With so many things in the world to learn and master,
how can anyone ever become an icon, a genius or a maverick?
I think most of us here probably relate
more to the Demon Cat in Adventure Time
where we have, like, an approximate knowledge of many things.
Luckily, knowledge in one topic can actually help you master another topic
or at least, help you get a head start.
So my name is Liz Fiacco
and I graduated here, Chapman University
last year with a BFA in Visual Arts and game development.
After graduation, I founded a company called Fallstreak Studio
with the partners that I work with on developing a game called Axel.
So we raised 20,000 dollars through donations on Kickstarter
but we could not have done that
without a lot of hard work and a huge transition.
You see, I've been studying animation and film for 4 years,
as emphasizing in storyboarding,
and then suddenly I found myself
surrounded by all these businessmen and businesswomen.
And I was a little bit out of my water.
Luckily, I think everyone here has experienced some time
where you've learnt something outside of the classroom
and it's become useful somewhere unexpected.
For instance, when you're a kid and you're roasting marshmallows
you kind of get the idea that you can get the fire going by blowing on it
and you get the idea that you put a fire out
by smothering it with water or sand.
Well, that's great for roasting marshmallows,
but then when you get to high school chemistry
and you're studying combustion reactions,
all of a sudden you understand why oxygen is needed for fires.
You have this innate knowledge of it.
But you weren't thinking about chemistry back when you were roasting marshmallows.
Unless of course you had really nerdy parents who told you.
So I used this ability,
these transferable skills, after I graduated
to sort of retrofit my film animation education
into the entrepreneur world.
One of the first things that just kind of boggled my mind
about the business world is that everyone kept asking me:
"who's your market"?
And my major reaction was to say: "anyone, please,
someone, please, someone, buy my product! Please!"
But that is not what they wanted to hear.
So, when we were developing our Kickstarter video,
I realized that when businesspeople asked me what our market was,
that's when film people were asking us who you're audience is?
And that painted a really clear picture for me.
And from there I can make better choices about how to build,
market and monetize our game.
So, transferable skills, incredibly useful
but kind of unpredictable.
You don't really know when a skill you learn in one place
is going to come in handy somewhere else.
Plus, everyone comes from different backgrounds and experiences,
so they're hard to share.
If you tell someone about a transferable skill,
they don't really experience the transferable skill.
But it's such a powerful learning tool
there's got to be a way to make it part of a day-to-day solution.
And that is where I think videogames can really shine.
See, games are actually the perfect medium to hone transferable skills
because most of the times when you think of a skill that you learn in a videogame,
you're thinking kind of like, knowing what ability that you need to be
super effective to gain some certain pokemon
which isn't terribly useful day-to-day.
But, if you think about something like Rock Band,
if you learn how to drum on Rock Band,
eventually you're gonna learn how to do real syncopated rhythms
and you're gonna learn some common drum techniques,
which is pretty sweet.
And the power of these games comes from their rapid teaching test cycles.
A player learns something new and then immediately has to put it into practice
and they get tested on it again and again and again.
One of the greatest games, Portal, is actually about 70% tutorial.
So is not that when they teach you it's a dry,
clearly, teaching through a videogame is incredibly compelling.
Additionally, through a game you can learn from failure.
I probably lost... I probably died maybe hundreds of times
trying to beat Donkey Kong Country Returns.
If I failed hundreds of tests in school, I would have a very bad time.
But luckily with videogames, you can learn from failure.
Additionally, with technology today, videogames can actually simulate
extremely complex systems. And they're interactive
which means that students or players can change stuff about these systems
and then see the repercusions of their actions in the world.
So all these powers in videogames,
but you can't get a transferable skill from it
unless the mechanics actually reflect real skills and real content.
Like with Risk. I love playing Risk and I'm very competitive at Risk.
So in order to be good at Risk, I need to really understand the map,
know where all the countries are, know what borders what,
and this knowledge to be competitive at Risk
helped me out when I was studying World Geography.
Or a more poignant example is the game Foldit.
Foldit is a game about folding proteins up.
Stuff that scientists are actually working on.
But it's a puzzle game and it's a lot of fun,
and people actually managed to fold the protein
within a couple weeks of the game's launch,
that scientists have been stumped on for years.
That's pretty cool. That's a lot of power.
Also, games allow you to discover stuff for yourself through the mechanics
you can find strategies and techniques
and really understand why that's important.
For instance with Risk again, I feel like I have first hand experience
on why Napoleon had such a hard time moving his armies east through Russia.
Like that's impossible.
So yes, transferable skills are incredibly important
but historically they've been only used out of accident or necessity
or disresourcefulness.
And if we are mindful of them,
we can actually make them a lot more powerful.
We can start inserting them into the games that we make or other media.
So, encourage teachers to take a second look at games
as more than just a distraction.
And try to find those real world ideas and concepts and content from them
in order to actually bring that content into the classroom.
Because these games aren't necessarily educational,
like Risk, you don't think of it as an educational game.
And Foldit is really more of a puzzle game.
But yet there's really valuable experience in them.
So, by actively seeking connections
you can actually use transferable skills to a benefit.
Because if we all have a bunch of disjointed experiences,
then you end up like that Demon Cat from Adventure Time:
you have an approximate knowledge of many different things.
But using transferable skills, that can be the difference between
being knowledgeable and being a genius.
So I urge everyone to go out
and try to create experiences that can be transferable
for yourself and also for others.
And to realize that we have the opportunity now to make
widespread transferable experiences through videogames
and therefore the opportunity to make an entire generation
of icons, geniuses and mavericks.
Thank you.
(Applause)