between the time when you saw it and the time you're typing, stuff has already continued to happen in the game. There's there's almost no way for you to get it to do exactly what you

wanted it to do. It does, however, mean you've affected the game in some other way that you had not perhaps intended. This This reminds me of the board game Robo Rally. If you guys have ever had not played that, Oh, it's it's it's it's so frustrating, it's wonderful. You have this little robot that you're trying to control, and you can give it. You have to put down a bunch of different instructions for it, all at the same time, and then it plays out those instructions and it's like

the worst game of chess that you've ever played. So instead of it doing all of your instructions and sequence, it goes from player to player and builds it that way. It'll do all of your instructions in sequence, but the other players will have meanwhile been moving around the board mucking things about, so by the time your instructions play out, anything can happen. I'm sorry, that was a big tang. No, it's fine. Well, the only other thing I play it

or give it to your enemies. The only thing I have to say about play it with your enemies, which plays Pokemon, is that the the community that has grown up around this has created a mythology for this game where there's this one for example, there's this one object in the game that has a purpose, but once you use it, it's that's it. It's useless. You still have it, but you can't do anything else with it some kind

of key or something sort of. So what happens is that whenever anyone was there was this one case where he kept on the character Red kept on opening up his inventory and looking at this one thing over and over and over again, because that's just the way that the commands were coming in, and it was happening so frequently that people started to joke he was actually consulting an oracle that was that took the form of this object, and then they essentially deified this object. So now this

is like the the overarching god of that game. I can't remember. I don't play the pokemons. It's some sort of helix thing, think of a bob So anyway, Um, they also have named certain Pokemon after various uh characters that are theological. Um. So like they they've created a whole kind of mythology and religion based upon the activities that happened within this game. And it's very much tongue in cheek, but it's also kind of interesting to see.

Like I said, it is a social experiment. In this case, we're again we're learning more about people than the people within it are learning any other like valuable skill or or or any other kind of knowledge. Um. There was also a paper that was a Stanford research paper published about the social interaction of massively multiplayer online games. Yeah, this also seemed to find in general that perhaps players were not as connected by the multiplayer element as we

might assume. Well, the whole concept behind something like World of Warcraft was that people are playing characters within a world, and that, you know, if you're going to like the the the purest of experiences, based upon the way it's marketed, you are playing a character. You you are inhabiting the role of a character within this virtual world. So you

are a virtual a virtual member of this world. Right, And rather than being forced to interact only with computer response characters or or non player characters the way that you would on a single player game, you have the enrichment experience of being able to interact with uh, goat huggers all over the world. It's not necessarily they're not all Leroy Jenkins, but uh at any rate, the idea was that, uh, you could actually have a role play experience.

Anyone who has ever gone on any of these things knows immediately that role playing is almost always highly discouraged on except on specific servers. And if you go to one of those servers, I think the main reaction for most people, not all, but most is y'all this is a goofy game. I cannot believe the way people are walking around in character and doing this kind of stuff. Um, it's very very much true of any sort of role

playing game though. I mean, if you've ever played any kind of pencil and paper role playing game or gone out to a live action role playing game, there are very different types of players. There are players. There are players who talk about their characters completely in the third person as a way of saying, like they're playing a game, they're just going through statistics, essentially saying, all right, statistically speaking, my character is more likely to defeat that enemy monster

than the enemy monster is to defeat me. Therefore, I'm going to engage in combat. It's this very kind of high level, detached approach. Then they're the other games where people are are trying to inhabit their character, they're trying to are doing a they're incorporating a storytelling element in addition to the physical game play. There's some theatricality there. It may not be physical, it may all be in description, and they could be throwing little packets of bird seat

at each other. So there's there's no I mean, I've played both types of games. And I enjoy both, and both of them have valid places. But it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the Stanford research paper found that there weren't these really super deep social interactions

going on within this game. You had people who had grouped together essentially in order to further the goals of their own characters, possibly to further the goals of whatever guild they were in, or whatever group they were in, or or possibly well I'm not speaking to the paper, but um, but certainly I know a lot of people who use that kind of game as almost a chat room. They're like, well, let's go kill a dragon, but also how are your kids doing? But see, those are the

