Jane McGonigal believes there are four factors that make online games like World of Warcraft so engaging:

1. They surround us with people willing to trust them with a world saving mission that is on the verge of what you can achieve but is still achievable.
2. They provide a community of collaborators, that want/need our help and input.
3. They give us a role to play in an epic story.
4. They offer ongoing positive reinforcement.

These factors combined with the achievement of what McGonigal calls the “Epic Win”, “An outcome that is so extraordinarily positive that you had no idea that it was even possible until you achieved it…almost beyond the threshold of imagination and when you get there you are shocked at what you are truly capable of,” provides the foundation for the depth of engagement that online gaming produces.

So when I look at McGonigal’s research and I look at the early church, there’s no wonder why the church grew so rapidly in those early days.  Read over that list again.  Then re-read the Gospels.  Is that not what Jesus offered his disciples?  Is that not the path of discipleship?

I think it’s time to redeem gaming.  Instead of using games as a way to escape from real world suffering, we need to use games to inspire people to solve real-world problems.

It’s easy for us to look down at gamers for spending so much time in a virtual world solving virtual problem.  But maybe the blame lies with us…for making an individualistic, mission-less, passion-less, story-less reality.

Instead of looking down at gamers, maybe it’s time to create world-changing games that help people tell a better story.

I’ll share one way we plan on doing this next Friday.

What’s your story?

KB

Video games are tied to childhood like the fish and the sea.  Children wade in the waters of technology; they survive and navigate digital environments.  However video games have historically been viewed as cheap entertainment with little value.  Certainly sociopathic games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; bloody titles like Manhunt, God of War, or MadWorld; or addictive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft have given parents and legislators fuel to the notion that video games harm children.

A recent study published by the Journal of Children and Media examined how violent video games impact the moral reasoning among children ages 7-15.  The study revealed that children’s perception of violence is impacted by exposure to acceptable forms of violence in video games.  Other results from the study reveal

• 71% of the video games reported contained at least some mild violence.
• 25% of the video games played contained intense violence, blood, and gore.
• Children who reported playing a number of video games, consistently played the same type of games whether violent, sports, etc.

But there is hope.  Fun, casual, active video gaming for the family was introduced with the advent of the Nintendo Wii and continued with Playstation Move and Xbox Kinnect.  According to Wired Magazine, young children love controlling video games with their bodies and voice commands, except the number of games for young children is fairly low.

Enter Once Upon a Monster, a video game that will be released later this year.  While Leapster, ClickStart, and websites like Starfall provide young audiences with gaming experiences designed to teach reading and math skills, Once Upon a Monster is designed to teach kids to “real human themes like shyness, friendship, bravery, sensitivity, and empathy” using familiar Sesame Street characters like Elmo and Cookie Monster, according to project leader Nathan Martz.

Check out the trailer for the video game!

Once Upon a Monster is a unique gaming notion.  Previously games were generally in two categories: entertainment and education.  Once Upon a Monster delves into using a game to teach real-world, emotional skills.  Inherent in the gameplay is the idea that the actions you take as you physically interact with a digital character impact other people.  The opportunity here is incredible.  Somehow game makers have realized the power of the digital to teach children not letter sounds and colors but social good.  My imagination is running wild because I envision a future where games like these undergird early childhood ministry.  What about you?

Check out this video from Will Wright, the creator of the insanely popular video games Spore and the Sims.  This talk was given at the National Academies summit and was popularized by one of the latest blogs I follow by Andrew Revkin.  Revkin posted a follow-up piece to his review here.

Could video games become the new puppets for digital learners?  Could they become the vehicle by which teachers teach and learners experience and navigate truth from God’s Word?

Little Big Planet is a video game on the Playstation console that allows players to create and share their own game levels, as well as rate and play the game levels created by others.

According to Mashable.com, LittleBigPlanet 2 works a little bit like a YouTube for games, if YouTube more prominently featured a Facebook-like activity feed of your friends’ activity.

Each time a gamer friend plays or creates a game or level, it pops up in your feed. You can opt to play his or her level, or even join him or her in whatever activity he or she is doing at that moment. Alternatively, you can just search by keyword for levels that you want to try out.

When you like a level or game you come across, you can share it (ratings and all) with your friends just like you might share a cool link on your social network of choice.

