 So we're going to play a game in which you would call out a person, fictional or real, living or dead, who matches the criteria on cards, I'm going to show you. So we're going to play this game as a beginning of our session in this afternoon at the beta zone. So when you see the two words on the screen, shout out a person, fictional or real, living or dead, who matches the criteria. Male wizard. Harry Potter. We got a Harry Potter right in the front row here. All right, you would get those cards in this game, okay? All right, nerdy CEO. Wow, it was unanimous Bill Gates. Wow, wow, does he know that? Musical failure. This could be culturally specific. Anyone? Combination? I think if, does anyone know Dr. Spock from Star Trek? He actually had several record albums, Leonard Nimoy. I would maybe classify that. They were not great. How about this one? Pardon? Shout it out. Marie Curie, Marie Curie, she could count, I think, yep, yep. And how about this? Name your Iranian economist. Abbas Miracor is one, for example. So all right, so we're going to get, I'm going to explain what this game is about in a little bit, but first I want to just introduce my background, why I got into thinking about games in the first place. You know, I, it's kind of unlikely that I'm here speaking with you today. I grew up in the Midwest of the United States. My grandfather died a homeless man in New York City. My father was a factory worker who had an eighth grade education, and I was a sickly child, and I spent more time in hospitals than I did in climbing trees or doing things that other kids did. So what was interesting to me, of course, was that I was just a kid. I didn't know that I was in any way disadvantaged or poor. We were in a rich country in the United States. But I also knew that the world did not seem to have many options. And for people like us, we didn't really think that we could do a lot to change the world. Things started changing for me one Christmas when I got this Atari 2600 gaming console. We hooked it up to a used black and white television set, and I started playing video games. And I, like I really started playing video games day and night. I played hungry. I stayed up. I just kind of really obsessed. You've seen probably your children doing the same thing at home. And what's interesting is that I played video games before I read great literature. I played video games before I saw great art. And for me, video games were something that were, there was profound. There were these little worlds that had rules that I could understand and master. And that was really special to me. And it didn't occur to me, for example, that girls didn't like technology because I certainly like technology. And these magical portals became things that I became obsessed with hanging out in video game arcades. Games reacted to me and to my choices. And when you're a kid, you rarely get to make big choices. And so for me, games changed my world in the way I saw myself. Beyond reading and multiplication and all the clever things they teach you in school, I learned things from video games that now research is backing. That video games can teach persistence. That they can normalize failure and iterative try and try again. That it's okay to not know the answer but to keep experimenting and trying out. To come up with unusual solutions, strategizing and reflecting. So if someone had told my family that a video game would actually change my economic status, send me to college, get a PhD, all of these kinds of things, that would be very surprising, I think. And I don't think anyone would have really believed that at the time. But it's something I actually do believe. But beyond me and the story about how I got into video games, there are pressing problems that all of us are here at the summit, at the forum to deal with. Climate change, poverty, sustainability issues, gender inequity is a big topic. Of course, this here is sexual assault. These are all massive topics. And for me, the first idea that comes to my mind is, well, what could video games do in that space? Normally we tackle the world's biggest problems through treaties, through policy, through careful laws, through design. But history keeps repeating itself. And what could we use games and something kind of fundamental to human history to do? So I make all kinds of games, sports, digital games, card games, and I instinctively see these as methods by which we can actually have conversations and even change our minds and behavior. And I will tell you that the games I make, well, they don't necessarily look like they're solving social problems and that's what I'm going to unpack in the rest of my talk. I'm going to share with you four themes or four kind of surprising and counterintuitive ideas that I have discovered in the last 10 years of working in video games that might stir some conversation for you in the Q&A. So first theme is that video games, and all kinds of games really, can lead to open-mindedness. And they can disrupt stereotypes. A few years ago with my research team, we came up with a game that we played at the beginning of the session. The game is called Buffalo, and you match the person living or dead to these cards. Now at first it was a terrible game. It was about science. And you had women, chemists, female biologists, male physicists, and this was not a game anyone would ever play. It was terrible. I mean, really bad. But that's okay, because you can iterate. And so we iterated and iterated and came up with a really kind of fun party game that people can play. Now what's interesting about the game is that after 20 minutes of gameplay in an empirical study, we found that social identity complexity and average universal orientation scale, which are the ways that psychologists measure bias, showed significant changes. And in fact, the game seems to lower people's biases, even after 20 minutes of gameplay. We don't know how long the effect lasts, but what's interesting is that games are played over and over. So if you think about it, the game could be inoculating us against our biases and stereotypes. And in fact, the inventor of