The gamer's brain – The untapped potential

[Music] well thank you very much this is a very unique experience for me if this is the first time I'm making a presentation to a community of gamers most of the time I presented two very boring all academics in primarily academic conferences but I'm excited what prompted is to move towards this direction is with a with one fundamental observation our education system sucks it's extremely boring I'm not sure how many of you had a great experience in school I never had one until at a very late stage in my life when I went in in my graduate studies and then it became fun so play what we recognize is play is essential

for well-being not just for academics so I'm not talking about here of using games to improve our academic performances because that takes us back into the whole school of thought is primarily games as play which is essential for human well-being one of the scary things that's coming out from a lot of the observations I'll talk about wh oh you know a little bit but one of the things that they have done in 2015 there was a study that was released which says if I'm sort of saying in this is global but for India itself twenty five percent of kids between the age of 13 to 15 have some depression problems leading to suicidal instincts primarily driven by the anxiety and the tensions that the education system creates just to give you context in India I was really

shocked when I took up my post in India you need to get a 99.9% pass ready to get into a university it's like 99.9% that's you know so the anxiety the build-up you just don't have a life the kids just don't have a life so so the whole idea here is to change that experience but at the same time develop both the act what we call the intellectual intelligence but more important the emotional intelligence we have the science actually to that so what we know and this just came out in a very interesting Journal article in in nature where they had kind of done brain imaging of gamers versus non gamers some longitudinal studies so you have sometimes span over that gamers have strong a functional connectivity FC stands for functional connectivity

within the different parts of the brain and I'll show you those connectivities that they saw in gamers brains so pretty much most of you I'm assuming that all of you are gamers yes that's that's and I'm gonna show you how your brain looks like and and this is basically coming from some of the work that the neuro scientists have that I'm not a neuroscientist I'm actually a boring economist by training but got really fascinated to sort of see how the science or neurosciences has been really contributing towards the whole science of learning surprisingly our education system is not based on science I'm not sure where it revolved from but I think it was just a demand by the Industrial Revolution to produce workers for the factories and we are still in that same mode as of two three hundred years ago so that's the kind of the brains connectivities that we are talking about

one of the things that came out from this study is where exactly in which parts of the brains this connectivity is extremely strong and we're talking about actual AVG's that they call it action violent games and what they find in these what happens with kid people who play with these games is that it increases a tension regulation which makes sense because you really have to focus otherwise you get shot in your you lose your points but it also increases the sensory motor coordination your hands eyes and you gamers will know that this happens and this is what they have found and which parts of the brain that happens is that that particular part Dean's in select contacts is where that attention regulation and sensory motor skills get activated so you see a lot of bright liar connections happening at that part of the brain when when we put gamers playing this kind of AVG games

under functional MRI machines now the other interesting thing is that another group of scientists have been working on gaming and sort of seeing how it has an impact on the emotional side of the brain and what happens is that when people play games huge amounts of dopamine and serotonin are injected into the brain structures these are your feel-good chemicals and so that actually has an empower important role in terms of stimulating that part of the brains and you can sort of see a connection between what we call which is basically

where anxiety stress and aggression starts merging from we've also sort of found that it increased capabilities on their neocortex as well but these are not games doing everything these are particular games so some john rowe of games create connectivity in some parts of the brains but it doesn't do the whole structures so this is where i'm kind of moving towards in terms of a demand from this community and that's where the prefrontal cortex so some games actually stimulate this quite a bit some do more and better than other other games trigger the attention regulation which I emotional dimensions

so what we have in education system and I'm going to talk to you about a little bit of a neural network that we want gamers to start or Graeme designers to start thinking about in terms of creating this particular neural network and I'll we've kind of coined a name for it as a term for it so this is our education system one size fits all so if you have a kid with dyslexia and you have somebody who does not have their they still have to have the same materials the same way it's being imparted to them many of us suffer from that you be you being interested to find out that one in every five that's the most pessimists the most optimistic is one in every ten of us have some form of difference learning so I'm looking here they're about maybe thirty five forty so one in ten four to eight of us here I

say us because I have some form of that which was just recently diagnosed because I did the maybe positive negative thing of employing a neuroscientist on my staff who then sort of looked at me over some time and said do you know that you have dyslexia after 40 of the 54 years of of my life but it's a one-size-fits-all this is the one that I really hate discrete assessments you know you at the end of the semester you go and sit for a three-hour exam and based on that three hours your life is determined which way you move forward our whole life is defined with those examinations it doesn't have to be that way failing is failure that's the that's one thing with the school system does really well if you fail you are a failure focus on building the intellectual intelligence that's all it is all about either through rote memorization or other forms but it's all

about the intellect it's about the knowledgebase nothing else simulation of the neural cortex at the most that we have found it static content and text driven books one of the things that I do when I have problems sleeping at night I take my son's American constitutional history book I'm off within three minutes four minutes I'm completely in Slumberland I don't need all those sleeping pills and all that chemical stuff to get me off so it's in one way those text books do some really good work but in terms of actually for the intellectual simulation it doesn't do so what do we need in education Marty knodel so you can already see where this is coming within your sphere of expertise Marton order to fit different learning styles video audio action continuous motions dynamic

in changing with feedback a player plays a game he has feedback it's continuously changing interactive immersive reward driven and endogenous wouldn't it be great if you have within the school system where the kid is given a game and when he plays his games and as he grows up from the levels that you have you're basically being assessed and by the time you reach a certain level we have done it and go on to the next level so you don't have your one-time exams it's just continuous if you don't do it you get back learn again just like a simple like what you do in games so that's where we are moving towards so the game's potential its multi-sensory I'm talking to the guys who do this all on a daily basis interactive immersive player pace and the one that I'm really forgot the endogenous assessment self-paced and

failure is learning failure you it's it's about just continuously learning so what we need from games the creation of new neural networks I've already talked about certain neural networks that have been that have been created the neuroplasticity that's happening when you're playing with the games we call it the Gandhi neural network it's based on neural neuroscientist from UC San Diego who coined the word Gandhi neurons based on the mirror neuron network that we have in our in our here in our brains which talks about empathy mirror neurons in the sense that you can empathize with the other person and that part of the brain is activated and it's natural but we need to train it as well so a lot of these networks have to be trained you have to train your brain it just doesn't happen naturally and that's what we are

talking about lighting up this whole functional connectivities and that's what we're looking for in game design so the game is brain I wanted to tell when I'd earlier talk to you about the connectivity that's the gamers brain that's your brain looking at all that additional connectivity's that they have observed in gamers brains versus those who don't play games connectivity neuroplasticity is good connectivity means learning happens neuroplasticity means learning happens so I had to throw this market potential and I now on reflection after a day or two there's a lot of focus on you know in terms of the market the business model it is huge because if you look at

the publishing houses in text books it's huge the schools each text book is about 35 to 40 dollars some - some of them go to a hundred two hundred dollars you're basically replacing books as the primary medium of education and that's what we think games have the potential to achieve so the challenges there are challenges what we find within us cope and we have been going out there we don't we are not a game company we don't intend to get into that business we want to work with partners who are in that business who know that much better to help us develop these kind of games but right now those games are very limited some are good many are also not so good I'm not going to use the word bad not so good based on the pedagogical strengths does it actually create do stimulate learning Quality Assurance many of the companies

that we have worked with that we have been working together including unity Ubisoft Microsoft is that the kind of sort of an encouraging for some system of quality assurance some kind of system which sort of says pedagogically it's been pretty good it's been pretty good in building so emotional intelligence it's been pretty good at Inter intellectual or maybe not so good at emotional that's okay but you have that checklist and they've been asking for that kind of system designed by the experts then they say this problem with the whu-oh report that care that came up with saying games have this problem of addiction there was a big lash back on that primarily from the from the psychology community of course the gamer the gaming community wrote some responses but you would expect them to sort of say that it doesn't but the scientific community also came back to

