When we think of games, there's all kinds of things.
Maybe you're ticked off, or maybe, you're looking forward to a new game.
You've been up too late playing a game.
All these things happen to me.
But when we think about games, a lot of times we think about stuff like this: first-person shooters, or the big, what we would call AAA games, or maybe you're a Facebook game player.
This is one my partner and I worked on.
Maybe you play Facebook games, and that's what we're making right now.
This is a lighter form of game.
Maybe you think about the tragically boring board games that hold us hostage in Thanksgiving situations.
This would be one of the tragically boring board games that you can figure out.
Or maybe you're in your living room, playing with the Wii with the kids, and there's this whole range of games, and that's very much what I think about.
I make my living from games, I've been lucky enough to do this since I was 15, which also qualifies as I've never really had a real job.
But we think about games as fun, and that's completely reasonable, but let's just think about this.
So this one here, this is the 1980 Olympics.
Now I don't know where you guys were, but I was in my living room.
It was practically a religious event.
And this is when the Americans beat the Russians, and this was -- yes, it was technically a game.
Hockey is a game.
But really, was this a game?
I mean, people cried.
I've never seen my mother cry like that at the end of Monopoly.
(Laughter) And so this was an amazing experience.
Or, if anybody here is from Boston -- So when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series after I believe, 351 years -- (Laughter) when they won the World Series, it was amazing.
I happened to be living in Springfield at the time, and the best part of it was, you would close the women's door in the bathroom, and I remember seeing "Go Sox," and I thought, really?
Or the houses, you'd come out, because every game, well, I think almost every game, went into overtime, right?
So we'd be outside, and all the other lights are on in the whole block.
And kids -- the attendance was down in school, kids weren't going to school, but it's OK, it's the Red Sox, right?
I mean, there's education, and then there's the Red Sox, and we know where they're stacked.
So this was an amazing experience, and again, yes, it was a game, but they didn't write newspaper articles, people didn't say, "You know, really, I can die now, because the Red Sox won."
And many people did.
So games, it means something more to us.
It absolutely means something more.
So now, this is an abrupt transition here.
There was three years where I actually did have a real job, sort of.
I was the head of a college department teaching games, so, again, it was sort of a real job, and now I got to talk about making them as opposed to making them.
Part of the job of it, when you're a chair of a department, is to eat, and I did that very well -- and so I'm out at a dinner with this guy called Zig Jackson.
So this is Zig in this photograph, this is also one of Zig's photographs.
He's a photographer.
And he goes all around the country taking pictures of himself, and you can see here he's got Zig's Indian Reservation.
And this particular shot -- this is one of the more traditional shots.
This is a rain dancer.
And this is one of my favorite shots here.
So you can look at this, and maybe you've even seen things like this.
This is an expression of culture, right?
And this is actually from his Degradation series.
And what was most fascinating to me about this series is just, look at that little boy there, can you imagine?
We can see that's a traditional Native American.
Now I just want to change that guy's race.
Just imagine if that's a black guy.
So, "Honey, come here, let's get you a picture with the black guy."
Right?
Like, seriously, nobody would do this.
It baffles the mind.
And so Zig, being Indian, likewise it baffles his mind.
His favorite photograph -- my favorite photograph of his, which I don't have in here -- is Indian taking picture of white people taking pictures of Indians.
(Laughter) So I happen to be at dinner with this photographer, and he was talking with another photographer about a shooting that had occurred, and it was on an Indian Reservation.
He'd taken his camera up there to photograph it, but when he got there, he discovered he couldn't do it.
He just couldn't capture the picture.
And so they were talking back and forth about this question.
Do you take the picture or not?
And that was fascinating to me as a game designer, because it never occurs to me, should I make the game about this difficult topic or not?
Because we just make things that are fun or will make you feel fear, that visceral excitement.
But every other medium does it.
So this is my kid.
This is Maezza, and when she was seven years old, she came home from school one day, and like I do every single day, I asked her, "What did you do today?"
So she said, "We talked about the Middle Passage."
