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Integral Research

		Press Play to Grow! How Could Video Games be Designed to Facilitate Personal and Spiritual Growth? A Mixed Methods and Integral Study

Games are great motivators—sometimes you can’t tear players away from their session. How would it be if we could harness that motivation for the cause of education? - Donald Norman, professor, Northwestern University and author, Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Norman, 1994).

Games are the most elevated form of investigation. - Albert Einstein, scientist and "chess player".

Article - John F. Kennedy University newsletter

Moses Silbiger has a Masters in Integral Psychology with a Certification in Life Coaching. He is also an architect, and has worked with graphic design for more than 17 years, experiencing as an “insider” some aspects of the virtual worlds being developed by the video game industry. For the past 8 months, he has been developing an integral research exploring the potentials of using video games for personal and spiritual integration and development, following a strong insight he had while reading the book Integral Spirituality (Wilber, 2007).

That spark ended up exquisitely aligning three of his main passions: visual arts, technology and integral theory. While reading that book, Moses had a significant insight: “What if the institution of entertainment could also purposefully serve as a ‘conveyor belt’ for our individual and collective growth, both in personal and spiritual ways?” During the two months before beginning this research, this question gradually led him to the subject of video games, as being the most promising segment of the entertainment industry with enough potential to accomplish this role. Moses is presenting this research project in the upcoming Integral Theory Conference on August 10th, 2008. In this essay, he briefly comments about his ongoing research study.

According to contemporary research on education, successful learning involves various complementary attributes. As the educational and game designer Clark N. Quinn comments, “learning is at its best when it is goal-oriented, contextual, interesting, challenging, and interactive” (Quinn, 2005, p.2). These characteristics also define the best video games, suggesting that the most effective learning experiences are also engaging and playful. However, game designers still face specific challenges to design learning practices that successfully incorporate the fun of play. As Quinn (2005) says, “learning can and should be hard fun!”

Building upon this timely discussion, I suggested stretching the educational goals referred by Quinn and other contemporary E-learning scholars and designers to embrace not only education related to teaching information (formal orientation), learning processes (cognitive and social orientations) or technical skills (training orientation); but most importantly education related to facilitating personal and spiritual growth (transformative orientation) - as explored by contemporary developmental and integral researchers.

By introducing some of these developmental concepts through E-learning - and hence pushing the existent boundaries of formal, processes and technical online education - a few online academic courses such as the recent Integral Theory Masters and Certificate at JFK University, as well as some emerging Web 2.0 online ventures (Integral Naked, What is Enlightenment and Aliveware) seem to be pioneering the use of technology as a developmental learning media. However, basically nothing significant seems to be emerging in the realm of video games. In fact, one of the main reasons of this exploratory research was to find out what are the current worldviews shared by the gaming world and the current nature and status of the various video games existent in the market, in order to investigate and propose alternative game designs that could facilitate personal and spiritual integration and development.

So, why video games? The answer to this question might be more accessible and reasonable than we could expect. From a gradual but exponential process of evolution and popularity since the 70s to the mid 90s, an unprecedented generation of video games has been emerging with the rise of the 21st century. This industry is already the fastest growing and one of the most popular, pervasive and profitable segments in the already “trillion-dollar-a-year” (Bryant & Vorderer, 2006) entertainment industry, having even surpassed the movies. According to a recent speech by the renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil (The Age of the Spiritual Machines, 1999), “in the acceleration of technological progress, there is no industry in the world matching the video game industry today”. He goes even further, claiming that video games and virtual reality simulators will be the main tools used for teaching, training and learning in the next decades. As optimistic and farfetched some of Kurzeil’s (2008) predictions may possibly appear, I see many of them as being quite feasible to be gradually manifested. However, I envision some of their main implications and applications - especially related to the impact on our personal and subjective world and realities - from a different approach. I see them from an integral approach that takes in equal account and value both the objective worlds of technology, cognitive science and cybernetics, and the subjective worlds of inner growth,integration and transformation.