solace say there isn't any real evidence to show that this happens and the data that was used has some issues with it and and recently I think it's just about three days - four days back was a seminal paper that was published which kind of alerted us that much of the data that has been used to show that on screen time is bad for for children addictions that dataset has been erroneously used and they showed how and it and so there's there's a big rethink about that whole issue so that's good news but saying that the science is still not as a good academic isola say it still we need to do still more research but we need that data we need that we need a systematic approach or in terms of how to collect that data and to analyze that and in the myth of games and violence there's been always this in

the minute there's a there's a random shooting in the school hey that could play violent games and that's that's the causality that also has not been established statistically so this is the ask that I've come here quality games I've been around walking around looking at all the different stalls fantastic games but I haven't seen the the link with the educational component very few and I'm sort of saying kind of making a player that this is a great place to put your talents your creativity skills in developing those kind of games profits yes but the not bottom line I come from UNESCO so we have a business model which really sucks because we don't make money before we continuously ask money from others but but we do understand that the developing community the game developer

community has to so they and publish income a textbook publishing companies make millions anyway so I think it's a it's a great potential for gaming for the gaming community and in supporting guidelines initiatives by UNESCO we had we had a we have this yearly conference in India last year we invited a number of countries which when I say countries which means Ministry of Education one of the things that they requested and asked for UNESCO this is what we do is to develop this set of guidelines if it goes through the process and if these guidelines get indoors then 193 member countries endorses and wants to get the endorsement if the games and doors it's a big market out there potentially my big market the gift from us is that the guidelines adopted by 193 access to schools one of the things that we have been in

the process of signing an agreement with one of the states in under Pradesh now a state in in India is as big in terms of population is as big as some of the countries and combined in Europe so the it it's a huge potential market out there and one of the things is that they have agreed to allow us to bring in the games which have been developed by our partners which have which had these guidelines as as that provides those guidelines to access to their schools an online learning platform surprise surprise UNESCO mji P is actually we had we had spent the last three years developing an online platform because we felt the ones that were available were not according to the kind of outcomes that we wanted so one the focus was more in terms of getting the kids it was more like a management learning management system looking at the kids looking at the

grades and monitoring it where's the platform that we wanted was to actually stimulate learning where teachers can come and create the content it's got some rudimentary artificial intelligence in helping in terms of interventions but with our focus on building what we call the balanced human being emotional and intellectual for us from MGI piece perspective we really focus on the emotional intelligence and what we have managed to get from that state government is to invest relatively huge amounts of resources as well in terms of both land infrastructure and financial resources to set up hub a whole ecosystem where they have the science of learning which means the research incubators new startups teacher training

academies because if you don't train the teachers to use games they're just going to be pushed back on it we've already started on that particular very difficult community but it's a whole ecosystem that kind of is connected and like with every other ecosystem economic incentives and all those different options are available for young startups to relocate it's a it's a it's a great place one of the reasons that I personally decided to go to this was it has one of the best beaches that I've seen around the world good weather around the wall all year round and the land that has been provided for this hub is right there facing the ocean so and we have this conference every year it's called tech it's a play of words tag technology but it's actually transforming education conference for Humanity we've had to it

happens in December of every year so it's a great time to escape the winters and come down south we have quite a large number of speakers from around the world the last one we had the first year we had too many we were hoping to get 800 and we ended up with a thousand seven it was just a little bit too big it was just too fragmented so last year we focus a bit we still had about a thousand two this year I think we really want to focus a little bit Baba Go Go in deep rather than go shallow and we get it's a great place to meet a whole different sets of people so who you'll get to meet it's not just other gamers you get to meet neuro scientists you development psychologists teachers policymakers yes they're boring but very useful to have around the table we normally have a high level policy tear forum where we bring in ministers from

countries and and tell them what's happening and stuff so that the result from the last meeting was this guidelines which they have requested from UNESCO so it's kind of a exciting place but it's not like yo that one community but it's actually you'll meet a lot of new people it's exciting to create new teams and one of the things that we are looking for is gamed is - to hook up with neuroscientists who have done work on on how the brain works development psychologists because of the different age groups is extremely important to target how the brains development and which type of games would be created useful and critical and gets the best return on investments you get that kind of expertise supporting you in terms of the design but they have no clue about game design so we need that group as well so in the last meeting we had about out of the Korea speakers we had about I think about 10

