On Using Games to Transform Behavior

Today's Art23ac lecture doubled as a CITRIS presentation. I'm not sure what the topic of the talk was supposed to be, but it started off with a vague description of 'service' and 'co-production' that I didn't really buy .

There were two key concepts that stood out from the talk. One was how an image 'performs' for us rather than simply encoding information. Prof. Niemeyer started with an image with flat text data from a weather station for an example of an image with lots of data, but one with a performance that was boring. Then we moved to a line graph of weather data over a time axis. This we could relate to and understand as a trend of global warming. Then there were a series of colored maps and globes, each more eye-catching, but with less data information. The final picture was a cover of 'Gears of War' and a YouTube trailer with flames and fallout in the background. The images that caught my attention and evoked thoughts of heat and evil were the later ones, but really the earlier images were the ones that actually encoded the most information. The warning is to carefully tradeoff between raw dramatic performance and useful information.

The other big concept I really liked is what games can do to transform a person's consciousness. When I walked into the room, I saw a person playing a game with a balance board that looked like a shrunken DDR mat. The board controls a paddle in the center of the screen which can be used to deflect colored balls into correspondingly colored hoops as the hoops revolved around the board. After the player made a few successful shots, the game got harder by making the radius of the circle of hoops smaller, and changing the speed of revolution. Then it would take a while for the player to adjust and make finer grained movements to control the paddle. Besides having an incredibly novel interface, I was amazed by how this system is used by physical therapists for injuries and old people to improve balance. In fact, all the games he later demonstrated had a message and was meant to change the player in some way. One of them wanted to focus on pollution, another on global warming. They all had interesting interfaces and were all intrinsically fun and addictive. The other really cool interface was one that required 3 players to control forward/backward, lateral movement, and altitude respectively. The way a player increased or decreased their control was by making sound into a mic. They'd navigate through a 3d world of some part of human anatomy. There were games for trauma, games for memory loss, and other concepts that were helpful to society.

I thought the talk was great. It gave a good overview of how one can control and manipulate a person's thinking in a indirect way. By using various media combined with an interface that makes the player interact and become part of the game, these games encouraged the player to take a part of that game back with them into their daily lives.

Check out his bio page for links to the games he's collaborated on