Kress 1 Blaise Kress Professor Campbell ENGL 1102 April 8, 2013

Extended Inquiry Project How have video games impacted how business and the work force operate?

Kress 2 With Cliff faces on both sides of a narrow road a three-vehicle convoy passes through mountains. An explosion takes place after the first vehicle passes the explosive device, which has now halted the convoy. As the survivors in the second vehicle crawl out after the explosion left them critically injured. A voice cracks on the earpiece as barrage of bullets cause the ground around the survivors to explode, CONTACT RIGHT! CONTACT RIGHT! The survivors scrambled for their weapons to see rockets propelled to the first and third vehicles leaving all inside them not existent. The enemy forces have now advanced down the cliff face and moving towards the survivors and killing all who are still alive. In a conference room full of young employees of a big business GAME OVER flashes on the screens of the young employees informing them they have lost. A manager walks to the front of the room writing a question to open a discussion on what went wrong with many of the issues being from communicating with peers and taking leadership when necessary and many other problems that happened. To some individuals video games may seem that they are only meant to entertain our selves but there could be more actual practical uses for these video games. Learning to communicate as a team and allowing to everyone to practice carrying their weight in a video game it can help build trust or due many. As part of a new generation coming of age, we have grown up with video games always in the stores trying to sell you the newest and best game systems. Children would spend countless hours playing these games and in return their parents would get angry that their children wasted their lives not doing activities that would help improve themselves. The questions here are; would we as a generation fail in business abilities due to our lack of socialization and determination? Would it impede on our abilities of teamwork and learning new concepts? Would it hinder us by not allowing us to think in broader terms and to be more

Kress 3 innovative? While parents were thinking of video games in a negative context maybe they should have been thinking in broader terms that it could possibly help them in the future. Looking at the usage of video games with a parents perspective in mind they are concerned about the positive or negative effect it would have on their children. Parents are concerned that by hours of over usage of video games children would lose their socialization skills. During the early years of video game consoles there was an option that more than one player could play at a time. So while a child could play alone they could have the option of having someone come and play alongside them. When more than one person would play a video game they would learned to respect each other. Also this helped a person learn competitiveness and to become goal oriented. So in turn one could see that video game usage did not hinder their socialization skills. An example of the type of video games available at this time is the video game Super Mario Bros. The player would need to fight off Bowzer the King Koopla when trying to save Princess Peach or even games on the Nintendo 64 playing the adventure game of Banjo Kazooie. Those games were not based on having an Internet connection, which would lead to having to have a friend come over to play along with you cooperatively. During the time I was growing up if you had a handheld Gameboy you were considered a cool kid. There were not many kids that had a Gameboy and if you did have a Gameboy you were a very desirable person to talk to. If you compare that time frame to the present you will notice that many children have handheld video games or smart phones, which carry many games on them. Compared to nowadays when I go out I notice very many kids have these handheld video games or even smart phones which carry many games on them. Many of the video games on the market currently have Internet connection requirements to play, such as World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Halo. By setting a team goal such as to

Kress 4 capturing another teams flag, the players must work together with people they have not met before. In a book by David Edery and Ethan Mollick, Changing the Game: How Video Games are Transforming the future of business, they found a U.S. Army General Paul Gorman used a training exercise to work on the 29th Infantry Division teamwork abilities in 2004. Using a modified video game called Neverwinter Nights they gave the soldiers a related position in their real life duties to that of the game. It was the Generals thought that if in the corporate world a bonding team moment could occur on a rafting, paintball, or rope course excursion why couldnt the same happen playing a video game? The findings the General had found with the help of the research company BBN, was that the soldiers had increased their ability in working together without even knowing it. (Edery and Mollick 115-117) The basis of teamwork is focused around a simple aspect of communicating with others to achieve the goal. Within the same book by Edery and Mollick, they came across another teamwork game called Everest, developed by a Harvard Business School Publishing and Forio Business Simulations, which had a group of people that all have different roles on the journey climbing up to the top of the highest mountain. Each of the five players is assigned a role with individual descriptions and goals from sports enthusiast to the trip doctor.(117) Over the course of the simulation they encounter problems like oxygen shortages or contracting an illness. They describe the core design as a genius as, it assigns slightly different goals and provides slightly different information to each player...the doctor knows crucial information about various diseases, but cannot act if the marathon runner fails to report that she is feeling illgiven that the game encourages the runner to hide this information. (117) These games are great ways of showing that it takes true communication to succeed and achieve an object, if a member of the team is not specific enough or not forthcoming with information they will lose the game. In real

