How games make kids smarter

Can playing video games make you more productive? Gabe Zichermann shows how games are making kids better problem-solvers, and will make us better at everything from driving to multi-tasking.

I'm 36 years old.

My first experience
with the video game business

was neighbors who were wealthier than us

bringing home an Atari 2600
and playing it.

It was a pretty definitive moment for me.

I also remember going to school,
and on an Apple II,

playing a game called
"Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?"

an awesome game,

which was the first time I played a game
in the school context.

When you ask people about the video game
business and what's significant,

most people think that Atari 2600
is really the nexus,

the catalyst of the video game business.

But I actually think that "Where
in the World is Carmen Sandiego?"

is probably the most important
video game ever made,

principally because it was
the first and the last time

that parents, teachers and kids all agreed
that a video game was awesome.

(Laughter)

Now, that was a long time ago.

In fact, it was 1987.

And it may surprise you to know

that "Where in the World
is Carmen Sandiego?" continues to be

the last substantial giant hit
in the entertainment business,

despite the fact that it was 1987,
which is such an incredibly long time ago,

and I'm only 36, so you can do the math.

Things are completely different today
from what they were.

Just as a simple example,

in 1987, we thought
this guy was kind of crazy.

Then we met this dude,

who has really changed
our perspective on that subject.

(Laughter)

Things have changed.

(Laughter)

Anti-Bush political humor
goes a long way in Western Europe.

(Laughter)

So, between 1987 and now,

I played a lot of this game
called "Civilization,"

which was designed by a guy
named Sid Meier.

In fact, I spent about 8- to 10,000
hours of my life playing "Civilization,"

which is a long time I probably
should have spent studying.

But nonetheless, I managed to turn
this love of video games into a job,

first working on the Game
Developers Conference,

helping to start the first successful
digital distribution company in games,

called Trymedia,

and then now, writing
the Gamification blog.

I'm author of two books
on the subject of gamification,

including the recent "Gamification
by Design," published by O'Reilly.

And I chair the Gamification Summit,

which is an event that brings
all this stuff together.

So in many ways, I am parents' dream

of how somebody can turn a sedentary
lifestyle of playing video games

into an actual career
that pays real money.

So when I get invited
to an event like this,

I'm sure that all of you
expect me to get up here and say,

"Games are awesome for your children."

Right? Because I'm a games guy
and this is how I make my living.

(Applause)

Games will help children.

But instead, I want to ask you
a different question,

which is: Really, who needs games help?

I started this process by thinking
about reading a particular article

in the New York Times recently.

In the article, a neuroscientist
was talking about

how children were presenting themselves
with attention deficit disorder.

Their parents would come in and say,

"My kids can't possibly have ADD,

because they're super good
at focusing on video games,

But when they go to school,
they're really bad."

The neuroscientist was debunking
this idea in the article.

She trotted out researchers
like Dr Christopher Lucas at NYU,

who said games don't teach
the right kind of attention skills

where kids have sustained attention,

where they're not receiving
regular rewards.

And she trotted out experts

like Dr Dimitri Christakis
at the University of Washington,

who said that kids
who play a lot of video games

may find the real world unpalatable
or uninteresting,

as a result of their
sensitization to games.

So I sat there and thought to myself,
I'm scratching my head,

is it that our children have ADD,

or is our world just too freaking slow
for our children to appreciate?

(Applause)

Seriously, consider the picture
you're looking at right now,

like in my era, even my grandfather's era,

sitting down on a Sunday afternoon
to read a good book with a cup of tea --

I just have to say,

I don't think that today's kids
are ever going to do that.

The evidence is found
in the games they play.

Consider the video game
"World of Warcraft."

When I was growing up,

the maximum skill that I was expected
to display in a video game

was simple hand-eye coordination,

a joystick and a firing button.

Today's kids play games
in which they're expected to chat

in text and voice,

operate a character,
follow long- and short-term objectives,

and deal with their parents interrupting
them all the time to talk to them.

(Laughter)

Kids have to have
an extraordinary multitasking skill

to be able to achieve things today.

We never had to have that.

It turns out things like that
actually make you smarter.

Research by Arne May et Al
at the University of Regensburg in Germany

found that when they gave participants --
this was actually done on adults --

a simple task to learn, like juggling,

in 12 weeks,

people who were asked to learn juggling

displayed a marked increase
in gray matter in their brain.

On an MRI, you can see
people get more gray matter

after 12 weeks of learning juggling.

In 2008, they went back
and redid the study

to see why the gray matter increased.

They discovered it was the act of learning

that produced the increased brain matter,

not performance at the activity itself,

which is a very interesting finding.

