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Watch Gabe Newell's excellent Games for Change keynote in full right here
Sure, you read our thorough coverage of Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell's Games for Change keynote last month, but we know how you like moving pictures. We do too! And that's why we're doubly happy to finally present the entire, highly entertaining speech, just above.
Newell sees no distinction 'between games and educational games'
The majority of Valve president and co-founder Gabe Newell's keynote address yesterday at the Games for Change Festival was dedicated to his perception of games as educational tools. And that was fitting for the event, which is dedicated primarily to the educational and socially beneficial elements of gaming, and fitting for Valve Software, a company known most recently for releasing a game steeped in science. Newell explained: "The interesting thing about Portal 2 is it doesn't sort of fit the traditional simplistic model of what a game is. It's not a collection of weapons. It's not a collection of monsters. It's really about science. It's about spatial reasoning, it's about learning physics, it's about problem solving. And often, during the course of the game, you're going to be solving problems with somebody else. The social model inside of it is collaborative and not competitive." After rolling a short clip of the game for audience members, Newell went on to profess, "There seems to be this distinction between games that are educational, and games that are going to be commercially successful. I'm not really sure I buy into that." Citing sales of Portal 2 as proof, Newell pointed out that Valve has seen "$165 million dollars in gross revenue" from the game since April 18. "We can do this. We can make educational, commercially successful games, which are gonna help us both on the game side and on the educational side." He reaffirmed this to me in an interview after the speech, saying, "I just don't believe in this distinction between games and educational games. A lot of times [the label] 'educational games' is a way of being an excuse for bad game design or poor production values."
Portal 2 Authoring Tools for schools: Newell explains
Sure, we already think Portal 2 is a wonderful educational tool, but Valve wants to convince everyone else of that fact. And not by evangelizing the title to college-aged people the world over, but instead by turning the game into a more direct learning experience, with custom tools to match educational programs. "We just add another layer on top of the authoring tools to simplify the production of those spaces," Valve head Gabe Newell explained to us this afternoon. In so many words, the level creation tool for the PC version of Portal 2 gets another layer of interaction on top of the placement of, say, platforms or boxes. "If you give us a lesson plan, we can give you a tool that allows kids to build content to lock down those lessons," Newell detailed. "The number of times I solved problems about how fast will this be going at this time -- how about if it's on the moon?" In his words, "It's a lot easier to get people excited about it [education] if they're on the moon and they get to throw the rock at the piece of glass that breaks the glass that lets all the robots fly out." We can all agree on that, Mr. Newell. Without indicating when the education-focused version of Portal 2 will be released, Newell confirmed that his studio is currently building the application. "The layering on top of it of the framework for giving people a direct physical experience of physics is there, but you have to tell me exactly how you want to measure whether or not your students are successful or not." While we're certainly interested to see what Valve cooks up, we have to imagine that the students of the world are far more intrigued.
Valve interested in Wii U; 'It fits better into our scalability model,' says Newell
This morning, Valve head and co-founder Gabe Newell gave one of several keynotes at New York's Games for Change Festival, speaking to a variety of topics surrounding education and gaming. And while we'll have a full breakdown of that keynote in the coming hours, we thought you might like to know what Newell had to say about Nintendo's Wii U and his studio when we put the question to him. "Wii U seems to be a lot more powerful than the previous generation," he told Joystiq. "It sort of fits better into the scalability in terms of graphics performance and CPU performance, so I think it'll be a lot easier for us to fit it into our scalability model." Valve has yet to release any of its games on a Nintendo console, though Gabe told us, "We've always loved Nintendo." He also pointed out that Valve has been slowly transitioning from the PC to console counterparts, starting with Xbox 360 and more recently moving to the PlayStation 3 in a major way with Steam getting ported to Sony's console. And it looks like Nintendo may be next, as Newell restated, "Now it's a lot easier to look at Wii U and have it fit within that framework." As for us, we're most excited to see what Valve might do with the WiiPad.