Kress 5 life, consequences will be a lot worse than just losing as in our Everest game the marathon runner could possibly get injured very seriously or die causing more of a burden of the team. With the use of putting employees in a game that is unrelated to their job they will not operate as they are used to and possible work or communicate in a way that is different either if it is in a expedition journey game or a combat game. Edery and Mollick thought that success in a game doesnt mean you have to play a game that has a direct relation to what your real world job is. (120) Many would assume that those who play video games are introverts and not very enthusiastic in playing or talking to others. Parents may see a better use of their childrens time learning different skills like those John Beck and Mitchell Wade used in their example of piano or golf in their scholarly informative book The Kids are Alright. Saying, both piano and golf follow the same dynamic as that of video games, only that individual who is performing the activity experiences the joy making that ball fall into the hole or stroke the correct keys to a famous composers work. Also finding that those who play video games care just as much about other people as other people do, When presented with the question, I find people more stimulating than anything else, member of this generation answered with boringly similar levels of agreementBut within the game generation, gamers seem to be slightly more people-oriented than those who didnt play games growing up. (112) Video games are a hands on learning experience that help teach a person how to navigate the realm they are in. How better can a person learn than to have the support system of fellow video gamers. Online or side-by-side playing video games give the new comer a tutorial and support system to help the video gamer. These communities inspire teamwork and communication among a group to learn though others experiences.

Kress 6 In an article by James Paul Gee, Learning and Games edited by Katie Salen in The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, Gee discusses just that. With video games we have the ability to learn new tools and practice them over again so that we may master the technique and be prepared to use it for when it counts. (24-25) Growing up many knew of the game Math Blaster, the game was designed to help you learn how to do mental math quickly and easily while prompting the user to also make decisions like that of a normal video game. When it comes to learning how to perform your job it could have a probability of seeming very boring and dry. Edery and Mollick have found that by those workers who are in the zone as so many famous sports athletes call it and being fully involved with your work you can find it easier to do your job and make it efficient. (158) Furthering on the fact that games can increase the productivity Edery and Mollick cited the U.S. militarys use of improving their fighter pilots skills during the Vietnam War. Naval Fighter Weapons School, also know as Top Gun saw that the success of U.S. Naval Aviation Fighters went down since the Korean conflict and created a rigorous computer flight simulation and in the air training and turned them into a war-game of sorts and in a few years the U.S. Navy had seen a progress of going every three enemy planes shot down per one of their own to then thirteen enemy planes to our one plane. Comparing the programs success to the U.S. Air Force whom only changed the technology in their aircrafts, saw that pilots were only doing worse off and came down to shooting down one enemy plane for one of their enemy planes. This real life use of learning new skills shows that you can accomplish more with what you already have if you only learn how to use it more efficiently. (103) Video games have discovered a way of training the players brain to getting fully involved in the game and to work hard by striking up an emotion in the player. Gee writes,

Kress 7 emotion plays an important role in the organization of long-term memory emotions can often help us to both focus our attention on what is important or matters to us an retrieve information from long-term memory (35) In the video game Banjo Kazooie, the game makes the player emotionally attached to following the game to the end by having the main characters sister stolen by an evil witch, striking the player to want to help save the close family member by bringing a emotional attachment to the players desire to want to keep playing even when the game gets more challenging for the player. Video games have a variety of ways to help us perform efficiently in a business workforce environment as we have talked about, but there is another way video games have helped us do more than just working in the office. Video games have been able to help our companies become more innovative and move forward to the next big leap in technology. Airplanes have evolved since their first conception to use them in combat in the First World War. Airplanes since then have been able to be flown from across the world these remote controlled airplanes are called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. In an online article from The Chicago Monitor, Brittany Moore equates the flying of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to that of like a video game where pilots are on the ground looking at a computer screen remote controlling the aircraft from half way around the world. The use of a program like that of an airplane simulation to teach civilian pilots in the world today how to fly passenger and cargo planes alike. Video games may have sparked the idea for some executives thoughts of creating a colony on the planet Mars. Quiet a few video games on the market have had a general setting on a planet in space for instance DOOM and HALO. In an article in TIME magazine Space Tech at South By Southwest(SXSW)- After the Shuttle, Boom Times for Space Innovation? people like

