Jesse Schell, has taught Game Design and led research projects at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center since 2002 and rounded off the 2010 Games Based Learning Conference with a  live web-streamed keynote from the US. His provocation provided some fascinating insights about the future of an education based around gaming, online communication and virtual exploration.

Jesse suggested that ‘everything is becoming more beautiful’ and that we like it that way. Siting the cornerstone example of the iPhone he emphasized how collaboration (in particular between artists and engineers) is central, if not essential, to making technology ‘more beautiful’ and hence more usable. Recognizing specialization, Schell suggested, is vital and he offered the suggestion of working hard to engineer situations where there is no choice but to work together as a framework to export from gaming development into education and virtual collaboration. He also explained how young people in particular expect the ability to customize not only their virtual environments but their real lives too.

Emphasizing that ‘people love sharing things – photos, music, knowledge’, Schell affirmed the Open Source movement, asserting: “that [the fact] Wikipedia works at all, gives tremendous faith for the human race”. He also explained that we all want ‘real things’ and that young people want all of these things too. But how to translate this into the classroom? His provocation continued to suggest that educators often prefer standardized (e.g. text books) when perhaps they should be interested in customization and that as opposed to withholding (individual work) they should look towards sharing.

Questions of ‘beauty’, customization, sharing and reality are central to the conversation generated by Robots and Avatars, which seeks to explorethis discussion from a wide range of angles including education, creative industries, the arts and academia.