Furthermore, due to their increasingly embracing higher power, realism, interactivity and massive-multi-player online (MMO) capacities, these video games could be the natural followers of the revolutionary advent of the Internet. Following an exponential scale of technological development, they could gradually bring into the foreground of our daily life a second wave of radical transformation in the way we deal, use and interact with technology and “reality”, as well how we communicate among ourselves.

Besides or instead of navigating through websites, this time we would navigate within immersive 3D environments including experiencing a more fully engaging sense of embodied interactivity and communication capacities though new kinds of brain-mind interfaces. Those interfaces would eventually include the intriguing option of plugging our nervous and sensorial systems directly into these virtual worlds. Maybe some of our most farfetched sci-fi dreams seen in the Star Trek and The Matrix series were not as impossible or so far ahead as we imagined… As Ken Wilber (personal communications, 2008) suggests, this potentially revolutionary advent could mark the transition from our current 1st Tier (Spiral Dynamics) techno-economic mode represented by the informational age into new kinds of "brain-mind-computer" interfaces and linkages that would underlie the techno-economic mode of the 21st century.

By talking about all these potential “dignities” that could be provided by video games, there are (and also could be) - as in the case with most tools and phenomena - very real potential “disasters” that could be brought by their use. Is important to note that due to issues of space and a primary concern to focus on the main topic of this research - which was to explore how (not if) video games could be designed to facilitate personal and spiritual growth - I did not explore in depth the important and already extensive discussion related to some of these potentially addictive, violent, alienating and other unhealthy themes and effects. I also did not dive into the question of whether video games should be used or not to facilitate personal and spiritual growth as an alternative to other existing venues.

From one hand, I consider video games as being just another emergent potential tool or medium of communication, independently of their current context and content. Like many other media, their influence and effects could have both its pros and cons. From the other hand, I believe that it is already too late to close our eyes and deny the gradual and significant influence that video games have already conquered (and will increasingly do) in our culture and society as a whole, especially in the younger - and not so younger – population (the average age of a gamer is already 33 years-old). Given the fact that millions of users throughout the world are already playing video games of different themes for different purposes, my intention was to add into this fully blossoming and unstoppable trend a new set of applications that could bring an extra layer of qualitative, deeper, meaningful and healthier use of this revolutionary powerful media. Whether some may like it or not, we are already fully immersed in the information technology age, meaning that a lot of aspects of life that we were accustomed with are gradually and radically changing as time goes by. There is a common historical pattern related to how human beings tend to initially react to radical technological innovations and paradigms, which also happened with the advent of the telephone, TV, movies, and more recently the Internet.

So, how could be human development related to the topic of video games? In the AQAL journal article titled Integral Play: An Exploration of the Playground and the Evolution of the Player (AQAL, 2007), Gwen Gordon, M.A. (educational designer and pioneer transpersonal play researcher) and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Ph.D (leading integral scholar-practitioner and also my mentor in this research) explore the role of play in the process of personal and spiritual development. According to them, the experience of play can - from an integral perspective - not only embrace but strongly support the continuous growth of various “Play Selves.” These Play Selves correspond to sequential and holarchical (Wilber, 2000; Maslow, 1973) levels of development from pre-personal, to personal, to post-personal, to transpersonal stages. Gordon & Esbjörn-Hargens suggest that “through the adult developmental model, we discover the forms of play that express different stages of consciousness and which contribute to their transformation” (2007, p. 37). As embracing a video game could be in relation to the various levels of AQAL and Play Selves, more fun, engaging, comprehensive and effective it would be to enact various developmental messages.

Using Integral Theory and Integral Play Theory as frameworks, various studies were conducted in my research exploration. I used a mixed methods approach (Integral Methodological Pluralism) due to the complementary use of multiple and more specific quantitative and qualitative methodologies. As part of that, I interweaved First- (Subjective), Second- (Inter-subjective), and Third-person (Objective) methods of inquiry. This approach was chosen with the purpose of bringing together the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative research in order to compare, validate, confirm, complement, and/or contrast quantitative results with qualitative findings. Among these various studies conducted, I included:

Phenomenological Accounts from subjective video game “play” experiences, autobiographical inquiry, journals and observations.
Personality Type explorations: Enneagram and Myers-Briggs.
Developmental assessments: Cook-Greuter’s (2008) Sentence Completion Test.
Interviews and Discussions with lead integral thinkers - Ken Wilber, David Zeitler, and others - and lead game designers - Daniel Erickson from Bioware, one of the most successful and “conscious” video game companies nowadays; among others.
Full 5-day Participant-Observer attendance at the world’s biggest Game Developers Conference (GDC 2008) with +16,000 participants and +120 expositors.
Empirical Survey: Comparative analysis of 150 people from 3 different groups related to the topic
Extensive Academic and Media Research.
Systems Analysis: Educational system as related to video games, Integral Education and Integral Play Theory.