Kress 8 Bas Lansdrop have made it a mission to raise funds to go to the red planet. Some are quoted as looking at leaving in 17 years for the one-way trip for 80,000 people to live on Mars. While there is great potential with video games there are always negative consequences that should be noted. A big thing that everyone is always making comments on is the behavioral difference caused by playing such video games. Harry Brown observed with people worried about what these video games could do to children, In 1982, the case of Americas Best Family Showplace vs. City of New York it was decided that video games are pure entertainment with no informational element. In the early years of video games, the entertainment of these video games and industry was not big enough to be considered for federal standards and were left to local governments. The fears for behavioral differences was so extreme that in 1983 a local government in Des Plaines, Illinois, put a law in effect that barred individuals under the age of twenty-one from visiting an arcade without a parent. In 2000 Brown said that there was much controversy over video games following the Columbine shooting, with scrutiny of videogames. One of the shooters in the Columbine shooting massacre, Eric Harris, was big on playing the video game DOOM that was considered to have violent thematic elements. According to ESRB, the organization in charge of rating video games, DOOM was rated M for mature audiences seventeen years of age or older for Animated Blood and Gore, Animated Violence at the time when the game originally came out in 1993. Eric Harris personally created map levels of similarity to that of the halls and rooms of Columbine High School gave more scrutiny saying that video games serve as murder simulators.(63-66) In the article mentioned earlier by Brittany Moore about Unmanned drones simulating video games she states that while they are helping unman the front lines so soldiers wouldnt

Kress 9 suffer post war illness like those of the veterans of the Vietnam War the use of these drones could lead too difficult for some soldiers to distinguish a real difference between the army based video games that are played at homeand realizing the point and shoot technique in combat is not a game.(Moore) In conclusion the use of video games has been both positive and negative. I feel the positive outweighs the negative and has helped transform our lives in the work and school environment. Video games have proven effective in training us to work together as a team, with communication skills, be determined in our tasks, and learning new procedures and duties. The usage of any product and be seen as either good or bad depending on the personal views of the individual. The usage of such equipment can always be used for either good or bad; however, the majority usage of this equipment is for good purposes. If video games are used in a proper way such as limiting time exposure and the type of video games you personally expose yourself to will have a change in you behavior. I have found that there are more practical uses for video games and that so many could benefit such a wide array of groups. With technology always improving we will see that we will need to have more efficient ways to keep up to the new and developing times.

Kress 10 Works Cited Beck, John C., and Mitchell Wade. The Kids Are Alright, How The Gamer Generation Is Changing The Workplace. Harvard Business Press, 2006. Print. Brown, Harry. Videogames and Education. Armonk, NY, USA: M.E. Sharpe, Inc, 2008. Print. Edery, David, and Ethan Mollick. Changing The Game: How Video Games are Transforming the Future of Business. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc., 2009. Print. Entertainment Software Rating Board. Entertainment Software Rating Board. Web. 13 Mar. 2013. Hunter, George, and Hunia Gao. United States of America. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Investigation of the Impact of User Gaming in the Next Generation National Airspace System. Campbell: Seagull Technology Center, 2011. Print. Kluger, Jeffrey. "Space Tech at South By Southwest (SXSW) - After the Shuttle, Boom Times for Space Innovation." TIME. TIME. 11 MAR 2013: n. page. Web. 11 Mar. 2013. Moore, Brittany. Drone wars vs. video games: Are they one in the same? The Chicago Monitor. The Chicago Monitor, 13 Nov. 2012. Web. 13 Mar. 2013. Salen, K. The ecology of games: Connecting youth games and learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. Print.