White House "game jam" lures top video game developers

WASHINGTON — If you need any more proof that video games are becoming an accepted part of our culture, consider that the White House just brought 100 top game designers to town to show off their skills.

Over the weekend, Obama administration science and technology advisors fed the group pizza, coffee and Red Bull in a two-day, red-eyed effort to develop a batch of cutting-edge educational games. The developers showed off their designs at the White House.

The weekend "game jam" was part of a broader effort by the administration to get technology companies interested in investing, even experimentally, in education.

"We're just trying to figure out what works best," said Mark DeLoura, a senior digital media advisor in the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. DeLoura, 44, came to the White House after working for nearly 20 years in the video game industry.

By industry standards, the White House event was small — 102 developers and designers came to town, paying their own way to be part of the group. By comparison, many game jams bring together 500 people or more, and so-called "global game jams" can connect thousands worldwide. But the event was unprecedented — it was the first ever sponsored by the White House that focused specifically on education.

Following President Obama's 2011 call for educational software "as compelling as the best video game," 23 teams rapidly prototyped designs that tackled subjects ranging from math and spelling to science and history.

One team from Far Cry developer Red Storm Entertainment created a game simulating how predators and prey affect each other's populations as well as the environment, while a team from the independent New York studio Playmatics explored the causes of World War I. Another, from GlassLab, a joint project of gamemaker Electronic Arts and various educational groups, created a game about the electoral college. A group from Santa Cruz, Calif., developer Magic Leap, led by veteran designer Graeme Devine, created a build-your-own-planet astronomy simulator dubbed Rare Earth.

Teams had until 7 p.m. Sunday night to submit a two-minute video laying out their game's basic structure, but they could tinker with the designs until Monday morning. The developers, not the federal government, retain rights to the games, but that's the idea, said Richard Culatta, director of the U.S. Education Department's Office of Educational Technology: "The point here is to show what's possible," he said. "Our goal is to show that this can change education."

In the end, all 23 teams produced the basic outlines of games and many said they were encouraged by how much fun they had building something educational. A visibly pleased DeLoura said the event just scratched the surface — he predicted that for games to break through as learning tools, schools would need access to many different kinds of games, tackling many different topics. "We need scale," he said. "We need lots of data. We need lots of designs."

A team from American University developed Function Force 4:

A team from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill developed Accel-o-rama:

A team from Magic Leap developed Rare Earth: