 Hello, everyone. My name is Ashlyn Sparrow. I'm the assistant director of the Western Game Lab at the University of Chicago. I am a game designer, an experienced designer, and basically a person whose trajectory in James has been the road less traveled. And honestly, that in itself has allowed me to think about interaction design and frameworks in a way that I think is a little bit more playful. But before we get started, let us define our currents. We must answer the question, why games, right? Games are a huge cultural phenomenon. And so much so that there is 1.82 billion self-identified gamers out there in the world. Games are one of the fastest growing cultural forms. 97% of teams play games. The average age of a gamer is 37. And 43% of American women are gamers. And just in 2020 alone, the games industry has grossed $139.7 billion. Grand Theft Auto, a very popular game that was released in 2013, grossed $1 billion in the first three days. Pokemon Go was downloaded 550 million times in the first couple months. Minecraft has sold 200 million copies. It was more profitable than the Avengers in-game, even if you don't count the merchandise. And in 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft IP were purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. Between September 1st and 14th of 2020, among us was downloaded 42 million times. And overall, it was downloaded 264 million times in 2020. In early 2020, it was revealed that gamers have put in 25 billion hours into Call of Duty games, the entire series. To put this in perspective for you, the human civilization is only 6,000 years old. Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. Call of Duty, 2.85 billion years. League of Legends is now one of the most popular PC games in the world with gamers logging over 1.3 billion hours of gameplay. And games are moving beyond the screen and permeating other artistic and cultural forms. Games has tapped into the K-pop industry and has actually created a group called KDA, which is what you see here, with their music video pop stars. It imagines four of the characters as a critically acclaimed K-pop group. When the video first dropped on YouTube, it exceeded 20 million views in the first four days and reached number five on the Apple music pop charts in the US, performing better than any other League of Legends music video. And note, there are quite a few bands that Riot has produced. And so as you can kind of see, games are all around us. They are permeating our music, our phones, everything, so much so that we are actually also seeing a huge movement in terms of gamification. And gamification is when you take game elements and use them for non-game purposes. So when we think of Fitbit or Nike Plus, how they're, they give you points that they give you stars and achievements for things. Khan Academy gives you badges for watching certain videos and taking tests and doing those things, right? So anytime you see those elements, you're probably in a gamified system. And so they're so popular, right, that now it's like, well, games are everywhere, games are everything, but we have to also ask this question, what is a game? There are multiple definitions of the game, but my personal favorite definition comes from Jasper Jules in his book, Half-Life. A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome where outcomes are assigned different values. The player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome. The player feels emotionally attached to the outcome and the consequences of the activity are negotiable. And so this definition has no mention of a medium, right? Because games are transmedial. There's no single game medium. There are multiple game media, each with its own kind of strengths, right? There's the computer, there are board games and card games. You can also think of the real world as a game platform to be used. And so that's the one reason why I love this definition and also the fact that it's so broad. There are basically only six elements to a game, right? The fixed rules that have to be really well-defined, right? The number of arguments that you probably get into with people when you start to play UNO, it's probably insane, right? You have to have clear rules. How are you gonna play your game of UNO versus what's your house rules? What's the actual rules, et cetera, et cetera, right? The games have a variable and quantifiable outcome, right? For the game to work, the game should provide different outcomes, right? You do this, you get outcome A, you do something else, you get outcome B. There's a valorization of the outcome. It means that some of the outcomes are better than others, right? That's how you get winning or losing or maybe with games that you just complete. There are good endings, there are bad endings, there are better endings, et cetera. Players must exert effort. All games have a challenge to them. They are interactive in some way. If there isn't this level of effort or interactivity, those are simulations. Players are also attached to those outcomes, right? They care about them. It's a psychological thing. And then the consequences are negotiable. There's a degree of separation from the rest of the world following the consequences of the game. They're all negotiable. But that separation is the thing that's negotiable, right? Where you could play a game of poker, you could bet real-world money and your bank account goes negative or you can not bet real-world money, right? And that consequence right there is based off of what the player actually wants. And so then, with this, I'm kind of curious with how life is set up, could we actually think of life as a game, right? Life does have rules. We care