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Playing Engineers
Video games may be the opportunity for better public understanding and education the profession has been waiting for.
BY MATTHEW McLAUGHLIN
THIS CANDY BARBARIAN FROM THE VIDEO GAME TROVE USED HIS SPOILS TO BUILD A CREAMSICLE-SHAPED HOME.A
barbarian studies the cotton candy-colored landscape for a moment. Then she’s off on horseback, fighting her way through angry, anthropomorphic ice cream cones to get the ore she needs to build the final floor of her gingerbread skyscraper.
It’s a trippy scene to be sure, but also one that could spark a grade school student’s interest in designing real-world structures. Trove is a new video game released in July—a brightly colored take on massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft and resource collecting and building games like Minecraft—and while it may be light on real-world engineering principles, it’s bursting with engineering creativity, much like LEGO bricks have been for more than 50 years.
The engineering profession has for decades been asking itself how it can improve public understanding of what engineers do, provide better engineering education to grade school students, and get those same students excited about careers in engineering. Played regularly by 155 million Americans, according to the Entertainment Software Association, video games could be the best answer yet.
The New Gaming
It’s never really been in doubt that video games can create excitement, but for much of their history, the mainstream view of video games has been to label them a guilty pleasure at best and a corrupting, brain-atrophying influence at worst. Both video games and attitudes have evolved, however, and a growing amount of research and success stories not only challenge old stereotypes but show video games can be both beneficial and an incredible tool for teaching.
A popular example that has made headlines in recent years is the Institute of Play’s Quest to Learn school in New York City. Opened in 2009, the school is a lab for developing game-based approaches to teaching using both video games and nondigital games. The school now boasts three winners of the New York City Mathematics Project’s Math Olympiad and an average student performance on both English language arts exams and science exams that significantly surpasses the city as a whole—by 56% and 43% respectively.
The Institute of Play isn’t the only group exploring the educational potential of video games. NASA and MIT have both developed their own games, and even more government agencies, universities, and independent groups are researching video games and establishing educational programs and projects that use them.
A video game doesn’t need to be made by NASA or developed for the classroom to be useful as a teaching tool either. Even commercial games, developed purely for entertainment, have surprising potential as tools for teaching. For example, Constance Steinkuehler, a researcher of cognition and learning in online games, has published a number of studies on World of Warcraft and how it encourages players to develop scientific and mathematical thinking habits.
A 2008 study of World of Warcraft discussion forums by Steinkuehler and fellow researcher Sean Duncan found 86% of posts engaged in social knowledge construction, more than half evidenced systems-based reasoning, one in 10 evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an evaluative epistemology in which knowledge was treated as an open-ended process of evaluation and argument.
“[Players] actually have really serious debates around data and analysis of that data and what it might mean,” says MIT Professor Eric Klopfer, director of the university’s Scheller Teacher Education Program and Education Arcade. “There’s these really rich, data-laden, numerical kinds of conversations that they have.”
DiscoverE has also proven the educational potential of commercial video games. The group has used the game SimCity in its Future City Competition since the middle school engineering program started in the early ’90s, paving the way for the more recent movement to use video games as tools for teaching.
“The interactive game gives the students a chance to really grasp the complexities of city design and management,” says DiscoverE’s Maggie Dressel, Future City program manager. “Students learn to prioritize their spending, so as not to run out of money, and learn the impact that their decisions have on the development of the city.”
The interactivity of video games is really the key to their educational potential. “Games provide instant feedback, real-time feedback on performance, which is really powerful,” says Richard Culatta, director of the Office of Educational Technology for the Department of Education. “You can see that happening outside of games too, but games do a very good job of it. Students always know where they’re at in the game.”
A PLAYER GETS A TASTE FOR THE COMPLEXITY OF CIVIL ENGINEERING WHEN THEIR BRIDGE DESIGN FAILS IN THE VIDEO GAME POLY BRIDGE.Structure and feedback not only differentiate games from simulations, but they’re also what helps players to learn, Klopfer says. “Games are really good, specifically for learning, because they do provide more of that feedback and scaffolding that we think are really important for learning.”
SimCity works for Future City, in part, because of its subject matter. In the early ’90s though, it was more an exception than the rule for video games. The shift in attitudes toward video games over the last decade is as much driven by the evolution of commercial video games as it is by social changes.
Beginning roughly a decade ago, the commercial video game industry began making a better variety of games to reach a greater and more diverse audience, Klopfer says. The change made people realize video games had much more potential and were much more interesting than they had previously thought, and eventually they began to think about using them for educational purposes in more and new ways.
Topics and themes of today’s independent and even blockbuster video games range not only from shoot-em-ups to high fantasy but from historical fiction to engineering. In fact, engineering games have become increasingly popular with both players and developers in recent years.
