Posted
by Mary Grabar @ Selous Foundation
Gaming holds huge money-making potential
for crony capitalists as they seek to capture
an $8 billion-textbook publishing industry and transform all textbooks into
video game format. For the U.S. Department of Education and progressive
educators gaming promises to end “achievement gaps” and to transform students
into social change agents.
Games of challenge involving fighting,
racing, or sports once offered young males a release valve to hours of stultifying
political correctness and feminine modes of teaching in schools. Now
educational games will impose politically correct lessons. As the Games for
Change event revealed, game developers, with financial support from
the Department of Education, are producing games that provide lessons on Muslim
cultural appreciation, bullying, slavery, Native American culture–and
masturbation.
Such politically correct games are being
promoted by politically connected people, such as the “powerhouse couple” of
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (as they were
introduced). They produced the celebrity-studded PBS documentary (and
accompanying game), Half the Sky, about women who hold up “half
the sky” globally. Kristof claimed that such entertainment can change behavior
by closing the “empathy gap,” which is at the root of racial and gender biases.
The couple praised the Department of
Education’s early childhood education efforts. Kristof explained that this
redirection to the “zero to five” age range came because Common Core is “toxic”
and has polarized education reform. He noted that Obama’s early education
initiative was the only one applauded by House Speaker John Boehner at the
State of the Union. Kristof repeated his call for early education in his column the next day, writing, “Education
inequity is America’s original sin.”
Ken Weber, Executive Director of
Zinga.org and a board member of Games for Change, then introduced Saudi Arabian
prince, “HH Prince Fahad Al-Saud,” a technology
entrepreneur. Weber noted that it was not often that he got to introduce a
prince, whom he referred to repeatedly as “His Highness.”
The Stanford-educated prince, who spoke
without an accent and was dressed like a hip-hop mogul, displayed his
familiarity with lessons in academe about the “other,” as he repeated the word
in reference to how the West sees the Arab world.
His games, he said, are intended to
“build a celebratory narrative about diversity” and to end stereotypes about
the Arab world: Osama bin Laden, Aladdin, the “evil and oppressive dictator of
the day,” and especially the treatment of women. Claiming that 35 percent of
tech entrepreneurs in North Africa and Arabia are women, he took the
opportunity to point out gender inequalities in the U.S. While women might
experience “movement restrictions” in Saudi Arabia, women in the United States
earn less than men, he said. (He did not specify which “movement restrictions,”
but presumably they involve driving a car.) According to Wikipedia, the prince has two wives, both
princesses.
One of his companies, Na3M Games, part
of the Arabic Renaissance, aims to develop the “culturally sensitive
individual.” It is operated out of Jordan and Denmark (the latter because it
has the largest population of Arabs in the northern European countries).
A 2013 Business Insider article praised Fahad
Al-Saud for foregoing the “high life” of a Saudi prince for the life of a “tech
entrepreneur and social media evangelist” who had an impact on the Arab Spring
uprising. Most of his start-ups have focused on spreading Arabic culture
through games, although he also developed a casino game. He was quoted as
saying, “In 10 years I want to see countries in the Arab world in their
rightful place as global leaders and contributors.” (Later, Rami Ismail, of Vlambeer,
also made a pitch about appealing to an Arabic audience.)
Next was the Well Played Series with
DePaul professor Doris Rusch. While some of the games her lab has developed,
such as understanding mental illness, seem good, others, for developing “social
and emotional intelligence” and dealing with bullying, seem too psychologically
invasive for children. These games “assess” such things as empathy, social
skills, impulse control, and cooperation, and are in line with recent efforts to teach social and
emotional intelligence, and the Education Department’s focus on “non-cognitive
skills.”