Now, this was a big moment.
Maezza's dad is black, and I knew this day was coming.
I wasn't expecting it at seven, I don't know why, but I wasn't.
Anyways, so I asked her, "How do you feel about that?"
So she proceeded to tell me, and so any of you who are parents will recognize the bingo buzzwords here.
"The ships start in England, they come down from England, they go to Africa, they go across the ocean -- that's the Middle Passage part -- they come to America, where the slaves are sold," she's telling me.
But Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and then he passed the Emancipation Proclamation, and now they're free.
Pause for about 10 seconds.
"Can I play a game, Mommy?"
And I thought, that's it?
And so, you know, this is the Middle Passage, this is an incredibly significant event, and she's treating it like, basically some black people went on a cruise, this is more or less how it sounds to her.
(Laughter) And so, to me, I wanted more value in this, so when she asked if she could play a game, I said, "Yes."
(Laughter) And so I happened to have all of these little pieces.
I'm a game designer, so I have this stuff sitting around my house.
I said, "Yeah, you can play a game," and I give her a bunch of these, and I tell her to paint them in different families.
These are pictures of Maezza when she was -- God, it still chokes me up seeing these.
So she's painting her little families.
So then I grab a bunch of them and I put them on a boat.
This was the boat, it was made quickly, obviously.
And so the basic gist of it is, I grabbed a bunch of families, and she's like, "Mommy, but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things."
And she says, "They want to go."
And I said, "Honey, no, they don't want to go.
This is the Middle Passage, Nobody wants to go on the Middle Passage."
So she gave me a look that only a daughter of a game designer would give a mother, and as we're going across the ocean, following these rules, she realizes that she's rolling pretty high, and she says to me, "We're not going to make it."
And she realizes, we don't have enough food, and so she asks what to do, and I say -- remember, she's seven -- "We can either put some people in the water or we can hope that they don't get sick and we make it to the other side."
Just the look on her face came over -- now mind you this is after a month of -- this is Black History Month, right?
After a month, she says to me, "Did this really happen?"
And I said, "Yes."
And so she said -- this is her brother and sister -- "If I came out of the woods, Avalon and Donovan might be gone."
"Yes."
"But I'd get to see them in America."
"No."
"But what if I saw them?
Couldn't we stay together?"
"So Daddy could be gone."
"Yes."
She was fascinated by this, and she started to cry, I started to cry, her father started to cry, and now we're all crying.
He didn't expect to come home from work to the Middle Passage, but there it goes.
And so, we made this game, and she got it.
She got it because she spent time with these people.
It wasn't abstract stuff in a brochure or in a movie.
And so it was just an incredibly powerful experience.
This is the game, which I've ended up calling "The New World," because I like the phrase.
I don't think the New World felt too new worldly exciting to the people who were brought over on slave ships.
But when this happened, I saw the whole planet; I was so excited.
I'd been making games for 20-some years, and then I decided to do it again.
My history is Irish.
So this is a game called "Síochán Leat."
It's "peace be with you."
It's the entire history of my family in a single game.
I made another game called "Train."
I was making a series of six games that covered difficult topics, and if you're going to cover a difficult topic, this is one you need to cover, and I'll let you figure out what that's about on your own.
And I also made a game about the Trail of Tears.
This is a game with 50,000 individual pieces.
I was crazy when I decided to start it, but I'm in the middle of it now.
It's the same thing.
I'm hoping that I'll teach culture through these games.
And the one I'm working on right now, which is -- because I'm right in the middle of it, and these for some reason choke me up like crazy -- is a game called "Mexican Kitchen Workers."
And originally, it was a math problem, more or less.
Here's the economics of illegal immigration.
And the more I learned about Mexican culture -- my partner is Mexican — the more I learned that, you know, for all of us, food is a basic need, and it is obviously with Mexicans, too, but it's much more than that.
It's an expression of love.
It's an expression of -- God, I'm totally choking up way more than I thought.
I'll look away from the picture.
It's an expression of beauty, it's how they say they love you.