about certain outcomes for certain actions that we take, whether it's a test or going on a date. We have to exert effort into everything that we do. We're attached to our outcomes and depending on what it is that we're doing, the consequences really are negotiable. And so I'm really interested in thinking about how we can take the game design principles and use them in the real world and start making a more equitable and just system. So a design question that I might ask is how might play and game design influence our social cultural systems? Well, they sort of kind of already are in weird ways. Like I said before, games are kind of everywhere. And the way that people are interacting, especially on the internet, is very game-like to be quite honest. For instance, take QAnon, the right-wing conspiracy theory group. The way that I'm gonna describe it to you is gonna sound very much like a game that there is an anonymous person known as Q who has managed to find secrets about the deep state that contain information about Democrats and Hollywood actors who are conducting violence on children and the only person who can save them and save us all is Donald Trump. How does that work? Their motto, you have to do your own research. There are times where there are random drops in the real world where you have to go to a physical location and you might receive a cryptic clue or message that you then have to decode for yourself. There's a group of people online who are trying to decode that message and try and figure out what it all means. It operates like what we'd call as an alternate reality game, where it's a conspiracy that you're trying to follow and try and figure out and uncover the mystery. There's an investigation. They've managed to gamify research. If only they managed to gamify research for social good. Another example that I think is kind of more positive and interesting but also kind of weird is what happened with Wall Street bets. The group of redditors who decided to take down Wall Street by betting or by investing buying stock from GameStop because a group of investors were betting against GameStop. What's interesting with this group is that they, like good gamers, understood the rules of engagement. They understood the stock market and they decided to play Wall Street's game but use their same energy, but use it against them, right? And because of this, there are quite a few companies that went under because they had to sell back their stock which is kind of fascinating to me. So I like the energy of Wall Street bets. I would like to see them do things for, again, social good. Imagine what we could do with climate change with the same energy that Wall Street bets has. So this leads us nicely to games and social impact. And the types of games that I'm gonna specifically focus on are what we call serious games. And these are games that are designed for a purpose outside of entertainment. This term came from Clark Act in the 1970s. They evolved out of his long dual fascination with scientific problems and then dramatic human conflicts on the other. And so I design serious games all the time in my lab and we talk about a lot of different affordances of the games and the game space that, again, kind of similar to Yule's definition of what a game is, the games are really good at providing player agency. Players must exert effort, which then means games are really good at providing players agency. Players know when they can or cannot do something, when they can make change to something or when they cannot. And that's really, really powerful and really, really important. There are a lot of times where in the real world people don't feel like they have agency. They don't feel like they have choice or power. So how could we start thinking about changing some of our systems in the real world to make sure that people do have power, do have agency, do have choice? Games are really good for trial and error, right? Like you can try something, you can fail, you can put on a different strategy and it's totally fine, right? A game tells you you've lost or you've failed or you've died, not to punish a player but to really say, hey, what you just did didn't really work. Maybe you should try again, right? Which then means it's a space for safe failure. Can't fail tests in school multiple times, right? Like there are too many negative consequences for that and there's no safety net after that. And they're really good at depicting systems like extraordinarily well, like you can build galaxies and universes in games, which is kind of cool. One other thing that we talk about in terms of game is called procedural rhetoric. This is a term from the game theorist, Eric Zimmerman, which mainly talks about how games can persuade people through rule-based representation, right? So in the war, for instance, we have the written word and we have rhetoric there and how we can persuade people with our words and how we write. Games make their persuasive arguments through the rules, right? And so maybe if we started thinking about the systems that we interact with and the rules that we have to engage in, that they actually do make meaning behind them, right? Who are the types of people who get tech jobs, right? Do they have to go to certain colleges? Where are people looking like? What are the rules and how you recruit? How you look at resumes, right? And that will tell you, based off of who's hired, is this a place that other people feel like they can be a part of, right? What are the rules telling people, right? Based off of what they see, based off of how they interact, right? A thought, more of a philosophical question. Can social systems be thought of like a game? Let's try and