GameDaily BIZ: At the Serious Game Summit next month, you're presenting a keynote on the age of media convergence and collective intelligence. What is the premise behind the speech and in what ways do you believe the game industry will be affected by this media convergence?

Henry Jenkins: This talk builds on some core ideas from my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The book's core premises could be identified as the following:

1. Convergence is a cultural rather than a technological process. We now live in a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms.

2. In a networked society, people are increasingly forming knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence.

3. We are seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture (a contemporary version of folk culture) as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their personal and collective interests.

4. We are acquiring skills now through our play, including our game play, which we will later apply towards more serious ends.

Because the book mostly focuses on popular culture, there has been some backlash suggesting that it ignores the role that alternative or nonprofit media can play. I wanted to respond to that criticism through this talk by outlining the implications of these changes for serious games producers.

On the one hand, just as fans attach themselves to television shows and rework them to reflect their fantasies, serious games advocates can attach themselves to existing commercial games that have pedagogical potentials and rework them to serve their own agendas. In my own work, we have been modding Neverwinter Nights to create a new game, Revolution, which re-enacts the culture and politics of the American Revolution.

Other examples might include the "universities" that have grown up around [Sid Meier's] Civilization or simply the development of teacher's guides to get students to think critically about the models of society in Sim City. A student has modified The Sims and Grim Fandango to turn them into tools for mastering foreign languages in a particularly engaging and immersive way.

On the other hand, much of the learning that currently surrounds popular culture takes place at the intersections between media or between media and the real world. I want to look at ways that serious games designers can tap the power of collective intelligence and participatory culture.

Here, I am interested, for example, in alternate reality games which already build on research and collaboration skills but which might also incorporate information about the real world, and I am interested in augmented reality games which map the game play onto real world spaces and take advantage of mobile and location-aware technologies.

A key insight coming through the book has been the distinction between texts as cultural attractors (drawing together like-minded individuals to form communities) and as cultural activators (giving the community something to do together with the textual material). I want to get people at the conference to think about what needs to be done to produce serious games that are both cultural attractors and cultural activators.

Right now, a lot of talk about serious games assumes most of the learning takes place inside the box: design the perfect game and it will teach people stuff. But if we look at the commercial sector, most of the learning now takes place outside the box, in the interface between games and other media, in the metagaming talk that takes place within fan communities that grow up around the game. Serious games needs to broaden its perspective to think about these dimensions of game design.

BIZ: Serious Games refers to the potential applications of video games in areas such as healthcare, fitness, education, military training, etc. But can we really consider these "serious games" as games? At what point do they cease to be games and become valuable software applications?

HJ: Let's be clear: the word, game, as used in the games industry, seems to mean anything you do on a computer for fun. The game industry lumps together a variety of different things, sports, games, design tools, toys, role play, stories, which we might keep separate in the real world and calls them all games. This is powerful from a marketing stand point.

Then, on the other hand, they use the word, "games" rather narrowly to repel outside competitors and block new ideas. When Brenda Laurel tried to develop a girl's game movement, the recurring response was that these were not really games. The same response has from time to time been directed against educational games, serious games, and casual games, that is, anything that doesn't fit their marketing model or that might allow people outside the core industry to expand our understanding of what their medium could do.

Occasionally, they fall back on academic definitions of games to justify their claim but they are fully capable of ignoring them when they want to pitch their own products. So, my position is that if SimCity, Spore, Civilization, flight simulators, Zoo Tycoon, Age of Empires, and Medal of Honor (to choose a few examples) are games, then serious games are also games. You can't have one standard for commercial properties and a different one for nonprofit properties.