the IAT test, if anyone's familiar with that test for bias at Harvard University, among other universities, claims that the only thing that can really counteract our biases and stereotypes are counterintuitive examples, which we find in the game through just random play. The second situation I want to talk to you about is fictionalization, and this is going to be a shocker. Asserting that the more fantastic and fictional the story, the more effective the message. So I was working with a public health group in the United States, and they wanted to increase vaccination. And they said we could make another educational pamphlet or flyer, but we really need to get people engaged in this situation. We made a game called Pox to get people talking and thinking about vaccination. It's a participatory game where you're collaborating with other players to stop the spread of a virus. Well, one gamer said, I really like zombie games, and I thought, great, we'll make a zombie version of the game. So we made a board game version of the game, a zombie version of the game, and of course an iPad version of the game, and did, again, empirical studies on how people are playing these games, all of the games in person. And we found some interesting stuff. The most effective game at shifting attitudes and behaviors, shifting attitudes and mindsets was the zombie game. Yes, zombies. Think about that. Okay, I won't act out zombies right now. Zombies have come up before today. I mean, today, this is the second time I'm talking about zombies. I don't know why it's not on my head. Okay. Games can help us associate, make new mental associations, and possibly help save the planet. We worked with climate scientists to think about ways in which we could get people recycling. This is a common thing. Everyone wants to have people recycling. There's a popular game called Cards Against Humanity. Some of you may have heard of it. It's a horrible game. It has a lot of negative things. You do horrible things, and you can see some of the example kinds of questions over here. This is like the kind of horrible thing that would happen in the game. It's over-the-top humor, very dark humor. We made our own version of the game, Cops Arrest Manatees, and inserted climate-related themes, things about penguins, things about the Arctic, and they weren't nice. They were just inserted in there in the same theme of the game. And then we did a devious study in which our IRB allowed us to have a study in a bar. We gave everyone cups of water until the study was done, then they could do what they wanted in the bar. And we monitored their recycling behaviors. Now, baseline control condition, just playing a regular version of the game, unfortunately, the baseline recycling rate was 10%. That's not so great. It's really embarrassing, actually, especially in an educated town of New England. But in playing the climate-related version, where there was some climate-related content snuck in, we had a recycling rate of 30%. So, huh, that's very interesting. And how we did that was we actually put invisible ink, spy ink on the cups. We went through the garbage. You know, it was awesome, actually, to just like, all right, we're going to find out what is in this recycling. So it was pretty hands-on research in that particular way. Now, this is an artwork by Yoko Ono. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's called Play It By Trust. It's from 1966. And this is Yoko Ono's attempt to get us to really look at conflict. She was a big, and still is, a big pacifist. I like this example because it helps us rethink even common games, even games that are very old in culture and how we could actually redefine them. And can we look at social issues through new perspectives? So one last example I want to give you is a sexual assault, which is something that seems very difficult to make a game about, right? Is there the name game just seems kind of offensive? So what we did to work on this project to increase bystander intervention when there are issues where college students may be faced with sexual assault, you know, in the United States, one out of five women on college campuses faces attempted or completed sexual assaults, which is the most violent crime on U.S. college campuses. We made a comic book game in which these college kids are on a spring break trip, and they go into an alien planet and they see weird situations and they have to intervene. And in our study of this game, we found that playing the game, especially with male college students, the first year college students, significantly shifts their attitudes and self-beliefs that they can effectively intervene as bystanders. Again, the secret to this and to all the other games is that we don't reveal the purpose of the game. We're assessing stuff. When you play this game, you do not think it's about sexual assault. It's not obvious at all. It's actually kind of funny, you know, they're going to sporting events and eating pizza and stuff. The sexual assault stuff is buried in there. So by using these highly fictionalized worlds and making a game that does not preach about the dangers of anything, we have messages that can actually sink in. Now, all of these games work by a process called embedded design, where we're artfully weaving in content and shifting attitudes and behaviors. You could call it nudging as well. And this is something that we've been working on for the last 10 years to see how we can actually address problems in real ways. You know, our challenges don't change when we know more facts. And we all here really find facts very, very important, but that's not the only thing that's going on in the human mind. You know, we grow up playing and experimenting and imagining new worlds and systems. So we need to be able to take other elements, besides facts, into our decision-making processes. Can we keep a play spirit alive as we move forward in any sector? Can we actually free ourselves to make new models and invent new voices for new solutions to social issues? Just imagine what worlds are possible if we use games to reinvent our futures right here at Davos. Mark.