Could video games be good for your brain?

It's a common belief that video games rot your brain, but some studies have shown that video games might actually improve cognitive capabilities. How can we use video games to boost our brains, teach counter-intuitive concepts and even learn about ourselves?

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Be there, and welcome to Forward Thinking. The
podcast that Looks at the Future says, I have a
pocket full of quarters and I'm headed to the arcade.
I'm Jonathan Strickland, and I'm Joe McCormick and people. Yeah,

(00:26):
it is just pretty much acknowledged by everyone that video
games are brain suck, right, Yeah, they just they kill
brain cells. They make you stupid that you might as
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

(00:49):
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,

(01:10):
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

(01:33):
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

(01:53):
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

(02:14):
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?

(02:37):
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

(03:00):
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

(03:24):
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,

(03:47):
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

(04:08):
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

(04:31):
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

(04:53):
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

(05:15):
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

(05:37):
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

(05:58):
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

(06:21):
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

(06:42):
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

(07:02):
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

(07:24):
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,

(07:45):
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

(08:08):
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,

(08:32):
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

(08:54):
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

(09:16):
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

(09:40):
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

(10:02):
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

(10:22):
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

(10:45):
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

(11:06):
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

(11:28):
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

(11:49):
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

(12:11):
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

(12:34):
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

(12:55):
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

(13:16):
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

(13:38):
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,

(13:59):
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

(14:20):
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,

(14:42):
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.

(15:04):
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

(15:25):
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

(15:48):
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

(16:11):
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,

(16:32):
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

(16:57):
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

(17:18):
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

(17:38):
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,

(17:59):
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

(18:20):
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

(18:41):
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

(19:02):
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

(19:26):
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.

(19:49):
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

(20:11):
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

(20:31):
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

(20:51):
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

(21:13):
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

(21:34):
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

(21:55):
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

(22:18):
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

(22:38):
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

(22:58):
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

(23:19):
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

(23:41):
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

(24:04):
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

(24:25):
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

(24:49):
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,

(25:11):
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

(25:32):
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

(25:54):
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

(26:15):
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

(26:37):
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

(26:58):
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

(27:20):
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

(27:40):
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.

(28:00):
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

(28:21):
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

(28:44):
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

(29:07):
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

(29:28):
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

(29:50):
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

(30:11):
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

(30:35):
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

(30:55):
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

(31:17):
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,

(31:37):
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

(31:59):
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

(32:19):
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

(32:40):
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

(33:02):
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

(33:23):
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,

(33:45):
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

(34:05):
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

(34:30):
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

(34:52):
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

(35:15):
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,

(35:36):
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

(35:59):
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

(36:19):
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

(36:40):
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

(37:00):
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,

(37:23):
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

(37:46):
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

(38:06):
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

(38:27):
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

(38:48):
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

(39:10):
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

(39:32):
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

(39:55):
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

(40:17):
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

(40:41):
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

(41:01):
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

(41:21):
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

(41:43):
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

(42:03):
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

(42:25):
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

(42:45):
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

(43:07):
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

(43:27):
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

(43:50):
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

(44:11):
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

(44:32):
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

(44:54):
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,

(45:14):
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

(45:36):
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

(45:56):
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

(46:17):
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.

(46:39):
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,

(47:00):
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,

(47:23):
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

(47:49):
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

(48:11):
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

(48:32):
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

(48:54):
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

(49:14):
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

(49:36):
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

(49:58):
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,

(50:21):
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

(50:44):
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

(51:08):
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

(51:31):
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,

(51:55):
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,

(52:18):
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

(52:38):
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

(53:01):
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

(53:22):
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

(53:45):
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

(54:06):
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,

(54:30):
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,

(54:51):
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,

(55:14):
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

(55:34):
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,

(56:06):
brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,