Elizabeth Newbury:
Welcome, I'm Liz Newbury. I'm the director of the Serious Games Initiative here at the Wilson Center. The Serious Games Initiative is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. It was founded with one goal, and that is to make games to engage the broader public in public policy issues and research. So we both developed games at the Wilson Center is also research serious games and how they are being used by the broader field of practice. I'm joined today by Jason Matthews, creator of Twilight Struggle, and really excited to have you here, Jason, would you mind introducing yourself and how you orient towards the field of serious games?
Jason Matthews:
Thank you, Elizabeth, thank you very much for having me. Of course, the Wilson Center is an institution here in DC, and so I'm excited to participate in your 20th anniversary. That's fantastic. Like everyone else in DC, I'm a lawyer and a lobbyist, but my true passion is in game design, and I was involved also 20 years ago with a game on the cold war called Twilight Struggle, which did really well, honestly, for a hobby and commercial game, and was won a bunch of awards and that sort of thing. And so I have been that phrase encouraged me to continue doing it for whatever reason. So I've done a number of games about the intersection between conflict and politics because I think that was an area that had been under explored in historical commercial board gaming. Since that game has come out. Of course, the foreign policy of Russia has tried to keep everything about it topical, and a lot of people have become interested in the Cold War. It's it's weird to be old enough to have remembered it so vividly, but realize that people younger than me, like yourself, Elizabeth, probably have a much easier recollection of the Cold War. And so Twilight Struggle has been a good introduction for a lot of people in that regard. And I think the way that I interact with serious games is this notion that games can help effortlessly, to expose people in the United States who are not particularly well aware of their own history and are not particularly well aware of how their government functions, and help spoon feed them some of that education that they either slept through or ignored while they were in high school and college. And I make it a mission to try and make my games accessible educationally, that way for people.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Well, if you don't mind me pulling on a quick thread there, when you were creating Twilight Struggle and you were thinking about that accessibility and making history really come to life, I should say that I do know a little bit about the Cold War, mostly through our Cold War history project here at the Wilson Center.
Jason Matthews:
We try use constantly. I would refer to constantly.
Elizabeth Newbury:
How did you approach that with your game design and game make?
Jason Matthews:
So I think one thing that was happening at the same time that Ananda and I were designing Twilight Struggle was that there was this huge influx, what eventually would be called a golden age of board gaming, a huge influx in gaming that was spurred on, kind of by innovations that had occurred in Europe, some clever thinking about how games should work and how players should be engaged all the time, how they should be shorter, how they should be more graphically appealing, all of these sorts of things. And so when we were designing Twilight Struggle, we were very much influenced by what had been occurring in Europe, and we were trying to take a bunch of their tricks and inject them into American game design, which had traditionally been driven by thematics. You're trying to simulate something in particular, but, but we kind of fell down on the well, we're going to simulate World War Two, and it's going to take almost as long to play as actually participating World War Two. And it wasn't maybe the world's best fit, or what it did was meaning that gaming was reserved to a very small niche of people who had the time to do it, mostly college students, right, or high school students, and then after that, it just disappeared. Well, that was another reason that Ananda and I got involved in design in the first place both of us were leaving college. I was done with law school and whatever, and we're entering professional life and married and having kids and whatever, and these eight hour games that we had been playing just were no longer feasible, and so we needed to compact game design in such a way that it could be accessible to, you know, people who are just looking for a couple of hours of entertainment and then move on with their life.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Yeah, so much more realistic for broader audiences to kind of engage in. Not everyone. Nothing against people who play for eight hours or a good
Jason Matthews:
I was one of them, I just can't anymore.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Yeah, so that kind of segues into one of the things that we want this interview series to do is help us reflect on the past, the present and the future of serious games with leaders of the field like yourself, so briefly thinking back to the age of creating Twilight Struggle, or two decades ago or so, what can you describe as the sort of like the catalyst or spark in the field that was happening around serious games at that time?
Jason Matthews:
I think it was right about that time that this, this this notion that gaming could be used in all sorts of ways and to make many more points than we had been using it. It starts entering public consciousness right about then, I guess that it, it kind of keys with the creation of your institute, but you see it popping up all over the place. It's when academia starts taking games seriously for the first time, and you start seeing education or educational programs develop. It's when gamification as a serious era of study starts becoming a real thing, all of these things had existed in some form earlier. There are, there are older precedents, but it's when it really began to come into its own. And a couple of years after I published Twilight Struggle, I had the chance to go over to Europe for a gaming convention. And when I was there, not only they were taking gaming very seriously as an art form, which they think is something that only now the United States is kind of coming around to but in addition, they were designing games on subjects that are were just amazing and groundbreaking to me at the time, games like a game on how do you come out to your parents if you're at LGBTQ teenager? And I saw a game, a role playing game, fascinating role playing game about, um, interacting with your immigrant parent or grandparents. And just the fact that these subjects were being explored through the model of a game was revolutionary, I think, and exciting, so I'm glad I was able to get in kind of on the early part of that curve.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Yeah. I mean, one of the, if you'll forget, the turn of phrase constant struggles that we have in this field, is that the term serious games itself might confuse people, because games indicatively sort of evoke the sort of frivolity or like fun aspect of it, whereas what you're talking about from the Cold War to some of the personal identification struggles that people have, those are really serious topics. And how do you reflect on that sort of serious topic into the medium of games which does have that fun or entertainment background to it?
Jason Matthews:
Well, for my own purposes, I still want my games to be fun, and not every designer does, and people are doing interesting things where their game is not supposed to be fun. It's supposed to evoke an emotion, or show you how difficult a particular problem is, or whatever, or it's purely for an educational experiment, or it's supposed to provoke a conversation, like the purpose that a game can be used for? Well, we've just been expanding that horizon quite a bit lately, so that's that's exciting, yeah. So, but nevertheless, you know, I'm part of the consumer economy, so if my games aren't fun, I'm not going to get a royalty check out of the deal, so, I'm still interested in the fun aspect, but the fun for for most players of a game like mine, is going to come from the competition, the fact that they're going to learn a little bit while they're playing a game, because they're they're apt to not know everything about the subject that is incorporated into the into the simulation or the the model that we're using and in Twilight Struggle in particular, we're trying to create some of the mindset that the participants were going through, and we use some gimmicks to get at it, but this kind of sense of paranoia and fear that is part and parcel with the cold war experience, we try and give you a little bit of it in that box, because we feel that that helps the game resonate and makes the play experience much more impactful.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Yeah, it's, it's one of those things that's always tricky as a game designer, because you have, like, the learning goals that you want, what you want people to walk away with, and then sort of the atmosphere or the tone that supports that learning, and it's kind of like a meta goal on top of it, like, like you're saying it was a terrifying moment in history. So trying to evoke that in a game experience seems part and parcel to the learning experience.
Jason Matthews:
Exactly.
Elizabeth Newbury:
So my next question is, more in the present day, so fast forwarding to today. How far do you think the serious games field has come?
Jason Matthews:
Light years? Literally, not only is there all of this academic infrastructure underpinning it, which there was none, not even very long ago. But now it seems like there's a games department at every major university or there. Or I find out there's one like I just found out about American University a moment ago. So that part is exciting, I see the expansion in my own little niche of this. Obviously, War Gaming had been part of the tradition of the armed services in this country for a very, very long time, more than a century. But for the first time in recent memory, I see war gaming and the use of war gaming expanding into the other branches of the US government. The State Department now has a robust gaming, War Gaming capacity that they've been kind of building up the Coast Guard, obviously, FEMA, obviously, a lot of the CIA has always had one as well the intelligence services. But anyway, anybody who would benefit from the idea of practicing something that they don't want to actually happen, I think, has realized, hey, you know, this is a way we can go about it. There's actually a well established field. There are a lot of academics who can help us with it. And there are even places we can go, send people to be trained. And so I see it proliferating throughout the US government in a way that just wasn't, wasn't true,
Elizabeth Newbury:
Yeah. So one of the hats I wear is, I'm chair of the Federal Games Guild, which is mostly civil service. And I can definitely echo what you've said, there a lot of more internal games, practicing simulations and that sort of thing. One of my colleagues at the CDC has a coal mining training. So exactly what you're saying they use virtual reality and augmented reality to help coal miners train. It makes sense, right? You don't want to just throw them into the mines. Please, don't ever do that, exactly, but it's a safety net there.
Jason Matthews:
Yeah that's super exciting. The United Nations also has been the United Nations and the World Bank have been doing quite a bit of it as well.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Yeah, and we can provide a couple of links down in the description below for people who are interested in learning more about those game based approaches. To kind of round out our time here, although I could pick your brain probably for hours, what do you hope is the future for this field? What do you what do you think is the next big thing that's coming? Or what do you hope is the next big thing coming?
Jason Matthews:
The thing that I hope is coming is going to be hard, and I have a whole little soap box to get on about it. What I hope is coming is that we will more formally integrate gamified learning, gamification, however you want to term it, into our public education system in the United States. There the largest game company, well, maybe the largest non Mattel Hasbro game company in the world is called Asmodee, French, and they had some successful experiments introducing gaming and education in France and board gaming in particular. And they had begin, they had begun to organize themselves to do something similar here in the United States. But they have, there is a huge problem there. There's like a one benefit, but a huge problem, which is that you have to convince all of these school boards in the United States that this is something that they need to do, that they can afford to take time away from standardized testing and their preparation for all of that and inject it and it will be a meaningful improvement in education for students. And you essentially have to do that 1000s of times in the United States, because you'd have to do it to every school board, whereas in France, you can go to the Ministry of Education and kind of get this to happen. The good part of that is we also have 1000s of places where you can experiment with game education, and you won't up and the entire educational system by in, you know, participating in those experiments. But the thing that we need, and we don't have a ton of, is applying games in education is a multi-disciplinary problem. It requires educators, people who work on pedagogy, game designers, people who work on child development, all of those questions need to be answered, and while we are beginning to build the academic infrastructure for it, we don't have a lot of great studies at this stage. Not very many people can tell you with any real certitude, does this game help anybody learn anything? And if so, we need to know what kind of games help people learn. When do you introduce them into classroom? Is it better to do a lecture before a game or a game before a lecture, like all of these kinds of very base level questions that we need answered, and we kind of are relying on academia to dive in, but they're all multidisciplinary, and so it is going to require some either dedicated academics who are willing to jump over boundaries, or some collaborative research that so far has not materialized, but we desperately need to make that a reality.
Elizabeth Newbury:
So for game developers looking to try to figure out that sort of impact, what sort of advice would you give them?
Jason Matthews:
Well, I think, you know, the scientific method is the kind of thing that we're going to have to have, like you're not going to be able to go to a school board without real experiments. But what I think is exciting is that some school districts have already illustrated their interest in the field. I know Seattle has, for instance, has been doing some really interesting things in this regard. But school districts all across the country, and there are already people inside of education that are like, yes, we have to do this. My gosh, you know. And they're like local champions. So I think it's important to identify that local champion inside a school district team together and work together to develop a project that can work both for teachers and for game developers, because so often the two are not communicating in a ways, and we get a lot of game development, educational game developments that simply don't work for the classroom because they're not structured the right way. And so then we'd end up with an experiment that doesn't matter.
Elizabeth Newbury:
Yeah, as a recovering academic, I cannot say enough how much research would be beneficial in those cases. So and I just want to thank you so much for your time today. I know this was a very brief interview, just a taste of Twilight Struggle and your journey to here, but I hope that we can keep the conversation going. And for those who are tuning in, we're going to have a whole series of these interviews from the Serious Games Initiative. We'll link some more information about both the Serious Games Initiative and Jason down below, and just look forward to continuing the next 20 years of serious games. Thank you so much.
Jason Matthews:
Thank you, Elizabeth.