As a result of this preliminary 8 month research, the potentials of video games for facilitating personal and spiritual development were not only confirmed, but also deepened and expanded into powerful and useful developmental video game design practices, insights and ideas. The results of those six methodological analyses (Phenomenology, Structuralism, Hermeneutics, Ethnomethodology, Empiricism and Systems Analysis) brought various surprises and confirmations, raised timely challenges and issues, and pointed into various untapped potentials and applications. Taxonomies of video game “play” and video game players were also explored, based on developmental spectrums of human development and potential. Data showed that there could actually be a fairly good market for those kinds of video games. Their creation would require intentional shifts in current paradigms and patterns of video game design, as well as an application of some basic concepts of the integral model by video game designers - including personal and spiritual growth theories and practices - so that they could directly incorporate them in their creative process.

In my view, one of the most efficient ways to facilitate personal and spiritual growth and integration would be designing video games to promote a wider range of practices, experiences and messages related to different processes of development, corresponding to various kinds of players – from all ages, genres, interests, creeds and backgrounds. These video games would purposefully take into account at least one or more of the basic elements of AQAL and Integral Play and explore their full potentialities of growth. In order to provide that, these video games would ideally and skillfully address various different levels of inner development, lines of intelligence, states of awareness and types (gender and personality), as well as cover many behavioral, physical, somatic, cultural, interpersonal, social and systemic aspects or issues.

Furthermore, to the extent that a video game would satisfy, support and challenge different players or “Play Selves” in relation to as many aspects of AQAL as possible, the better, more complete, developmentally significant, attractive and “acceptable” these video games would be to the general population. In addition to that, a developmentally effective game would ideally adapt itself to different players (Play Selves), providing a balanced mix of inquiry, challenges and support based on their own inclinations, choices and actions while playing a video game. By providing that, they could also reach a broader range of players and hence embrace a larger popularity and market share, including an increase of potential profits.

This approach could be applied either in more general and inclusive ways, or using more focused and specific strategies aiming towards different kinds of growth and integration. In this way, video games could be also used by all kinds of educators, coaches and spiritual leaders, potentially facilitating both individual and collective human potentials to unfold.

In my view, one of the most significant values of using this mass communication media for developmental purposes would be to start covering the huge gap between the population that can have direct access to those kinds of personal growth facilitation and processes nowadays, and those who don’t. That would also include those who are purposefully interested in going through these developmental processes, and those who care less. Strategically speaking, video games won’t need to be “sold” as tools for inner growth; instead, inner growth could be skillfully and timely engineered in order to be integrated with the fun of play, where video games would gradually act as “Trojan Horses” of gradual (and steady) mass growth.

From a philosophical point of view, I think that the emergence of this new “wave” of video games would be one of the main signs of manifestation of what the developmental researcher Robert Kegan (2001) calls the “Transformation Highway”, which would transcend the limits of existing educational systems from the current “Information age”. From a more spiritual stance, I see this emergence from a similar perspective as the scientist and mystic Teillard de Chardin (1959), who used to see the apparently chaotic raising of the technological and industrial world of the 20th century as just being a temporary adjustment towards a whole new reality; a reality that would finally bridge the worlds of technology and spirituality. In his words:

We may be reassured. The vast industrial and social system by which we are enveloped does not threaten to crush us; neither does it seek to rob us of our soul. The energy emanating from it is free not only in the sense that it represents forces that can be used: it is moreover free because, in the whole no less than in the least of elements, it arises in a state that is ever more spiritualized. (Chardin, 1959, p. 190)