Jeff McNeill

Jeff McNeill is a PhD Candidate in Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he has been teaching for the past five years, on topics such as organizational communication, marketing and brand communication, and social media. He is one of a handful of innovative instructors who has actually taken students into online worlds; and his experience with gaming and instruction has lead him to an interesting conclusion: education and game design are on a collision course.

Primarily I want to know if you have any ideas on how these gamers are going to move – whether long-term or short-term.

When you put on the headset, you’ll see dragons breathing fire on you and picking you up and eating you. You’ll get a much more visceral experience, and it’s a little safer than a puppet going crazy in Disneyland and throttling you. If people like Disney don’t enter augmented reality soon, then someone will.

Gaming for entertainment will remain its own beast, but gaming as a concept will invade all areas of social life. And so will some of the games. The key here, I think, is that elements of game design are going to permeate the places that normal people go to have fun. You might not need a computer, or a mouse, or an MMO game that’s stored on a server somewhere.

If Warcraft collapsed today, then where would the players go? Other MMO games, single player games, the gym?

JM: I believe mainly MMOs, but who knows? If Warcraft were to go down, for some technical or gameplay reason, then there would be a hundred more games hitting the market trying to gather the gamers into their arms.

Do you anticipate the arrival of more game genres that might directly compete with MMO, single player, multiplayer online, etc?

JM: Like I was saying, augmented reality is going to change the face of gaming. Games will be sprouting everywhere. Things will be transfiguring into game-like elements, more or less, everywhere. The Wall Street Journal just had a great article which said “Work is going to be a game.” Game-like features help us to manage this level of complexity that we can’t keep up with anymore. Students, right now, have more decisions, choices and control than ever before. And yet school hasn’t changed.

Pretty soon, we’re going to be saying goodbye to classrooms where students put their hand up and get a single question in an hour… It’s just not enough interactivity. And once the value of game design is discovered, well, you’re going to see changes in the way that we think about, play, and buy games – whether they’re single player, MMO, or whatever else is just around the corner.

It’s a lot of work, making curricula game-like but it’s also quite fascinating. This is how educators can become re-invigorated in their discipline. Some are seeing it. Some are doing it. Harvard’s Chris Dede is doing it, and has been extremely successful.

We don’t just create an “educational game” and put some content in there. He knew the skills he wanted to teach, and had some fairly sophisticated learning theories to design with. His project is incredibly engaging for the students.

The best part is that lower performing and higher performing students actually perform equally as high through his system, and he’s teaching essential science skills of inquiry, something sorely needed in this country. His results are equivalent across socio-economic status, rural and urban schools. It’s unbelievable to see this kind of effectiveness.

We are an incredibly adaptive species. And that means that games, and game design, may make one of the most important societal contributions seen thus far. We can and we should do this for higher education. It’s incumbent upon us.

Finally, if you were trapped on a desert island with only one game to last you through the long years, what would it be?

JM: Chess, unless Spore lives up to my expectations. But chess is inexhaustible.

Also, if I ever get rescued, I could play competitively. Chess will be around for a long time to come.