These are facts that everyone else might know already but they were new to me:

Games have now eclipsed Hollywood in terms of entertainment dollars spent 10 billion vs. 9.5 billion dollars. Halo 2 was the single largest media related release in history. And gaming dollars in the online space are going to grow exponentially over the next few years.

Constance Steinkuehler has spent most of her research efforts looking at Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). Most of her presentation recounted her time in the game Lineage.

The interesting component of her talk was on how the discourse in these games is very instructional in nature. More experienced gamers teach newcomers to help keep the game going because the clans must replenish their ranks as some people decide not to continue playing. Players scaffold each other and provide mentoring in a way that Steinkuehler notes is very difficult to teach in the "real world." In these online games, social norms are as much a part of the game play as are any of the graphics and developer-created elements. Apprenticeships therefore also teach values.

Kurt Squire noted that games are now emerging that include social and political implications as the games can be made to include real historical events and stories. One of his more interesting points is that some people have even been known to change their real identities after playing in an online space (e.g. someone discovers that they have a knack for stock trading after playing a market-based sim).

A couple of my thoughts:

I thought one of the most important questions asked during the presentation was whether games could be used to create educational environments. Their response was interesting because they noted that many games contain a somewhat subversive element and institutionalizing gaming might actually reduce some of its allure. I think that educational game designers are going to run into the same problems that instructional video producers have found: whether we like it or not the standard is set by the commercial products that are available. No amount of high-quality education is going to make up for sub-standard game play. Competing on the scale of an EA or other company is just beyond educational budgets.

Another question I have about using gaming as a more institutionalized instructional tool is how to deal with the 40-50% of people who do NOT play games? Will we have to have gaming literacy classes and force people to learn how things work in games? I can hear it now, 1st period reading, 2nd period, game literacy. This is a big issue to consider because many times instructional designers wanting to use games are gamers themselves. Some of the basic assumptions about a give population (even younger generations) are not going to hold true for everyone.