This all takes place in the game, of course, but the other big addition besides the activity feed is LBP.me, a social website that hosts a personal profile for each user, including references to your creations and activities as they occur.

This post is not an ad for Little Big Planet.  This post is about the new global reality of gaming for kids.  Growing up, I played board games with friends and family or video games with my friend Tim Gallagher at his house (he owned a Nintendo, which was epic).  Games were physical.  Games were static as well.  When you play Monopoly, no matter what you are buying and selling real estate.  You didn’t take the board, the money, the green houses, metal shoe and thimble and play an entirely different game.

Today’s kid plays games differently.  They can play a game created by another child thousands of miles away and communicate with that child about recommendations to make the game improve.  Think about that.  The pieces that create today’s games are so easily manipulated that kids can create new games from them.  And they do!   Right now, there are over 3.5 million game levels to choose from and users around the globe have created almost 10 million pieces of LBP-related content. Kids can play these games against each other even when they are not in the same room or country.  So games are no longer confined to a physical space and they have become far more dynamic.

Leaders in children’s ministry need to recognize technological trends and think through the best ways to take advantage of such trends in the teaching and learning process.  So often I hear people talk about creating a global mindset for today’s generation.  I would argue that most children have a much more global mindset than the average adult because they spend time interacting with and learning from kids across the planet, even if it is a little big planet.

I’ve written about different perspectives on video gaming and the teaching/learning process.  Hopefully you’ve had a chance to read about people like Jane McGonigal or Quest to Learn.  Maybe you’ve read a book by Marc Prensky or James Paul Gee.  These individuals and organizations posit that video games are powerful tools for learning and they have (according to Mary Ulicsak, a senior research from Futurelab) “the potential  to be an important teaching tool because they are interactive, engaging and immersive activities.”

The research behind this claim states that serious games, games with an educational purpose, intrinsically embed learning into the experience of play.  There are many examples of serious games in professional and academic environments.  The US Army invested $50 million in “games for training,” overseen by the Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation. Games like Wii Fit have or other health related games are examples of serious games in the health and medical field.  The Games Learning Society and the Consolarium are examples of organizations that create and research serious games for the field of education.

There are even educational journals that focus on serious games and their use in the teaching and learning process: the Online Games Study Journal, Games and Culture, the more recent International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (IJGCMS) and, from 2011, the International Journal of Game-based Learning.

Tom Chatfield in Fun Inc.: Why Games are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business writes, “There will inevitably come a time when no one alive remembers a time before video games existed. like books and movies, they will be a part of the media landscape older than living memory. Within a modern school, that time has already arrived: every single pupil was born into a world where video games were simply a fact of life, and it’s in this environment and among these pupils that the serious potential of video games suddenly starts to seem less a novel possibility than a creeping inevitability – as much a fixture in our future lives as the mobile telephone or the computer screen.”

Here are some things to consider in this basic introduction to serious games and the people/places you can dive into to get more information.

• Should we be using serious games for the purpose of spiritual formation?
• If a serious game came out for kids who just got baptized or made a decision to follow Christ, how would you decide whether or not to integrate it into your church programming?

Hopefully you’ve had the chance to read my first last two posts on serious games (Introducing Serious Games and Serious Games Defined).  It is possible for a game to have an educational purpose and these games are becoming more and more popular and embedded into the cultural landscape kids in our ministries are developing in.  You can read about extensions of serious games here.  Or you can dive into the 89 page research report on the topic by Futurelab here.

But why should we use games to teach?  Here is the rationale (taken directly from the Futurelab Report, p 14-15):

• Without claiming that every child is a gamer, or even interested in gaming, games are integral to many young people’s lives.
• There is a growing acceptance amongst teachers that games have educational potential and there is an increasing willingness to use games in their classroom.
• Games provide a platform for active learning, that is, they are learning by doing rather than listening or reading, they can be customized to the learner, they provide immediate feedback, allow active discovery and develop new kinds of comprehension. There is also evidence of a higher level of retention of material.
• Students are often motivated and engaged in games in a way that they are not with any other teaching method (bold mine).
• The technology upon which games are used and played is improving, for example there is more access to greater broadband speeds, improved graphics cards and storage space and a higher uptake of digital devices overall (ie – the digital divide is closing).