think of this. Let's take voting, for instance. Voting, is it a game? I think not, but maybe kind of is. If we look at gerrymandering, for instance, like we know that depending on where you are, if you're identified as blue or red, that depending on how the district lines are drawn, that it can change the vote. Hmm, if I view this as a game, that doesn't seem fair. It doesn't seem equitable. In order for it to be fair and to be equitable, you would want to do exactly what you see in version one. It's a perfect representation. The numbers are equal across all districts. The districts are all the same size, right? And then you can count, based off of the majority, here you see blue wins. The second version, while blue does win, it's compact and unfair. Why? Because it's not equitable about the number of red that's in the same space, right? And then three is not equitable either. That's not a fair game. If we think less about ourselves as individuals, the way that a lot of politicians do, and we think more about our players, our constituents, our gamers, right? And we want to make sure, but again, it's not just one type of gamer. It's all the gamers that are playing our game that we need to actually balance the system out. We need to actually make it fair. I also think about this in terms of, you know, how race was constructed in the United States that it did not have to be this way, but the US has decided throughout history that certain people were not welcomed in spaces, right? And that's why you had whites-only spaces or black-only spaces, why people could not marry outside of each other's race, right? Certain people couldn't obtain jobs, right? People couldn't vote. And so it didn't actually have to be designed this way, but it was. It then also cascaded into who could get loans to get houses, right? It's all sort of crazy. And this means that these are all elements of what we call structural violence, right? These are political and economical and social policies that are created that create inequities. Policies are nothing more than rules. And the people who are playing and interacting in these systems are our players and it's unfair for our players. And again, none of these designs are innate, but unfortunately they all have real world consequences. So again, how might we redesign systems with a focus towards the future? How can we use the knowledge of game design and game design thinking, making things sure that are fun or engaging or fair and equitable, easy access? The onboarding process is really nice in that regardless of your immutable qualities that you still have a fair chance of navigating said system. There are so many different things that a game designer thinks about, right? The aesthetics, how it looks, the mechanics, the actions that the player takes, how those actions interact with one another and form dynamics, the narratives of how people interact with these systems, the communities that form around it, right? There's so many things. And most importantly, we have to think about the social cultural implications. And I know that I gave huge overarching systems that might be hard to focus on, but think about what you could do as an individual, right? At the individual level, maybe you can focus on your own biases and say like, huh, do I surround myself with other people who just look like me is my company full of people who only look like me? How can I go and find people who are different and talk to them, right? Because it all starts with self-awareness. It also means that you need to seek different perspectives just like a good game designer. A game designer tests their game with multiple people and not only people who are experts at the game, but people who are not experts. That's why difficulty levels exist, right? And one thing that game designers do all the time is they ask the question, why? Why do you feel this way? Why do I as a game designer feel this way when I hear maybe negative comments about my game? Why do I feel uncomfortable? Why do you feel uncomfortable, right? It's really important to start to diagnose that and then think about ways that like, what happens if you swap out the individual for a different person or one problem for another? Do you still feel the same way? If you don't feel the same way, why is that? If we focus on your community, if we focus on your company, right? You can think about diversifying your team like an RPG, right? You have a wizard, you have a sorcerer, which is technically different. You have a warrior, a bard, right? What does your team look like, right? What skill sets does your team have? What backgrounds does your team have? What knowledge does your team have? And think about adding new people as adding to your culture, right? Don't be afraid to reconfigure, try something new. And most important, I think you have to listen and trust the most marginalized people, the people on the edge cases, because those are the people who you're excluding the most. Those are the people who might actually be able to provide you more insight in the experience that you're ultimately designing and making sure that it's fair and equitable for everyone, right? So I encourage everyone to think like a game designer, make sure that you're going out, talking, changing your perspective, interacting with new people. And don't be afraid to say, you know what, I don't know, or oh, I'm wrong. I will actually change things to make sure that you're included because I care, because you want a fun, inclusive, enjoyable experience. It's not all a competition, it's not all a zero sum game. Collaboration and cooperative games exist too. And maybe the systems that we interact with can also be collaborative too. Thank you.