It also reinforced this idea,
which should go over well here as well,

that multilingual people
outperform monolingual people

on most standardized tests by about 15%.

There's something that happens
in the brain from that kind of activity.

Andrea Kuszewski,
speaking at Harvard, talked about

these five things that people do
to increase their grey matter

and to teach themselves
to increase their fluid intelligence.

"Fluid intelligence" is the intelligence
we use to problem-solve.

It's different from
crystalline intelligence,

it helps us problem-solve.

She identified, from the research,

that there were five things you could do:

seek novelty,

challenge yourself,

think creatively,

do things the hard way

and network.

Think about those five things.

Any of you play video games?

Does it resemble the basic pattern
of a video game to you in any way?

These are five things that recur
in all very successful video games.

It also is connected to a constant
and exponential increase in learning.

Video games fundamentally present
a continuous process of learning to users.

They don't just learn
for a little while and then stop.

They're constantly evolving
and moving forward.

It may, in fact, help us to explain
the Flynn effect, finally.

The "Flynn effect,"
for those of you who don't know,

is the pattern that human intelligence
is actually rising over time.

So if we look at the history of IQ,
people, in fact, are getting smarter.

In the US right now,

average IQ is rising
at .36 points of IQ per year.

What's been very interesting
is that in some countries --

not to call anyone out,
but Denmark and Norway --

in some countries, overall crystalline IQ

has stopped or slowed down or declined.

In other countries, though,

particularly when looking at fluid IQ,
fluid intelligence,

the number is increasing,

and the rate of fluid intelligence
increase is increasing,

starting in the 1990s.

Coincidence? I think not.

(Laughter)

In fact, games are wired to produce
a particular kind of reaction in people.

So we've got this learning brain increase,

multitasking brain increase connection,

and we also have a strong
dopamine loop in the brain.

As games present a challenge,

and you struggle to achieve that challenge
and you overcome it,

dopamine is released in your brain.

And that produces
an intrinsic reinforcement.

In the words of Judy,
that produces an intrinsic reinforcement

that causes you to go back

and keep seeking that activity
over and over again.

So this is really powerful stuff.

I want to introduce you to an educator
who understands this in intricate detail,

named Ananth Pai.

Ananth was a very successful
businessperson

who worked on process reengineering.

When his kids went into school
in White Bear Lake, Minnesota,

a suburb of Minneapolis-Saint Paul,

he saw the education system

and decided he wanted
to do something about it.

So as an adult, he went back
and got a master's in [Education]

and took over a class
at White Bear Lake Elementary School.

Ananth Pai replaced
the standard curriculum

with a video game based curriculum
of his own design,

separating the kids into leaning styles

and giving them Nintendo DS's
and computer games --

everything off the shelf,
nothing custom --

giving them Nintendo DS's
and computer games

that were both individual
and social to play,

that taught them math and language.

Let me tell you what happened.

In the space of 18 weeks,

Mr. Pai's class went
from a below-3rd-grade level

in reading and math

to a mid-4th-grade level
in reading and math.

In 18 weeks of a game-based curriculum.

More importantly,
when you talk to the children,

when they're interviewed on television,
even away from Mr. Pai,

they say two things over and over again,

that help them learn in his class:

learning is fun,

and learning is multiplayer.

Whether they use those exact words or not,

they say learning is fun
and learning is multiplayer.

This is the key to making that experience
really successful for kids.

It's also true, though,
that we need to talk about

the relationship between kids
and violence in games.

Study after study very clearly tells you

that violent games
do not make children violent.

We also must acknowledge, however,

that if you have a child
predisposed to violence,

violent games may help make them
a better violent child.

If they train kids to do other things,
they also will train that,

and we need to accept that,

and we need to start
understanding the connection

between games as a form of training.

We can't blanket-say
that they don't affect kids.

It's not true.

I'd like to call the group of people
who are driving this trend forward

"Generation G."

There are 126 million millennials
in the United States and the EU,

plus younger kids we can't yet count,

that form Generation G.

And the way that Generation G
is different from X, Y,

and all the different generations
that we may belong to,

is that video games
are the primary form of entertainment

that Generation G is consuming.

It is their primary form of entertainment.

This is already starting to have
a tremendous effect on society.

All around us, Generation G's desire
for game-like experiences

is reshaping industries,

from Foursquare, which caused the mobile
social networking ecosystem to start,

to companies like Nike, Coke, Chase,
and also Kozinga,

which owes much of its success to games.

The trend that underlies this whole
pattern is called "gamification."

It's a word that many of you,
I'm sure, have heard.

A simple definition of gamification
is it's the process of using game thinking

and game mechanics

to engage audiences and solve problems.

