LAS VEGAS—Networking, hob-nobbing, and schmoozing were the order of the day at the 2015 DICE Summit, as this is the industry's rare annual show to informally forbid all matter of announcements. No new games, systems, peripherals, engines, or even DLC packages reared their heads, which meant that higher-level industry conversations took the lead.























DICE 2015's keynotes regaled attendees with stories about better hiring practices and decades of changing consoles. Its lectures and panels were hosted by a wide variety of industry veterans, and the advice they doled out ranged from maximizing profits to maximizing fun. Yet the most surprising commonality among the panels, which were meant for a largely triple-A crowd, was how gaming and education are becoming more inextricably linked.

"What's interesting about video games from a government perspective tends not to be about the games themselves, but about the outcomes," former White House senior gaming advisor Mark Deloura told Ars Technica. The decades-long gaming industry vet had just hosted a panel about his work at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he'd just spent a year and a half helping other government offices find and fund educational games (including Budget Hero, Reach For The Sun, and NASA Moonbase Alpha) and hosted the White House's first-ever maker faire and game jam.

Deloura said his takeaway from his White House tenure was that gaming had entered the cultural lexicon so heavily that even President Obama couldn't ignore it, and that the events he hosted, full of excited kids learning about programming, made a big impact. Still, in terms of the current state of gaming, Obama's office cared about titles with hard, measurable impact, particularly the likes of Foldit. If state and federal agencies were to care more about gaming's cultural impact in general, Deloura says, they're going to need more data.

"The challenge is, government is evidence based," Deloura told Ars. "There's not a ton of evidence around game-related things. The field’s young, not a lot of research being done—not peer-reviewed, randomly controlled research. That’s what moves minds and gets programs going inside of government."

“We've capitalized on entitlement”

Tracy Fullerton, the director of USC's video game division, opened her DICE panel with a relatively common assertion at these kinds of events—that the idea of a "non-gamer" will soon vanish. But she quickly escalated to a much bolder, more fascinating claim: that video game design and public education will become synonymous with each other.

"Imagine a world in which a game designer is also a teacher, and vice versa," Fullerton said. "They will guide students through testing and failing, theorizing and strategizing. [This idea is] not about software taking the place of teachers. Games won’t solve issues like student-teacher ratios, but they will solve issues of engagement. A teacher without an expertise in game design will one day be considered unfit for the classroom."

After speaking at length about the ways games systems are already improving public works like transit systems, Fullerton also talked about modern efforts, like Girls Make Games camps, to bring more women into game design. She then challenged the industry pros in the audience to expand such efforts to Latino, African-American, LGBTQ, and other "missing" game designers.

"We need to protect ourselves from our own hardcore, dedicated audience," Fullerton said, alluding to recent, high-profile waves of online harassment within the gaming community. "People who see advancement of the form as a threat to their identity and entitlement. We’ve captitalized on that entitlement, really. That perspective is unique to digital gaming. Before the '90s, games were a pastime for everyone. Families, boys, women, men. We were all gamers. We all need to take back that sense of play for everyone."

Sam Machkovech































Interestingly enough, Fullerton's statement came one day after Tom Kalinske, former CEO of Sega America, took partial credit for fueling the gaming industry's first fanboy wars of the '90s. "We're gonna make fun of [Nintendo]," Kalinske told the DICE crowd while standing in front of a '90s advertising strategy list. "We're gonna position them as the little kids' system."

These days, Kalinske leads the Global Education Learning group as executive chairman, which produces, among other things, the Leapfrog line of edutainment gaming devices. He told Ars Technica that if he ever re-entered the console gaming industry, he'd gravitate toward forming an education-minded startup—possibly to work on more interactive, lively versions of MOOCs. "When I was running Sega, we had the Pico, and it was a very good educational device," Kalinske said. "It made $100 million—that wasn’t chicken feed, but our board said, stop wasting your time on this. It takes too many people, too hard to do, and we’re not making enough profit off it. Do Sonic 4 and quadruple the amount of revenue, a lot easier and more profitable, they said."

Listing image by Sam Machkovech