Simon Niedenthal is an Associate Professor of Interaction Design at Malmö University in Sweden. He conducts design-oriented research in the areas of olfactory interaction, game aesthetics, the sensory experience of gaming, and playtesting processes for innovative game design.

Besides teaching courses in media design, interaction design, visual communications, and game design, Simon is also working on 'Nosewise', a Stockholm University research project which aims to investigate the potential of smell-enabled gaming to enhance cognitive capacity in the elderly.

Arduino Education: Hi Simon, thank you so much for talking to us today. So as the gaming expert, can we start by asking you what your favourite game is?

Simon Niedenthal: I like a lot of games! Even very simple ones, for example I've been playing a lot of backgammon lately. I also like digital games that create an atmosphere and emotion. I like survival horror and digital games, particularly, but I don't play as much anymore as I used to.

AE: So what makes a game for you? And why do you think people love games so much?

SN: Well, a really simple definition of a game is that it's a system. So there's interlocking parts with any game involving players coming together, usually with a sense of artificial conflict. So it's not a real world conflict with real world consequences, but there's usually some kind of conflict in a game, bound by rules or confined by rules. And that leads to a quantifiable outcome.

That's a really commonly accepted definition of what a game is. And there are a lot of things you might think of that don't seem to quite fit that but for the most part, that's a concise definition. And it's pretty comprehensive, most things will fit into it. I like that.

Why do people like playing these games? I think they like the artificial conflict part and the rule sets can be really interesting and elegant or even super simple!

AE: So in that sense then, what is play?

SN: Play is a broader term than game, it's like an activity in a game as a form. So the term “play” is operative in more context than game, because I can play a game, or I can be playful. I can do my job in a playful way, but that's not a game.

Play can be everything from something that happens through a game to just a state of mind. I think the staple characteristics of play are really key to the experience of play. One is that it's from free-will, you can't force someone to play, people have to willingly do it. The second, that's what we call autotelic, which means the play is its own reward. People play just for the sake of playing, they're not necessarily gaining some kind of external benefit from doing it.

AE: Interesting. And do you think you can teach someone to be playful?

SN: Well, you can definitely create the conditions for play. I don’t think you can really force or teach someone to play - you just teach someone rules. But the behavior of play, we often think of that as kind of a wild internal force, it’s already in there. There's something that people just automatically have, and we can channel it in different ways, or we can influence it in different ways. But the force comes from within.

AE: That’s really great. And in terms of education and learning, what role do you think playing and playfulness have?

SN: A lot of theorists have talked about what is shared between good learning and game playing. And there are a lot of ways in which those things come together. That is when you're playing, you're solving non-trivial challenges - you’re learning as you’re leveling up. In this instance, you're taking in new information, you're applying it to new situations, you may be developing empathy through a character or there might be some representation that you're feeling empathetic towards.

There's been a lot of writing about this - what do games have in common with good learning conditions. And I think that there's a lot of crossover there. People have used that as the basis for developing what we call serious games, which are games that basically are aimed at non-commercial, non-entertainment ends. So that would be about basically, rehabilitation games, awareness, building games, and there's a whole category of games that exists to engage people playfully with serious topics. It could be pedagogical games, like learning math. There's a whole series of games that are relevant to education.

AE: So for educators, how can they use play to make something that’s maybe more difficult or boring more interesting? Like calculus or chemistry?

SN: There are bad approaches and good approaches to that question. One is to use gameplay purely as a reward. Traditionally that's been called “chocolate covered broccoli”. So you have something inherently unpleasant, but you have something that you want people to engage with, or in the case of broccoli, to eat. So to try to make that more appealing, you coat it with something that changes its character.

Early on in educational game design, there were examples where people would be working on math projects. And then once they had gotten to a certain point, they'd be free to play a game that had nothing to do with math or with or with anything else related to the topic. So it was just purely a reward.

I think that what most people are working on now is how we can integrate games into learning. By putting what we need to learn educationally into the specifics of game mechanics, we will be allowing the players to learn in the process and enjoy it all, rather than applying some veneer to an unattractive area.

AE: Changing topic, can you tell us a little bit about your research into olfactory interaction? How did you end up in this particular field?

SN: I’ve been working in the area of game studies for about 20 years, specifically in the area of lighting.

I did my PhD in the area of game lighting and I worked on that for about six or seven years, then finished my PhD but I didn't want to be the game lighting guy forever.

But another part of my PhD was looking at the sensory experience of digital gaming as a whole. I started to think about all of the senses involved in gameplay, and I was just curious about smell, it seemed like something that there wasn't a lot of writing about. So I just got stuck in, I read really broadly, looking at psychophysiology, literature, art history, olfactory art history, olfactory art, and sensory anthropology.

Then I wrote my first paper on smell games, exploring how things like scratch and sniff and other media experimentation have appealed to the sense of smell. There are ways in which people can output smell from digital systems, so I started looking at that.

Then I got into some research projects with psychologists. We’ve recently been looking at smell training, specifically. So the idea here is, can you train your sense of smell? Can you get better at it? And if you do, are there any other side benefits to doing that? If my sense of smell is better, does that help me cognitively? And in terms of food acceptance, and children? That is, can we use smell training to help kids eat their broccoli, right? We're working on things like that right now in the lab, which is kind of fun!

AE: That’s so interesting! It was great to talk, thanks, Simon!

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