social interactions that standard. The Stanford paper was really interested in seeing, like, are there these thing is going on? And while there are, there is some of that, it's not the most prevalent of So it was one of those deals were we're talking about, uh, you know, the world of social gaming, the world of online gaming turns out not to be so social after all. Uh, And then I guess we can talk about using games to actually, you know, do science. Yeah, that's the weirdest part. So

we have games improving your cognitive capabilities. We have games teaching you stuff, we have games showing that we're not necessarily learning how to work together, and you can maybe use games to do science. So there was a two thousand ten paper in Nature that explored whether an online gaming paradigm could be used to help solve technically difficult problems in science. And specifically what they looked into was

predicting protein structures with a game called fold it. Yeah, because protein folding is is this very complex, very unknown to us branch of genetic expression, and and the problems involved there are not easily solved by computers because they involved just too many variables to really get through it. It kind of helps to have a human elements sitting

there and puzzling it together. Yeah. The authors of the paper, they ended up saying that integrating in the sort of human problem solving method with traditional computer based algorithmic problem solving could actually be a big boost in in certain types of problem solving. If you can create a game that harnesses human brain power and creativity, we could actually solve some problems that computers alone can't solve. Oh yeah, and you know, and that idea is just so beautiful.

You know, rather than just like crushing candy or whatever

the kids are doing these days. Right, solving science sounds great? Right, Yeah, I mean this is not a huge surprise to me, mainly because I've also followed in the artificial intelligence world the the the progression of not just computers that are good enough to beat chess masters at chess, but this combination, this rising combination of computer human players where it's a human and computer with it's a human playing with computer assistance,

and uh there are several tournaments they use this approach. And part of the reason is because humans are really good at coming up with things that are not necessarily a mathematically logical approach but are still effective. That there are very creative approaches to problem solving that computers are not good at. So a human player might be really good at fainting on you know, fainting as an f ei n t I n g uh, fainting another player

so that they are drinking. Yeah, they're drawn out, not not not like oh my stars, uh no, but drawing out another player so that you can then uh act upon a vulnerability that has been opened up. So same sort of things you mean, killed the player, well not in chess. You don't you put them in checkmate. It's not that violent. I mean, you kill all the other pieces, but the king you just put in checkmate? What kind of chest do you play? Play it different? I don't

play Russian roulette chess. I don't know. You guys played from way higher stakes than I do. But at any rate, it's it's not just trying to extrapolate this to online first person shooters. Okay, well, fair enough, but the point being that, you know, using that human element, that ingenuity, that creative approach to a problem that computers are not very good at simulating, um could really make this sort of thing effective. So it's not just that we're again

it's not the player necessarily who's learning something new. We are learning something new because of the players interactions with this game. So there are a lot of different, very subtle variations on learning and video games. It's not necessarily

player game relationships. Sometimes it's it's outside of that. It's a more meta approach, but still a really cool one, and I hope that we get to see more applications of this sort of thing where you match a person's sort of unpredictable creative approach to problem solving and a computer's ability to crunch really hard numbers very quickly. Yeah, maybe a really neat thing to see. Continue absolutely before you go into the outro, because I feel like the

outro is pending. I just want to say, rob A Rally is not a terrible game. I just hate it. I have never played it, so now I'm I'm curious, and also I kind of want to avoid it like it's It's almost one of those things that I would rather have it occupy a certain place in my brain than to either confirm or deny it. I don't want that quantum state to break down into either I love this game or I hate this game. A lot of

people love it. I'm just very impatient. I can understand that. I, you know what, I actually do get very frustrated in game playing as well, So it probably be the kind of game that would drive me bonkers pretty quick. If you're the kind of person who's ever someone else's controller, back when controllers had plugs or ever, I don't know, flipped a table that had a full game on it. I'm not naming names, but someone sitting at this table has done that. It's me game of Monopoly too, I mean,

there are a lot of pieces on that board. I am not proud of it, but I did do it. I have to own up, all right. So anyway, that wraps up this discussion about video games and learning. I think we all learned something today. I think you learned a little more about me, for example, what I think I learned the most? All right, that's fair. Well, guys, if you have any suggestions for future topics on this

Future Looking podcast, let us know. Let drop us a line on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google Plus, or handle it. All three is f W Thinking. We are eager to hear from you, and we look forward to talking to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot Com m HM, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,