It's how they say they care, and you can't hear somebody talk about their Mexican grandmother without saying "food" in the first sentence.
And so to me, this beautiful culture, this beautiful expression is something that I want to capture through games.
And so games, for a change, it changes how we see topics, it changes our perceptions about those people in topics, and it changes ourselves.
We change as people through games, because we're involved, and we're playing, and we're learning as we do so.
Thank you.
One of the top chefs from Pasta Palace has been kidnapped by operatives from Burger Bazaar hoping to learn the location of their secret sauce recipe.
Little do they know that a third party— Sausage Saloon— has sent you to take advantage of the situation.
As their top spy, your skills range from infiltration and subterfuge, to safecracking and reading faces for signs of deception.
You’ve tracked the captors to where they’re holding the chef prisoner.
From your hiding spot, you can see him on the other side of the glass, while in front of you an interrogator wearing headphones speaks into a microphone.
“We already know the recipe is on the 13th floor of the bank vault, in a safe deposit box numbered between 13 and 1300.
Now tell us… Is the number less than 500?”
You can’t hear the chef’s answer, but you can see that he’s lying.
The interrogator, however, falls for it.
He follows up by asking, “Is it a perfect square?”
Again you can’t hear the answer but can tell the chef is lying, while the interrogator takes him at his word.
He then asks, “Is it a perfect cube?”
This time the chef answers truthfully.
The interrogator thinks for a minute and says, “Good.
Now if you just tell me whether or not the number’s second digit is a one, we’ll be done here.”
But as the chef starts to answer, the interrogator stands up, blocking your view.
Within moments he rushes out of the room, announcing that he’s got the answer and is sending agents to retrieve the recipe.
You know that the Burger Bazaar people have the wrong box number.
But can you figure out the right one and retrieve the recipe yourself?
Pause the video to figure it out for yourself.
Answer in 3 Answer in 2 Answer in 1 The key here is to work backwards.
We don’t know what the chef answers to the final question or whether he answers truthfully.
But we do know that by the time the interrogator asks it, he’s narrowed the options down to two numbers– one where the second digit is 1, and one where it isn’t.
Our goal, then, is to find answers to the previous questions that lead to just two possibilities.
Of the three constraints offered, the one that narrows our options the most is if the number is a perfect cube.
That leaves us with only eight answers between 13 and 1300.
So let’s assume the answer to the third question was a truthful YES.
Now, let’s look at the second question.
If the chef answered YES to the number being a perfect square, it would narrow the interrogator’s options to just 64 and 729– the only numbers in our range that are both a square and a cube.
But neither of these has a 1 as the second digit.
So the given answer to the second question must’ve been NO.
And that also means we can eliminate these two squares from the interrogator's list, leaving only six numbers.
Now for the first question, which allows us to divide this list.
If the chef answered YES to the number being less than 500, we’d have four options, which is too many.
But a NO leaves us with two numbers greater than 500, one of which does have a 1 as its second digit.
We don’t know which of these numbers the interrogator thinks is correct.
But that doesn’t matter– remember, his conclusion was based on lies.
You, on the other hand, are now in a position to reconstruct the truth.
First, the chef said the number was greater than 500 but lied, meaning it’s actually less than 500.
Second, the chef said it wasn’t a perfect square but lied again, meaning the number is indeed a square.
And finally, he truthfully confirmed that it was also a cube.
And as we’ve already seen, the only number under 500 that’s both a square and a cube is 64.
You find the secret recipe and are gone before anyone’s the wiser.
Corporate espionage is not an easy game— but sometimes, that’s just how the sausage is made.
When you grow up in a developing country like India, as I did, you instantly learn to get more value from limited resources and find creative ways to reuse what you already have.
Take Mansukh Prajapati, a potter in India.
He has created a fridge made entirely of clay that consumes no electricity.
He can keep fruits and vegetables fresh for many days.
That's a cool invention, literally.
In Africa, if you run out of your cell phone battery, don't panic.
