Gee: “World of complex systems that is biting us, and biting us bad.” e.g. peak oil => biofuel => no water / no food => failed states => end of global economy

Zimmerman: industry (19th century), information (20th), the Ludic Century (21st century systems)

Gee: Games not terribly good at delivering information, but at novel experiences: seeing the world in new ways. Can we do as well as the commercial sector in seeing the world differently? Games also as arch problem-solving spaces — essentially a continuous assessment.

Zimmerman: what do we mean by “games for change”? What are the design strategies? Sim as – a procedural representation of a system.

Gee: once you see that a game is a model, you can look behind it to critique the model.

Zimmerman: but not necessarily a good model of everything — they are fundamentally computational, logical. but if the influence is limited to the critique… how is that acceptable for games when not so for film?

Gee: but modding as part of the game — increasingly design is built into the play. a great way for meta-understanding

Zimmerman: range of strategies — information, simulation, design, interest (e.g. SimCity)

Gee: also, preparation for future learning — “failure” now may prep for future success. motivation.

Zimmerman: and also changes in behavior, beyond the player and the game system to the larger context. whether the subject matter or the gameplay.

Gee: future of game designers will be community designers.

Zimmerman: single-player game as a historical anomaly

Gee, channeling Jenkins: It’s a baby boomer attitude to take the game out of the context of convergent media.

Zimmerman: challenge of games that aim to break the frame and relate to the world — games like Pokemon that catch on are hard to design backwards; games are often emergent.

Gee: some things that one might learn is that Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh are systems with blank spaces for people to fill in (both the social/community and also the story)

Zimmerman: danger of G4C is that they’re “heavy,” “pedantic” — understanding play is the seeds of efficacy. Always a structure to play against.

Gee as Portal fanboy: “The game is designed to change the way players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment” — marketing description of Portal. Game offers you a tool to look at the world in a different way.

Zimmerman: Portal points out the difficulty. Portal succeeds because it’s a fictional, self-contained world. The unsolved problem: translating what we know about a closed system of a game into the kinds of issues we want to tackle within these games.

Gee: Learning sciences point to people learning best when triggering emotion. Perhaps the real win for social issue games.

Gee: We’ve reached the limit of realism in games. Japanese anime games are deeper emotionally because they are semiotic spaces — raising questions like what constitutes you as human? Get a lot of mileage out of using art assets, not realism.

Gee: Games as documentary of your story.

Zimmerman: Game industry chasing cinema — “cinema envy” — we should seek pleasures unique to games.