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Eric Gordon delivers this year’s Ithiel de Sola Pool lecture on the power of gaming
Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. But games can be used for a lot more than just keeping teenage boys entertained in their bedrooms.
As Eric Gordon, director of the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College, explained to students of the seventh Salzburg Academy for Media and Global Change, games are being increasingly used to create civic engagement and affect social change.
Delivering the annual Ithiel de Sola Pool lecutre on on the Impact of Communications Technology on Society and Politics, Gordon laid out how by playing learning games, such as 1990s school hit, Oregon Trail, and direct impact games like Darfur is Dying, where one must keep their refugee camp functioning in the face of possible attacks by Janjaweed militias, opportunities for learning, empathy and social control can be realized in a much more accessible manner than simply reading books or listening to lectures.
As Johan Huizinga, the Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history, said: “Let my play be my learning and my learning be my play”.
In their book Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman state that “games are systems where players engage in artificial conflict, governed by rules, for which there is a knowable outcome.”
They also offer the opportunity to fail safely, encouraging practice and perfection. In addition to generating empathy and experiential learning, games are also being used in the civic realm to gather data, help prepare for natural disasters, and community and urban planning.
Games can even be used to build mutual trust between a government and its citizens.
“Gameful design can increase efficacy because people feel like they can operate in the context of play in a way that they cannot operate in the serious work of civic life,” said Gordon.
This is most apparent when dealing with young people, said Gordon, who often feel marginalized in civic life.
“When you frame something as a game, all of a sudden you open up possibilities to a population that has been systematically excluded,” he added.
Echoing the words of Huizinga: “Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays”; Gordon concluded his lecture: “Fundamental to our humanness is play – and as we build societies and institutions that systematically discount our ability to play, we’re losing some of humanness. So games can be one way to bring that play back into civic life.”
Eric Gordon is Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College.
Gordon studies civic media, location-based media, and serious games. He is a fellow at thelhall Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an associate professor in the department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College.
He is also the founding director of the Engagement Game Lab, which focuses on the design and research of digital games that foster civic engagement.
Dr. Gordon is the co-author of Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Blackwell Publishing, 2011) and The Urban Spectator: American Concept-cities from Kodak to Google (Dartmouth, 2010).
He holds a B.A. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Critical Studies, School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. Ithiel de Sola Pool (1917-1984) was a pioneer in the development of social science and network theory.
Dr. Pool received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1952, and held academic positions at Hobart College and Stanford University before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty in 1953, where he was the first chair of the political science department and a founder of the Center for International Studies.
He remained a leader of MIT’s political science and international programs until his death in 1984.
He edited a seminal work, The Handbook of Communication (1973), which defined the scope of the field, and his reputation as a leading authority on the social and political impact of communications technology was fortified and extended with such publications as Forecasting the Telephone (1983), and Communication Flows: A Census of Japan and the US (1984), co-written with Roger Hurwitz and Hiroshe Inose.
This last book was an early attempt to define and then to measure rigorously the now widely-recognized trend toward a global information society.
His renowned works Technologies of Freedom (1983) and Technologies without Borders (1990) were defining studies of communications and human freedom, both as a history of older systems of communication and as visionary accounts of the ways in which emerging digital technologies might transform social and political life.
Dr. Pool served on three faculties of Salzburg Seminar sessions: Session 45, American Society, in 1956; Session 77, American Foreign Policy, in 1962; and Session 203, Development, Communication, and Social Change, in 1981.