You will find some resourceful entrepreneurs who can recharge your cell phone using bicycles.
And since we are in South America, let's go to Lima in Peru, a region with high humidity that receives only one inch of rainfall each year.
An engineering college in Lima designed a giant advertising billboard that absorbs air humidity and converts it into purified water, generating over 90 liters of water every day.
The Peruvians are amazing.
They can literally create water out of thin air.
For the past seven years, I have met and studied hundreds of entrepreneurs in India, China, Africa and South America, and they keep amazing me.
Many of them did not go to school.
They don't invent stuff in big R&amp;D labs.
The street is the lab.
Why do they do that?
Because they don't have the kind of basic resources we take for granted, like capital and energy, and basic services like healthcare and education are also scarce in those regions.
When external resources are scarce, you have to go within yourself to tap the most abundant resource, human ingenuity, and use that ingenuity to find clever ways to solve problems with limited resources.
In India, we call it Jugaad.
Jugaad is a Hindi word that means an improvised fix, a clever solution born in adversity.
Jugaad solutions are not sophisticated or perfect, but they create more value at lower cost.
For me, the entrepreneurs who will create Jugaad solutions are like alchemists.
They can magically transform adversity into opportunity, and turn something of less value into something of high value.
In other words, they mastered the art of doing more with less, which is the essence of frugal innovation.
Frugal innovation is the ability to create more economic and social value using fewer resources.
Frugal innovation is not about making do; it's about making things better.
Now I want to show you how, across emerging markets, entrepreneurs and companies are adopting frugal innovation on a larger scale to cost-effectively deliver healthcare and energy to billions of people who may have little income but very high aspirations.
Let's first go to China, where the country's largest I.T. service provider, Neusoft, has developed a telemedicine solution to help doctors in cities remotely treat old and poor patients in Chinese villages.
This solution is based on simple-to-use medical devices that less qualified health workers like nurses can use in rural clinics.
China desperately needs these frugal medical solutions because by 2050 it will be home to over half a billion senior citizens.
Now let's go to Kenya, a country where half the population uses M-Pesa, a mobile payment solution.
This is a great solution for the African continent because 80 percent of Africans don't have a bank account, but what is exciting is that M-Pesa is now becoming the source of other disruptive business models in sectors like energy.
Take M-KOPA, the home solar solution that comes literally in a box that has a solar rooftop panel, three LED lights, a solar radio, and a cell phone charger.
The whole kit, though, costs 200 dollars, which is too expensive for most Kenyans, and this is where mobile telephony can make the solution more affordable.
Today, you can buy this kit by making an initial deposit of just 35 dollars, and then pay off the rest by making a daily micro-payment of 45 cents using your mobile phone.
Once you've made 365 micro-payments, the system is unlocked, and you own the product and you start receiving clean, free electricity.
This is an amazing solution for Kenya, where 70 percent of people live off the grid.
This shows that with frugal innovation what matters is that you take what is most abundant, mobile connectivity, to deal with what is scarce, which is energy.
With frugal innovation, the global South is actually catching up and in some cases even leap-frogging the North.
Instead of building expensive hospitals, China is using telemedicine to cost-effectively treat millions of patients, and Africa, instead of building banks and electricity grids, is going straight to mobile payments and distributed clean energy.
Frugal innovation is diametrically opposed to the way we innovate in the North.
I live in Silicon Valley, where we keep chasing the next big technology thing.
Think of the iPhone 5, 6, then 7, 8.
Companies in the West spend billions of dollars investing in R&amp;D, and use tons of natural resources to create ever more complex products, to differentiate their brands from competition, and they charge customers more money for new features.
So the conventional business model in the West is more for more.
But sadly, this more for more model is running out of gas, for three reasons: First, a big portion of customers in the West because of the diminishing purchasing power, can no longer afford these expensive products.
Second, we are running out of natural water and oil.
In California, where I live, water scarcity is becoming a big problem.
And third, most importantly, because of the growing income disparity between the rich and the middle class in the West, there is a big disconnect between existing products and services and basic needs of customers.
