Kurt Squire & Constance Steinkuehler - "The Science of Play" (C4 Public Lectures)

Popular culture has always been a powerful force for shaping public perceptions of science. Media is seductive, and depictions of science on television and in film shape how the American public understands and imagines science content, science process, and scientists. Videogames are no different; in fact, if anything, they are more persuasive. Games allow players to virtually inhabit worlds where physical laws and physical constraints can be obeyed or judiciously thwarted (Portal and Portal 2), to engage in scientific thinking and reasoning about unpredicted phenomena that emerge at the intersection of game mechanics, virtual physical constraints, and aggregated human behavior (theory crafting in World of Warcraft), or to take on the role of a crowbar-wielding theoretical physicist who has just survived an experiment gone horribly wrong (Gordon Freeman in Half-Life). While we scientists are busy writing papers for academic journals, presenting for specialized audiences at obscure (and poorly catered) events, and generally bemoaning America’s lackluster interest in Science (with a capital S), the public is gobbling up seemingly science-related content in the form of games and other popular culture media and willingly paying top dollar for it. It just so happens that it’s not always or exactly the science content, practices, and dispositions we might have produced or sanctioned or hoped.
The Games+Learning+Society (GLS) lab at WID is committed to connecting games and other pop culture media to actual and accurate science. Our goal is to increate public understanding and interest in science through the seductive, “sticky” media of interactive digital videogames. Working with interdisciplinary team of games designers (through our non-for-profit partner), learning scientists (GLS faculty and doctoral students), and content experts (WID scientists and colleagues at other research institutions such as MIT), we create and investigate games based on actual science but aimed at the general public educational and entertainment market. We study how games are made and played and then leverage this understanding toward the design of interactive games and toys that convey accurate and cutting edge scientific concepts, practices, and dispositions to a broad audience. Our goal is nothing short of making science as sexy as the latest first-person shooter or Candy Crush.
In this presentation, GLS co-directors Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler review the current landscape of commercial and educational videogames and the R&D model we use to create games for science understanding, highlighting some of the GLS game titles to date and findings on their efficacy for public understanding (particularly, with kids). We then discuss the role of “real science” in the public imagination, both where it is now and where, we argue, we ought to lead it.
(Recorded 18 February 2015)
_
Learn more at c4.santafe.edu
Follow us on social media:
/ sfiscience
/ sfiscience
/ santafeinstitute
/ santafeinstitute
/ santafeinstitute