Virtual Engineers
There’s a huge majority of soldiers, cops, wizards, and tomb raiders that make up the mainstream of video game protagonists, but engineers are fast becoming star protagonists as well. Action role-playing game Torchlight II and massively multiplayer online role-playing game WildStar both feature engineers as a class alongside the likes of mages, warriors, and berserkers. But even more importantly, games in which the player takes on the role of engineer in more than just name, designing and building virtual objects, are also on the rise.
Minecraft is the blockbuster game in this category, but Space Engineers, a game that is technically still in development but available through digital game store Steam’s Early Access program, has sold more than 1.5 million copies. Poly Bridge, another engineering game still in development and released through Early Access in June, is estimated to have sold 400,000 copies its first month. The developers of both titles attribute the surge of interest in engineering-themed games to the freedom and creativity they offer and the public’s desire for that.
“I believe that the main reasons are the freedom and limitless creativity that these titles offer,” says George Mamakos, public relations and marketing manager for Space Engineers developer Keen Software House. “Players are always looking for something new and different and many games have been going in that direction lately.”
“I would attribute it to the public’s growing desire to be creators and not consumers,” adds Patrick Corrieri, developer of Poly Bridge. “As a child, my fondest memories are linked to building-block games, marble runners made of wood, and building stuff in my grandfather’s garage, and I think many of us have similar shared experiences.”
The truth is the rising number of engineering games is also due to the developers committed to making such games. Keen Software House, for example, has a rule “real science, real facts, real physics, and real emotions. No magic and fantasy allowed.”
“It is part of our mission to develop games that will encourage people to get involved with science and the STEM fields in general,” Mamakos says. “In order to achieve this properly, we need to focus more on realism rather than science fiction.”
“Since release we’ve been contacted by many different schools and educators wishing to integrate Poly Bridge in their classrooms as part of the physics curriculum, which is of course awesome and flattering at the same time,” Corrieri says. “We’re happy to work with these schools and allow them access to the game free of charge, as the only thing better than seeing someone have fun with something you’ve created, is seeing someone have fun and also learn something new with something you’ve created.”
Powering Up
If players are interested in becoming virtual engineers and developers are interested in creating those opportunities, there may never be a better time for the engineering profession to take advantage of video games to improve public understanding of what engineers do and develop the next generation of engineers. It’s not only worked for DiscoverE’s Future City Competition, but for NASA as well.
When the government agency wanted to make its Curiosity rover a household name as well as ensure the public understood just how astonishing an engineering achievement its entry, descent, and landing system was, it carried out an extensive marketing and educational campaign, which included a video game for Microsoft’s Xbox 360. The campaign, as PE reported in October 2012, was a huge success, and the landing was watched by an unprecedented 36.4 million viewers.
“We had several different avenues through which we were trying to pass information about what the landing attempt on Mars was going to be like and what was involved,” says Dave Lavery, program executive for solar system exploration at NASA. “We thought many of those avenues were ones where, as the information customer, you sort of sit there and you have things coming at you, and you absorb them or you don’t.”
Inspired to provide the public with a more interactive experience, NASA decided to try a video game. In this case, Mars Rover Landing, which was made available through the Xbox 360’s online store.
The game was designed to put players at the controls of the entry, descent, and landing system, giving them a hands on, virtual experience of the landing process, Lavery says. “It was a way to understand better, understand faster, and at a more natural and deeper level what was going to happen when we tried to land on Mars.”
The game was successful both in terms of the number of downloads and amount of positive feedback it received. Because NASA built into the game a way for players to watch the actual landing, it added to the landing’s overall viewership as well.
The engineering profession has a number of ways it can take better advantage of video games. It could develop more games specifically for educational purposes, as NASA did with Mars Rover Landing; or develop more educational programs or curricula that take advantage of commercial games, as DiscoverE has done with Sim City; or it could even do both, as MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program and Education Arcade does. Regardless of the preferred method, if the engineering profession does decide to take better advantage of video games, there are developers interested in helping.
“Bigger organizations in the engineering and STEM fields should move closer to game developers in terms of collaboration on this, invest more time or even money, and support the development of games that promote their work,” Keen Software House’s Mamakos says. “This is actually something that we are planning to do in the future.”
Even big game companies are expressing interest in getting involved. When the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology held its Games for Learning Summit in April, not only educators and government types showed up. Ubisoft, one of the industry’s biggest developers and publishers of video games participated as well.
ALONE AND WITHOUT A WORKING SHIP IN THE VIDEO GAME SPACE ENGINEERS, A PLAYER HAS ONLY ONE WAY HOME, AND THAT’S THROUGH ENGINEERING.“I played loads of games growing up,” Director of Design for Ubisoft San Francisco Paul Cross said at the summit. “I wish a lot of them could have been more useful to my life.”
The opportunity is there. It’s really up to professionals who want to tell their stories to make video games work for them.
“Having technology be more ubiquitous in our schools really has the potential to be one of the most transformational moments in the history of education,” says Office of Educational Technology Director Culatta. “But that largely depends on what we do with it, and all of us … coming together and thinking about how to take advantage of this.”
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