Jesse Schell: Top Of The Class

Right, unfortunately his noisiest predictions are about things that are going to happen after he's dead. Which is often the case with futurists, they get very bold about things that are going to happen when they're dead, as they can't be held accountable. I'm embarrassed to say I have a bet going with someone about the length of Ray Kurzweil's life, as he's gone on about being immortal enough.

Well, okay, so I do two things. I teach at Carnegie-Mellon and I also run a games studio of about 65 people. The majority of what we do is educational games. I was the lead designer of Toontown at Disney and we've continued to add facets to it. They sometimes come to us, adding new modules. And we also worked on Pixie Hollow, the Tinkerbell MMO. We worked on that entirely outside of Disney and integrated it later.

Disney decided that they were going to reinvent Tinkerbell, that she was not the only pixie in Neverland, and that there were going to be a whole society of them. As soon as I heard they were doing that, I was like "how are you not doing an MMO?" It took a couple of years of pitching, but gradually worked up. We cut a deal where we did third-party development on it.

People do that, it happens all the time. Disney and companies like Disney have a trademark on the look of their characters and now that they've expanded the universe, without Peter Pan or Captain Hook, they very much have ownership. It's interesting, colonising these established worlds is an interesting business. Nobody owns Santa Claus but someone owns Rudolph.

I don't think it's very soon. Well, I know US law and it's presently 95 years. It used to be 70 but it was actually Disney that went and fussed and fussed, because Mickey Mouse was about to fall out of copyright... It does get into this interesting question though of, if you invent characters, at what point should they fall into the public domain?

We're doing a lot of unusual educational games, and in my own classroom I've been starting to use experiments as well with new ways to teach. Inspired by Lee Sheldon, I've switched over to an experience-points based method of grading, which I hadn't done for a while. One of the good things about an experience-points based system is that it allows students to explore parallel paths easily.

Normally, it's quite difficult to grade that, but if you have a simple system where the more work you do, the more experience points you get and the experience points translate directly into grades, usually in a non-linear way, that part is kind of interesting. In my game-design class, 300,000XP gets you an A-, an A is another 50,000, and an A+ is 50,000 again. So to move from an A- to an A+ is a third as much work again, which I actually think works quite well, it lines up with the motivations of the students quite well.

I just do that for my game-design class. For some of my other classes it makes less sense, as we need them to be on the same path. Randy Pausch, who I used to work with, used to say "you can give students written and oral feedback all you want, but nothing says C- like a C-."

We've been doing interactive toys, the Mechatars, a bit like a more advanced version of Skylanders. We've got these interactive remote-control robots that can battle each other, here in the living room, and then they remember their battle records. You plug them into the USB port, they upload their records, online there's a videogame where you can play and level up. When you earn things there, you can download them back into the robot, and now it has new powers and sound effects and things to use in the living room.

One of the biggest things, changing sound effects, earning new sounds, new types of attacks, because a lot of the attacks happen in a virtual way with a hit points system, like Pokemon style battling. They have physical motions that kind of parallel the sounds.

So there's a game we're working on with Yale University, all about reducing the incidence of HIV in inner cities and we've been working with San Diego Seaworld on a project on the life cycle of the Sea Turtle, which was a tremendously fun game to work on.

Also, we're doing a new thing now, it's not really educational this, but it's called Puzzle Clubhouse. It's a club for people who would like to create games but don't want to do the hard work. So people can vote on what kind of game we're going to make next, and then we go to the community and they submit artwork for it and then we ask them to vote on the art, dialogue, sound effects, and they figure out what's best, and we put it all together and put the game out. We did it as a kick-starter project to get it launched and it got funded a couple of weeks ago, and we're going to get it launched this spring.

That's what we're seeing. People seem very passionate about this notion; game development's hot but it's hard to do. You want to make a movie, you point a camera around. It's hard to do well, but it's not that hard to do. Doing games at all, learning how to program C#, it can take you months and months of stress and strain to get it going. To kind of have an open doorway, where it's something anybody could do, is something people are really looking for.

We're finding at Schell Games it's very useful, because an independent studio you go where the growth is. We've some experience doing the educational stuff, as well as the entertainment stuff, and when you look at where's the growth in games right now, it's hard to find growth. Social's not growing, mobile's not growing, console's not growing. Tablets are growing a bit; educational is growing and people haven't realised it yet.

So we're finding it's been very useful as the entertainment game company that knows how to do education. What happens in educational games is that there's a real stink on them, because there's been so many bad ones. People in the space of educational games don't know how to make them entertaining.