Jon Boorstin's book "The Hollywood Eye" had a great way to describe 3 levels of processing movies - visceral, vicarious, and voyeur

Visceral is how movies affect us at the gut - gore, terror, etc. Vicarious is immersing viewers in the narrative and story, voyeur is higher-level intellectual processing of whether everything makes sense.

Same thing works for games too - think about it

In 2010, the National STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) video game challenge was created as part of President Obama's initiatives on STEM education. The $50,000 grand prize was taken by a Flash game called "You Make Me Sick!" created by Dan Norton and Dan White of Filament Games.

I was pretty impressed with the game and though it's short (not that much gameplay), it's much more in line with how educational games should be done. 

In “You Make Me Sick!”, my mission as a disease was to try to infect an elderly man (key characteristics: he’s a mouth-breather with many vaccines). I decided to create an airborne bacterium - airborne because his mouth-breathing would be an easy entry vector for my disease, and bacterium because viruses would have a harder time due to the vaccines my target had.

Mission #1 was to plan my attack. I had my bacteria blow in from the open window, and had to play a little minigame to guide myself into my target's mouth while he was breathing in and out. I succeeded after a few minutes of frenetic clicking and encountered another minigame involving infecting the target's lungs, hopping from alveolus to alveolus.

The game ended afterward (hence my complaint about it being too short), but it was definitely engrossing and was a great way to teach kids how an infection actually happens.

This sort of game, that's fun for its own sake and has real learning value, is what the educational game field should strive for.

Gamification is familiar, and probably cliche by now, to everyone inside the game industry. It's already spilling to outside of the formal game industry, and you can see this in the rise of check-ins and location-based awards, as well as the point, badge, and leaderboard systems that are increasingly common. Some of these mechanics have been well-known for a long-time, such as the punchcards you get that promise a free 6th meal if you come 5 times to the restaurant - or coffee shop, or hairdresser, or amusement park. 

The way it's going, in five years, pretty much everything in the world is going to be gamified. Is this a force for good though? This is something I was discussing with Dr. Richard Bartle, co-creator of the first MUD (multi-user dungeon, which some of you may remember as ascii text-based virtual worlds from the 80s and 90s).

Gamification is the use of game design for non-game purposes, but Bartle argues that it's not the same at all as a game because in gamification you get rewards and you can't really lose. There's no play. 

This brings us back to the debate between intrinsic rewards and external rewards. Where gamification, in the form it takes today, increasingly goes wrong is that it's all about external rewards - in essence bribing players to do something by giving them points, badges, and so on.

Continuing on this path, which seems to be almost a certainty because many people working on gamification aren't game designers, is dangerous because given enough time, people will eventually recognize "extrinsic operant conditioning tropes," avoid them, and the house of cards will crash down.

So when you're gamifying something, make sure there's intrinsically fun play and give rewards that are really inherently valuable, such as fun content - not just worthless points and empty badges.

Besides attentional blink, there are many more very interesting effects of videogames on the brain. Again, imagine yourself looking at a screen. There is a circle on the screen, and various shapes can appear on it like numbers around a clock.

Your task is to hunt for a diamond that appears on the circle. Sometimes, the diamond is the only thing that appears, in which case the task is trivial, and sometimes there are other shapes that appear around the circle to make it harder. In addition to this, there is sometimes an additional distractor shape that shows up either inside or outside of the circle.

Your brain can't help but pay attention to this distractor, and interestingly, if the distractor is a diamond, it actually will help you find the diamond on the circle more quickly. If the distractor is not a diamond (e.g. a square or a circle), it will slow you down.

When the task becomes difficult (many other objects on the circle along with distractors), the diamond-shaped "helpful distractor" actually loses its effectiveness. Interestingly, this only happens in nongamers. Videogame players are still sped up by same-shape distractors and this happens no matter how hard the task is.

A reasonable explanation for this is that videogame players have higher attentional capacity. It seems that there’s less of an attentional bottleneck.

Attentional blink is an interesting phenomenon first described in 1992. Generally, it's about spotting salient and important items in a rapid sequence of other objects. The specific task that's used in an experiment would be where the subject is looking at a screen, where a bunch of black letters pop up and disappear in sequence. Once in a while, a white letter pops up, and a certain (short) amount of time after the white letter, an X may or may not pop up as well.

So the white letter notifies you that the X might pop up soon. If the X pops up immediately after the white letter does, your percentage of seeing it will be higher than average. This is due to an aspect of attentional blink called "lag one sparing." There's no super conclusive explanation for this, though it's thought that the brain releases a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine after the meaningful stimulus (the white letter), the effects of which last for around 100ms and allow the X to be processed together with the white letter.

However, if the X appears between 0.2 and 0.5 seconds after the white letter, many people miss it. The visual system "blinks" after the relevant white letter stimulus and is blind to the X popping up.

A real-world example of attentional blink would be if you're driving outside, with many objects whizzing past you, and you have to respond quickly to a ball rolling onto the street. As you shift your attention and bring the ball to your conscious awareness, there's a half-second gap in which you might miss a child running out after that ball.

Studies, chiefly those done by Shawn Green during his graduate studies in Daphne Bavelier's lab, have shown that video game players have a much shorter attentional blink than nongame players. This is really interesting because it suggests that these fundamental phenomena are trainable and changeable by playing fast-paced computer games.

