to look at everything from the ancient games depicted on cave walls, to board games,

to the rise of the arcade machine, to home consoles, to virtual reality,

to role playing games and, hey nerds, even sports -- all games are created equal.

Games are used in schools and to treat medical conditions. They were used to train warriors for combat.

Some games have international tournaments, some even have very real political consequences.

There are games that you can play alone (tear)

And there are games that millions of people at a time can play together.

Some of these create a world -- some even have their own economics! Gaming affects millions of

players all over the world and makes an impact on popular culture and... "culture" culture!

I've got as many interesting game facts and stories for you as a Pokedex has Pokemon.

How many Pokemon are there now? Like 850-something? After 151 I am done.

So sit back, hit the pause button on whatever you're playing and prepare for a multi pixel journey through

the history of games. And remember: it's dangerous to go alone... take this!

[Theme Music]

Before we drop into all this like a misplaced tetrad, tetrazoid, tetrazone, tetris piece

We need to orient ourselves. We should answer a basic question: What is a game?

The dictionary will tell you 'a game is a construct that organizes play

through a series of rules for the purpose of achieving a set of goals overcoming an

obstacle and/or attaining an objective'. That's a decent definition. I would call

games "entertainment" but they're a very specific kind of "entertainment".

Game designer Chris Crawford came up with a really cool hierarchy to explain this.

To start, Crawford characterizes any kind of interactive entertainment as a play thing;

anything that you interact with to entertain yourself qualifies.

But there are also two types of playthings: a play thing without a goal like a slinky is a toy,

but when there's a goal involved like trying to get the slinky down the stairs, Crawford calls that a challenge.

Now if you're working to complete this challenge with no other active agent or person involved, it turns out you're working on a puzzle.

But when there is some kind of second party involved, then you have a conflict.

Ok, we're almost there. Crawford subdivides conflicts into competitions and games.

In a competition the participants don't interact or interfere with each other.

A good example of a competition is figure skating. Everybody's skating to win but they

can't really affect each other's performances.

Well, except for that one time with Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan but, you know, look it up.

Mario Kart though, now that's a game. Players interact continuously, blocking and passing, and there's no

clearer example of interference than when you're in first place and one of your friends in 8th place

and they use a blue shell and take you out and take the leap. Why do you always do that to me, Katie?

It's not cool! And here's an interesting thing to think about:

You don't have to be playing against a person for something to be a game.

Those soldiers blocking your path in Metal Gear are artificial intelligence or AI

agents trying to stop you from accomplishing your goal.

The rules of solitaire can be constructed as an agent working to stop you

from completing the game. So games have goals like scoring points or saving the

princess and we achieve those goals by following the rules,

like moving our game piece six places if we roll a six on the die or ending

our turn if we've spent all of our mana. Of course none of this matters unless you want to play.

Voluntary participation is essential, otherwise it's work. I'd also like to get at why we play games,

but that's a little harder. The short answer is, there is no short answer. There is no

universal unified theory of why we play games. There's no constitution of gaming,

no ten commandments of gaming. Different games work on our brains in different ways.

Games like Tetris appeal to our desire to create order. Something like Animal Crossing lets us be the center of a whole tiny universe.

Games like World of Warcraft or Destiny let us live a remarkable life in another world.

Games like Candy Crush lets us crush candy. We play games for a lot of different reasons.

Let's leave behind the mystery of why we play for a while and talk about what can

a game be and what can a game do. Take video games.

Modern video games can be a bit formulaic but recent technological

advances have made games available to a wider audience and they've made the

tools to create games widely available and that's well... a game-changer! Get it?

A game-changer! You see cause we're talking games. A larger audience and a larger pool

of creators means a wider variety of games that get produced. Sure, you'll get

Call of Duty and the annual licensed NFL game that cost millions to make and sells millions

of copies but more gamers and lower production and distribution costs means

quirky games like Braid or Super Meat Boy or Shovel Knight. Games that might have

relatively small audiences can be profitable and sometimes those quirky

independent games can get so profitable and so popular that soon they hit a wide

audience just as much as a Triple A title. And when I say wide audience I mean WIDE audience.

In the United States alone there are around 145 million video game players.

37% of those players are over the age of 36 and 18% are under 18.

That kind of breaks the gamers stereotype, doesn't it? And increasingly games are part of players' daily lives.