to 15 game designers who actually talked about games and teachers who have gone from the from the classroom who are now designing games and and set up their own companies we have a strong group from Kubik gaming gaming community what else yeah so I hope to see you in tech and we are always on the lookout for great speakers great ideas but the focus is on education and learning thank you very much I'm not sure if you have questions Q&A is No so the guidelines are primarily so what UNESCO does one of its mandates is to produce guidelines across different so one of the things that we were wondering

is like for a game what would be the pedagogical strengths of it age appropriateness how what's the time duration so how much of cooperation does it build how much collaboration competitiveness all the different variables but we are hoping for the for a group of experts to come and tell us what that would be and those guidelines would be basically some kind of a certification system but it's primarily only for games that are targeting towards the educational sector so not every game needs to have this to follow these guidelines if you're just making purely for entertainment that's fine but what what what we think would be what it would offer would be that if and we will be doing there on our part is to convince ministries of Education around the world that games offer a really

strong new pedagogical tool for learning and we have the science to prove that and so they start embracing that and then we will have this whole suite of different games for different for different courses for different disciplines but following these broad guidelines no questions we have a bit more time left if anything about you want to know anything more a little bit about your brains yeah so the one that is really becoming very popular is minecraft by Microsoft well it wasn't by Microsoft it was a company but which has been bought over so teachers been using minecraft quite a bit in terms of gaming we use

Hall of Heroes is that right which is a great assessment gear a game for assessing social-emotional skills so one of the problems with social-emotional so that's the emotional intelligence is that a lot of times when you want to assess it you give questionnaires to the kids but you know kids are very smart they know exactly what they need to say do you bully somebody who's weak of course you're going to say no and you'll get all the right answers but what this group have done is they have develop a game called Hall of Heroes and and that's for the older adalah older group then there's another game which is something called zoo which is for the younger kids but still using the game to assess how strongly associate motional skills are but there are not many that are available what we are thinking of is

if you would develop one on mathematics so there's also a distinction which I found a little bit interesting where they say we have serious games was this fun games and I thought serious games was always an oxymoronic term because I thought games were always supposed to be fun but so it becomes a sieve but when you take to a kid and say it's a serious learning game they kind of tend to get put off another perfect example was Ubisoft's assassin creed they had they had developed discovery I think more as a learning game but it was not really a game it more like a dis just going and exploring things and kids very quickly who turned off because they they wanted the game and so they came up with a lot of good suggestions that we hope to share with you be soft very soon on how the kids thought that using the main game itself you could actually provide a lot of learning within that game so so it's

still very early days what we are thinking of so we had a gaming challenge a couple of years ago we sort of said first prize $100,000 to develop a game and team from hungry war got the competition but what we found that the first prototype have completely had problems with gender discrimination racial issues but it wasn't intentional they never realized then we had to spend a whole one year bringing together pedagogy's people in from the education and then over a year we worked on the game and then we released it it's called world rescue and is based on the you how many of you have heard of the UN's sustainable development goals as DG's oh great this is more hands than I get it a policy workshop so that's great so so it's it focuses on three or four

of the SDGs in those games but it was a very simple rudimentary game of it was our first getting our feet wet we've learnt a lot but one thing that we we have come to terms is that we need this community to be engaged rather than we build games ourselves we just can't do it and developing a curriculum around a game is not simple it's so easy to just teach mathematics the way it has been done but if you want to teach it through a game you need to have a script you need characters you got to get the kid interested and then at the same time impose learning outcomes at each level so when you when you get through the first level you must have achieved at these two or three of this learning outcomes that we want you to achieve then you go to the next level so that we know that we can show to the and demonstrate to the to the policymakers that the kid is learning and that the learning outcomes have been achieved and the game actually has these built into it

not easy we've been struggling to tell you the truth [Music]