Now this is sort of the reciprocal of what people traditionally think of as educational games. Instead of learning material from games, we’re playing games to train our own visual skill, attention, enumeration skill, and so on. So it goes both ways - neuroscience can be used to design better games, and games can also be used to affect our own brains.

The field of game design is maturing. For the past several decades, games have experienced many revolutions, most of which up until recently were driven by technological advances and development of next-generation consoles. This process is still ongoing, but with graphics technology approaching photorealistic levels and the power of computer hardware today able to simulate highly detailed real-world environments, most future game advances will be driven not primarily by technology but mostly by development of new and innovative game mechanics. One of my strong beliefs is that the next major advance in games, and even entertainment in general, will come from the incorporation of neuroscience into game mechanics and player experience design.

Game designers have struggled for many, many years to understand how to produce fun games. There have been many successes and many failures as well. Designers deliver entertainment to their players, and they design games to be fun by instinct, but often cannot fully and precisely explain how they inject fun into games. Many great game designers work by “feel,” playing through their levels over and over again and tweaking the gameplay loops that don’t feel fun to them or that most people would not find fun.

There’s nothing wrong with using intuition as a design approach, but if designers cannot pinpoint what makes a game fun, the effectiveness of game design is compromised and we are then stuck in a more or less primitive stage of development. Game design is seen as an art, not a science. This means that what makes a game fun is not tightly and accurately defined and at least difficult to pass down to new game designers or the next generation in a systematic manner.

These concerns are reflected in the fact that over the past decade, the game industry has become increasingly hit-driven. World of Warcraft chomps up over 60% of MMO market share and the top 20 casual games occupy 75% of the market. This has forced the entire game industry to become conservative and very risk-averse, suppressing innovation and radical design and in so doing, making it difficult for new types of games to flourish.

I believe that the remedy to this problem lies in use of neuroscientific rigor in game design. Games, at their core, are systems that must be learned. According to Raph Koster (one of the MMO gods), games are “rule-based systems / simulations that facilitate and encourage a user to explore and learn the properties of their possibility space through the use of feedback mechanisms.” If your game isn’t quickly learnable, players will get frustrated and it will fail. It’s natural, then, that the origin of learning, the brain, should not only be taken into consideration, but regarded as a guiding light when designing learning-based systems like games, even purely entertainment-based games.

First of all, neuroscience can be used to study and understand the elusive concept of fun. Design of reward systems and schedules and understanding of player pleasure and motivations must obviously be based on how the brain works. As has been widely reported, World of Warcraft’s variable ratio reward schedule essentially hijacks the reward systems of the brain to keep players playing forever. There are many other ways to generate fun that have yet to be described in a scientific manner.

Secondly, neuroscience will provide general rules and formulas to explain what the best game designers have discovered by instinct. We need to improve the current “hit-or-miss through intuition and observation” attitude upon which many game are based and attempt to create the Holy Grail – a Neuroscience Theory of Fun. Finding these neuroscientific patterns in the world to explain how to make games fun to learn and play will drive the whole industry forward.

In a more broadly applicable sense, I firmly believe in the importance of Having a Theory. Understanding the patterns of behavior and design principles for success will provide a road map for greater achievements in the future. These aforementioned principles apply essentially to any industry, any business, and in fact, any single human being. If you collect and organize your experiences into a theory or an organizing philosophy or structure, you’ll be able to teach more effectively, spread the knowledge, and reproduce and expand your successes.

Malcolm Gladwell said in his New York Times interview, “People are experience-rich and theory-poor… people who are busy doing things don’t have opportunities to collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.” In that same spirit, neuroscience will change the whole game for the game industry and allow creation of a “neuroscientific theory of fun” that can be accurately and precisely applied in the future.

My training in brain research makes me reflect back to my education and it suddenly hit me that much of the school education I received in elementary school was not taking advantage of how the brain learns. It’s clear that the schools and teachers don’t understand, don’t have the tools to teach according to how brains learn. No wonder kids today in general are falling behind.

My parents believe that the education available in school was too narrow and had an inordinate emphasis on the traditional skills of math and language. Emphasis on math and verbal skills are not the problem. The problem is lack of attention and training in other areas that are very crucial for children’s success. They believed that there are many other values and abilities that are required for success once a person is out of school. In practice, they divided our curriculum into a more detailed categorization scheme to ensure that all the abilities needed for success are adequately prepared for and trained.

I see all too often from letters or emails written to me by students and schoolchildren that they are obviously very smart but are struggling in today’s rigid educational system. Once they start lagging behind, they feel they are without support in an uphill fight to catch up. They give up before long, as anyone would. They lose confidence, self-esteem, and passion for learning and school.

The idea of a new and unique learning system stems from my own experiences in learning and neuroscience, my parents’ educational philosophy, and the many correspondences my parents and I have had with other parents and students. We would like to build a learning environment where children will actually find learning fun and be fully engaged and immersed.

Combining neuroscience research findings on how people learn with the philosophy and practices of our version of what students need for success, we are constructing an online social game world where kids can engage in learning with peer-to-peer stimulation in a friendly and fun environment.

In addition to neuroeducational principles, multiple intelligence methodology, and social networking environment, we choose to deliver the core curriculum through games. This is the best format for kids to learn – just ask them.

Our vision is a world where kids can completely relax to focus on learning in a social network gaming environment. They will be engaged and happy. You will see learning at its full force on the learning platform we build for them. They will get smarter. And happier.