Part of the reason gamification has become
such an emergent topic right now

is because of Generation G's effect
on culture and society already.

Their expectations are different.

Some examples of gamification
that you may have seen

that are really fascinating to me

are the emergence
of in-dash[board] games in cars.

Today, if you buy a hybrid
or an electric vehicle,

you'll almost certainly see

the product of a hundred million
dollars' worth of tooling

and research and development,

in the form of a Tamagotchi-style game,

in a dashboard designed to make you
a more ecological driver.

Most of the game mechanics
are very simple:

a plant grows as you drive
more ecologically

and withers if you don't,

like those virtual pets Tamagotchi.

This is an example
of gamification at work.

Another really interesting example
is a thing called "speed camera lottery,"

designed by Kevin Richardson,
based in San Francisco, works for MTV.

Awesome guy.

This is the concept
in speed camera lottery:

you know those speeding cameras
that you pass by,

and they take your picture
and send you a ticket?

In many Scandinavian countries,

the ticket you get is actually based
not only on how fast you were going,

but how much money you make:
the more you make, the bigger the ticket.

Kevin reengineered
a speeding camera in Sweden

that instead of just giving tickets

to people who drive over the speed limit
that pass the camera,

anybody who drives under the limit
is entered into a lottery

to win the proceeds
of the people who speed.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

It is game thinking --
that term I described earlier,

the core foundation of gamification --

in its purest and most beautiful form:

take a big, negative reinforcement loop

and turn it into small, incremental
positive reinforcement loop.

It had the effect of dropping speed
by over 20% at that point of intervention.

Corporations have also become aware
of the trend of gamification

and the effect of games on people
like Generation G.

Gartner Group says that by 2015,

70% of all the Global 2000,
the biggest companies in the world,

will be actively using gamification,

and 50% of their process of innovation

will be gamified,

which is an astonishing thing.

It's a huge change.

What this all points to
is a future that looks pretty different

from the world we live in today.

Generation G and those driving
the gamification meme forward,

are advocating for a different world.

It's a world in which things
move at faster pace

than they did for you and me.

It's a world in which
there are rewards everywhere

for actions that people take.

The rewards don't always
have to be cash rewards.

They can be meaningful status rewards,

meaningful access rewards,

meaningful power rewards.

A world in which there's extensive
collaborative play.

This is one of the things
that Generation G does so much differently

than even my generation.

I remember going to school and teachers
struggling to come up with exercises

that we could do as a team,

that would be graded as a team.

In the end, those group exercises
always boiled down to an individual score,

which distorted the way
that people behaved.

But, Generation G plays a lot of games

that are purely collaborative,
in which there is group value.

This will also affect our world
in untold ways.

And, Generation G, the fun future,
is a much more global world.

It turns out that we are
already out of touch.

We are the generation most out of touch
with our future or current children

than any generation in history.

We like to think that baby boomers'
parents were the most out-of-touch people

in the world.

They're the ones who had
to deal with the summer of love

and sex and drugs
and all that kind of stuff.

We still make phone calls.

(Laughter)

I mean, we are the ones with the problem,

and we are going to be the most
out-of-touch generation in history.

Of course, it's also true,
and I'm here to tell you:

the kids are alright.

They're going to be just fine.

We don't need to worry, strictly speaking,

about kids and games, and the effect
that it will have on the world.

Not just are the kids
are going to be alright;

frankly, the kids are going to be awesome.

But it's going to take your help
to make the kids awesome.

I have a prescription for you.

This is the best prescription anybody
is ever going to write in your life.

I'm going to write it for you right now,

in your mind, I don't have an actual pad.

Just for clarity, a disclaimer:
I'm not a doctor.

(Laughter)

I am, however, going to write
a prescription for you all.

This is the prescription:

if you have children
or you work with children,

or you desire to work with children,
or you want to change he world,

this is the absolute, positive best thing
that you can do with your time,

from now until I see you in the retirement
home on the coast of Spain

or in the virtual world,

wherever you choose to retire,

which is: get into the game
with your kids.

Stop fighting the game trend,
if that's where you are right now.

Don't fight the game trend.
Become one with the game.

Enter the game. Understand it.

Understand the dynamic
of how your children play

the games that they play.

Understand how their minds work
from the context of the game outward,

rather than from the world outside inward.

The world that we live in right now,

the world of Sunday afternoons,
drinking a cup of herbal tea,

reading some old book,
chilling out by the window,

is over.

(Laughter)

And that's okay.

There's a lot more things that we can do
that are fun and engaging.

If you take away one thing
from today's presentation,

I hope it is you get a chance
to go play with your kids.

Thank you.

(Applause)