According to video game academic Jane McGonigal by 2010 the average video game player in the US

played for 22 hours a week. That's like watching all the Harry Potter movies in order,

and then watching Chamber of Secrets again every week! That's a dedicated Harry Potter fan.

Clearly we're spending a lot of time playing video games so what's this doing to us?

We now have entire schools devoted to gaming and almost every major university offers classes and degrees related to games.

The University of Southern California, University of Utah, and Savannah College

of Art and Design all have renowned programs in game art, programming, and design.

The gaming industry makes so much money. Even more sometimes than movies and television!

There are even people right now on YouTube

who are making a living playing video games, on camera - that's a job! And it's not just

about learning how to make games or make money off of games. Massively multiplayer

game worlds can provide insights across disciplines. Sociologists can study how people form groups.

Economists can finally see if their models work.

And in 2005 World of Warcraft became a legitimate subject of study for epidemiologists.

Let's go to the Thought Bubble. In 2005 a plague hit World of Warcraft. The game's developers

introduced a new mission that called on players to defeat a boss named Hakkar the

Soulflayer, blood god of the Gurubashi trolls. Is Gurubashi right? Whatever.

When players attacked Hakkar, he cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which drained the players hit points.

The spell was intended to be contagious but it was only supposed to spread in that part of the game.

Well, it turns out Corrupted Blood was kind of like a real world pathogen and it got out of

the intended area and spread to the entire game world. According to an

article from Reuters the major towns and cities were abandoned by the population

as panic set in and players rushed to evacuate to the relative safety of the

countryside, leaving urban areas filled to the brim with corpses and the city

streets literally white with the bones of the dead.

This is where science got interested. The Journal of Epidemiology compared Corrupted Blood to

real-life SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. Terrorism experts also studied the event.

They looked at the decision by some gamers to intentionally infect

other players and this provided some insight into how terrorist cells form in the real world.

In the end game developers had to invoke the nuclear option and

reset the game service to undo the havoc wrought by Hakkar the Soulflayer, blood

god of the Gurubashi trolls and, apparently, bio terrorist. Thanks, Thought Bubble!

Games also make their way into daily life through gamification.

This grows out of achievement systems some video games use to reward players in

addition to the normal game objectives. These systems have proven to be very motivational,

so why not try them out in real life? Purdue is doing this.

Some schools reward students with badges when they pass tests or complete

homework assignments. Gamification is also used in fitness. For example some

fitness apps award badges for walking around and even let users compete with

friends for the highest step count. Oh, that reminds me, hold on. This counts as steps, right?

Academic studies also seem to validate time spent gaming. Studies from China and Australia

indicate that expert-level video game players have a measurable increase in

cognitive functions, perception, and motor control. These players were found to have

increased gray matter and increased connectivity in their brains!

So next time your mom says you're playing too much video games, you go "hey mom I'm increasing my

gray matter." A hospital in Florida studied their surgeons who played video

games before performing surgery and found that surgeons who played video

games for more than three hours in a week made 37 percent fewer errors. They were 27

percent faster during surgery over those surgeons who did not. Gaming also has

cool applications in medicine. An Oxford University study indicated that playing

Tetris can reduce the after effects of psychological trauma and might offer relief

of PTSD symptoms. There's this virtual reality game called Snow World.

It's played on the Oculus Rift and it's used for pain management. Burn victims report

less pain during bandage removal and reapplication while playing this game.

Another example is the online game Fold It. In this game thousands of

players help doctors an computers fold proteins and other structures to support drug research.

In 2011 players helped scientists solve a decade old problem in under 10 days! That's the power of games!

So what we're saying here is that games can be a positive force in the world.

And that's why we're going to spend the next twenty weeks or so playing with these ideas.

So press Start or set up the board or tee up the ball or whatever. Let's play! Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next week. Now if you excuse me, I got some roads to crossy.

Crash Course Games is filmed in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis, Indiana,

and it is made with the help of all these nice people. If you'd like to keep Crash

Course free for everyone forever, you can support the series at Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support

the content you love. Speaking of patreon, we'd like to thank all our patreons in general, and we'd like to

specifically thank our high chancellor of knowledge Brett Henderson, MD, our headmaster

of learning Linnea Boyev, and our vice principal Mike Hunt. Thank you for your support.