Noted game designer and scholar Eric Zimmerman published a manifesto on the future of culture. Keeping in step with the content, the article was published on Kotaku, a videogame blog, rather than an academic journal. The document, “Manifesto: The 21st Century Will Be Defined By Games,” is a preview to his forthcoming book from MIT Press entitled “The Gameful World.” Zimmerman postulates that the 21^st century will be defined by games in what he calls the Ludic Century. He indicates that games are as ancient as culture itself, but digital technology gives games a new role in gating the control of information.

…digital technology gives games a new role in gating the control of information.

Whereas the 20^th century was marked by increasing access to information, the Ludic Century will be marked by an interactive relationship to information. Digital designers and media mavens will play a new role, inviting users to play with information in an unprecedented way. There will also be a democratization of digital experiences similar to that of other industries. Game design will cross all boundaries of art, science, education, and media. Zimmerman states that games are complex systems that might allow us to understand, synthesize, and digest other more complex systems.

The CUNY Games Network is excited to have Eric Zimmerman participating as a featured panelist at the CUNY Games Fest conference in 2014.

There is clearly a need to infuse programming literacy into the Common Core. Disciplines that traditionally reside outside of the domain of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are slowly becoming more technical as the conduit between practitioner and audience migrates to the Internet and mobile devices. Within STEM, those who acquire programming skills are at advantage now that datasets are growing more complicated (e.g., The Brain Initiative). As a case study, consider one of my friends, a postdoctoral fellow studying parasites at Rockefeller University. She spent her evenings this summer steeped in a Python programming language course so that she could learn how to integrate the many software bundles that are now required for her to analyze data. Another friend is a full time programmer for a molecular biology lab at Columbia University. And yet another is a programmer working as a technical designer for the fashion industry. Few of us have to look far to find an acquaintance that is a programmer or had to learn to code to support a non-technical field.

Learning to code is currently a long and difficult path, but it doesn’t have to be. With proper instruction and good tools, programming should be no more complicated than learning a language. What if the act of learning to program was a game itself? Rob Lockhart reviews the current state of affairs in teaching kids to program using games. He also touches on the other tools that teach programming to kids, but the list is not intended to be comprehensive.

A recent study by Joaquin Anguera and the Gazzaley lab at UCSF reported that older adults who receive training on a customized driving simulator demonstrate improvements on tasks that demand divided attention. Performance benefits achieved by the simulator last for 6 months, and the resulting performance of the experimental group exceeded that of a 20-year-old control group that received no training. Electrophysiological measurements in this group also provided evidence for relief from the decline of brain wave activity associated with a decline of cognitive control in advanced age.

Anguera J.A. et al., (2013), Nature. 501: 97–101. doi:10.1038/nature12486

The Gazzaley Lab at UCSF