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“I modified a version of ‘Dance Revolution’ a few years ago
and have got older people to play this rapid-stepping game,
and what we’ve done is reduce their risk of having a fall through
engaging this kind of game,” Smith says. “Older people fall over
a lot – it’s quite horrendous – 1 in 3 people over the age of 65
who are living independently will have at least one fall each year
and many of those falls can be injurious. We know if we can get
older people to exercise and do lots of it, particularly balance- and
strength-related exercises, then we can significantly reduce the risk
of them having a fall.”
Smith thought the best way to engage vulnerable people in
exercise and to make sure they were doing enough of it was to
situate the activity in the living room, thereby reducing a lot of the
barriers to entry.
“For me, using the television and
game consoles was a good way to
engage people in exercise, so we
built a modified version of ‘Dance
Revolution’ and demonstrated
through a randomised control trial
that we could reduce their risk of
having a fall,” he says.
Earlier this March, in South
Korea, the Google-developed
supercomputer AlphaGo artificial
intelligence vanquished Lee Sedol,
one of the greatest Go players of all
time, in a best-of-five series of the
famously complex strategy game
from Asian antiquity. In the midst
of this battle, University of Sydney
professors warned of how the
broader application of AlphaGo’s
masterful AI to robotics, smoke
detectors and driverless cars could
presage our impending doom.
“A human player can be affected
by emotions such as pressure
or happiness, but a computer
will not,” opines professor
Dong Xu from USYD’s School
of Electrical Engineering and
Information Engineering. “If a
supercomputer could totally imitate
the human brain, and have human
emotions such as being angry or sad,
it would be even more dangerous.”
No wonder then that USC
is initiating a dedicated bachelor of serious games to impart
knowledge of the subject to the emergent generations, lest we all
fall slaves to Terminator-esque android overlords. Multivalent by
nature, it’s a subject area that borrows elements from sociology,
anthropology, history, design, psychology and more, Smith says.
And he’s proud of USC for being a trailblazer in this space.
“There are other game-related bachelor degree programs –
there are bachelor of interaction and design and bachelor of game
design courses,” he explains. “What we’ve done is position an
offering that is different from all of those but integrates elements of
all the related kinds of content out there at the moment.
fAcuLty fOcus
“The whole notion of serious games is a relatively recent
phenomenon. There are elements of ways in which people have
been thinking about serious games, as opposed to games for
entertainment. I suspect that I’m correct in saying this is the first full
bachelor degree program in serious games, at least in this country.”
Smith says a lecture in the program would strip down to the
fundamentals of what games are all about. Students would
look at the history of pen and paper games, board games and
digital games to find out what makes people tick. ‘What are the
behavioural determinants of engaging in a kind of behaviour –
potentially over a long period of time – that makes use of the
rewarding elements of game play?’ is the type of essay question
that would confront students.
Listening to Smith talk about this
highly specialised – some might say
niche – university course calls to
mind one of the plenary discussions
from the recent Universities Australia
Higher Education 2016 conference
in Canberra. Dr Simon Eassom
is global manager for education
systems at IBM and he was at the
summit to instigate a conversation
about the usefulness of a university
education to the Generation Zers
tertiary institutions are trying to lure
away from the workforce and into
continued scholarship.
“The disconnect between
universities and requirements
of industry isn’t narrowing; it’s
growing,” Eassom warns. “The
insight from corporate recruiters
highlights that higher education
is not adapting fast enough to
the changes in business and
industry. Corporations are unable
to find applicants with sufficient
relevant experience to be effective
immediately in the workforce.”
So is a bachelor of serious games a
pathway to meaningful employment
or a lifetime of student debt? Smith
assures me it is the former.
“We need to be able to have our
students capable of looking at the
problems presented to them from
an external stakeholder and thinking
about how games might be used to solve that particular problem.
This course is situated where the government is trying to go with
its whole STEM innovation agenda,” he says, citing the ‘jobs of the
future we don’t even know exist yet’ aphorism.
“What we need to do is equip our students with not just
numeracy and literacy, but digital literacy,” he ar