The session with Nordic LARP (Live
Action Role Play), which originated in the Nordic countries in the late 1990s,
continued the theme, as Bjarke Pedersen promoted emotionally “engaging stories”
about racism, alienation, and oppression, and Cecilia Dolk likened their game,
Celestra about fighting fascism in Europe, with familiar lessons in police
violence and attacks on unions and workers rights. Martin Ericsson of the same
group promoted Inside Hamlet as an educational game (in three acts) of the
Shakespearean play that has been interpreted in multiple ways, including as a
Marxist parable of power. The company is looking for a place in the U.S.
Michael Gallager, President and CEO of
The Entertainment Software Association, as previously described, made an appearance again and
waxed enthusiastically about the potential of transforming classrooms.
The “Pitch”
The afternoon featured a “pitch event”
for prizes. Emcee Jesse Schell of Schell Games presented an image of a
game-dominated future, where teachers become “dungeon masters,” tracking their
students as they play games. Among the five judges were two representatives
from U.S. government agencies: Laura Callanan, Senior Deputy Chairman of the
National Endowment for the Arts (since November 2014), and Dr. Marc Ruppel, a
senior program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division
of Public Programs. Ruppel, who holds a Ph.D. in Digital Studies, once worked
on sponsor Tribeca Film Festival-funded “Robot Heart Stories,” and held
positions at the Maryland Institute in Technology for the Humanities and NASA.
Callanan had been a senior consultant, specializing in “social innovation,”
with McKinsey & Company (former employer of Common Core architect David
Coleman).
The other judges were Ron Goldman,
co-founder and CEO of Kognito, a technology company serving state and federal
agencies, and colleges and universities; Carl Robichaud, Program Officer in
International Peace and Security at the Carnegie Corporation, focusing on
“strengthening nuclear governance”; and Weber, of Zynga.org, a nonprofit that
promotes “the use of social games for social impact.” According to the website,
from 2005 to 2011, Weber had been COO of The ONE Campaign, “a global grassroots
advocacy and campaigning organization founded by Bono, Bob Geldof, Bobby
Shriver and others” that worked “in partnership” with the Gates Foundation (the
major funder of Common Core) and international development NGOs for “poverty
alleviation and global health issues, particularly in Africa.”
Unsurprisingly, the games pitched
advanced the progressive agenda: Thralled is about a runaway slave; Never Alone
is about Native culture in Alaska; The Sun Also Rises has nothing to do with
Ernest Hemingway or Ecclesiastes, but focuses on the traumas of soldiers in
Afghanistan; We Are Chicago “draws from real experiences to give a brief
glimpse into the average life of a teenager living in the most dangerous
neighborhoods in Chicago”; and Happy Playtime is “a sex-education game
which aims to eliminate the stigma attached to female masturbation.”
Never Alone took away most of the
prizes, but Happy Playtime, which has been banned by the Apple App Store, won the
$10,000 dollar surprise prize from Schell Games. Happy Playtime principal Tina
Gong told the judges that she wanted girls ages 10 to 16 to know that women’s
bodies “belong to themselves.” She described in sexually explicit terms how
points are awarded, and claimed that this game would produce good body image,
less unwanted pregnancy, less abuse, and better sex. Her plans include a
multi-player format with data-gathering.
This event received virtually no press
coverage. Other similar events on university campuses and at conference centers
have also gone on with little notice. Game designers are courted with grants
from non-profits (aligned with for-profit companies) and federal agencies. All are
intertwined.
What they promise is a future of
teachers as “Dungeon Masters” tracking students as they navigate games, games
whose lessons parents are ignorant of. Profiting are the techno-gurus,
progressive educrats, and a political regime seeing the fruition of a plan to
completely transform education.
Mary Grabar, Ph.D., has taught college
English for over twenty years. She is the founder of the Dissident
Prof Education Project, Inc., an education reform initiative that
offers information and resources for students, parents, and citizens. The
motto, “Resisting the Re-Education of America,” arose in part from her
perspective as a very young immigrant from the former Communist Yugoslavia
(Slovenia specifically). She writes extensively and is the editor of EXILED. Ms. Grabar is also a contributor to
SFPPR News & Analysis.
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