I just finished reading a Wired Article entitled “Why Aren’t Games About Winning Anymore?” by Jonathan Liu.  Liu uncovers a recent trend in video games where modern games are less about actually getting to the last level (a la Super Mario Brothers) and more about gaining achievements during the game.

For instance, I have become addicted to the iPhone app Angry Birds.

Angry Birds is a great game built on a ridiculous premise: catapult birds into fortresses made of wood, ice, and stone so you can destroy green pigs.  As I have played through the game, I noticed that every once in a while a message would flash across the lower part of the screen indicating that I had reached one of the game’s “Achievements.”  The game all of a sudden became less about defeating the green pigs (which is relatively easy) and more about the achievements.

I’m wondering about how this applies to children’s ministry.  One of the most addictive things about a video game is the constant feedback and rewards.  Can that sort of feedback and reward be built into children’s ministry programming?  Would it be harmful to include “achievements” into children’s ministry programming? What do those look like?

Our ministry context has been integrating some Bible Reading Schedules into most of our K-5th series.  The struggle has been finding the right reward for the kids completing the reading schedule.  Frankly our efforts have been lackluster.  But what if the reading schedules were web-based and as the kids read the passage, they received a little message (just like I did in Angry Birds), letting them know that they accomplished something.  Each accomplishment was tracked and ranked.  I’m sure there are a host of issues with this, but what will we sacrifice to get kids to make reading God’s Word a priority?

I am continuing the series of posts on kidmin and video games.  In my research, I came across Evoke.  According to Evoke’s blog, “Evoke is a ten-week crash course in changing the world. It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere.  The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.”

Evoke is the kind of thing children’s and family ministry leaders need to pay attention to!  Imagine if we could engage kids in virtual projects aimed at faith formation (serving, evangelism, discipleship, prayer).  Expect to see more and more games like Evoke in days to come.  If you are a gamer or know any programmers, DM me on Twitter!  I’d love to explore this idea!

I just came across an article entitled, “I Want It Now! The Fierce Urgency of Videogaming’s Future.” The article identified a key characteristic of today’s video game consumer: impatience.  Ever heard of Farmville?  The insanely popular Facebook game’s chief game designer recently pinpointed that many gamers lose interest in a game because the game takes too long to load.  Take a guess about how long Farmville takes to load….

Six seconds.

That’s it.

Here’s a quote from the article by Stephen Wadsworth, Disney’s President of Interactive Media Group: “The 20th-century notion of waiting around to watch shows when they air on television, or saving up to buy CDs, is quickly becoming antiquated as technology makes it easy to consume movies, TV and music on demand. As game development and distribution methods evolve, the same trends are changing the way the videogame industry works.”

Hang around a kid with Internet access and try explaining an old movie to them.  See how long it takes for them to tune you out and look up the movie on YouTube.  They want everything right now.

Here are a couple other highlights from the article:

• Close to half of children’s television is either time-shifted (through the use of a DVR) or done on a mobile device.
• While kids are happy to come to (Disneyland) and spend hours in line for Space Mountain, they’ve got a very short threshold when it comes to interactive media.

So kids are impatient, is this really a digital characteristic?  When they start getting impatient after waiting six seconds because they can find something (or anything) in three seconds online, then yes – it is a digital characteristic.  Here are three suggestions Wadsworth offered as a way to engage today’s digital audience (an audience he describes as “never unconnected“):

• Timelessness of story – is the story and its characters real, engaging, and powerful?  Will they last?
• Timelessness of technology – Is the world and environment where the story is set, believable?  Is it a world where discoveries can be made?  Is it a world where choices can be made?
• Shared experiences – Walt Disney believe in the power of an experience shared with other people, so he created the Disney theme parks.  Does the experience isolate people or draw them into sharing with others?

I think children’s and family ministry can certainly learn from these three suggestions and be confident that the Bible is not innately something that creates boredom.  It is the quintessential story of salvation history.  The Bible is the story of our God, the one who made us,  saves us, loves us, heals us, and redeems us.  It’s characters aren’t really characters; they are people who lived.  But how can we harness the power of shared experiences using God’s Word?  Thoughts/Ideas?