Do you know that today, there are over 70 million Americans today who are underbanked, because existing banking services are not designed to address their basic needs.
The prolonged economic crisis in the West is making people think that they are about to lose the high standard of living and face deprivation.
I believe that the only way we can sustain growth and prosperity in the West is if we learn to do more with less.
The good news is, that's starting to happen.
Several Western companies are now adopting frugal innovation to create affordable products for Western consumers.
Let me give you two examples.
When I first saw this building, I told myself it's some kind of postmodern house.
Actually, it's a small manufacturing plant set up by Grameen Danone, a joint venture between Grameen Bank of Muhammad Yunus and the food multinational Danone to make high-quality yogurt in Bangladesh.
This factory is 10 percent the size of existing Danone factories and cost much less to build.
I guess you can call it a low-fat factory.
Now this factory, unlike Western factories that are highly automated, relies a lot on manual processes in order to generate jobs for local communities.
Danone was so inspired by this model that combines economic efficiency and social sustainability, they are planning to roll it out in other parts of the world as well.
Now, when you see this example, you might be thinking, "Well, frugal innovation is low tech."
Actually, no.
Frugal innovation is also about making high tech more affordable and more accessible to more people.
Let me give you an example.
In China, the R&amp;D engineers of Siemens Healthcare have designed a C.T. scanner that is easy enough to be used by less qualified health workers, like nurses and technicians.
This device can scan more patients on a daily basis, and yet consumes less energy, which is great for hospitals, but it's also great for patients because it reduces the cost of treatment by 30 percent and radiation dosage by up to 60 percent.
This solution was initially designed for the Chinese market, but now it's selling like hotcakes in the U.S. and Europe, where hospitals are pressured to deliver quality care at lower cost.
But the frugal innovation revolution in the West is actually led by creative entrepreneurs who are coming up with amazing solutions to address basic needs in the U.S. and Europe.
Let me quickly give you three examples of startups that personally inspire me.
The first one happens to be launched by my neighbor in Silicon Valley.
It's called gThrive.
They make these wireless sensors designed like plastic rulers that farmers can stick in different parts of the field and start collecting detailed information like soil conditions.
This dynamic data allows farmers to optimize use of water energy while improving quality of the products and the yields, which is a great solution for California, which faces major water shortage.
It pays for itself within one year.
Second example is Be-Bound, also in Silicon Valley, that enables you to connect to the Internet even in no-bandwidth areas where there's no wi-fi or 3G or 4G.
How do they do that?
They simply use SMS, a basic technology, but that happens to be the most reliable and most widely available around the world.
Three billion people today with cell phones can't access the Internet.
This solution can connect them to the Internet in a frugal way.
And in France, there is a startup calle Compte Nickel, which is revolutionizing the banking sector.
It allows thousands of people to walk into a Mom and Pop store and in just five minutes activate the service that gives them two products: an international bank account number and an international debit card.
They charge a flat annual maintenance fee of just 20 Euros.
That means you can do all banking transactions -- send and receive money, pay with your debit card -- all with no additional charge.
This is what I call low-cost banking without the bank.
Amazingly, 75 percent of the customers using this service are the middle-class French who can't afford high banking fees.
Now, I talked about frugal innovation, initially pioneered in the South, now being adopted in the North.
Ultimately, we would like to see developed countries and developing countries come together and co-create frugal solutions that benefit the entire humanity.
The exciting news is that's starting to happen.
Let's go to Nairobi to find that out.
Nairobi has horrendous traffic jams.
When I first saw them, I thought, "Holy cow."
Literally, because you have to dodge cows as well when you drive in Nairobi.
To ease the situation, the engineers at the IBM lab in Kenya are piloting a solution called Megaffic, which initially was designed by the Japanese engineers.
Unlike in the West, Megaffic doesn't rely on roadside sensors, which are very expensive to install in Nairobi.
Instead they process images, traffic data, collected from a small number of low-resolution webcams in Nairobi streets, and then they use analytic software to predict congestion points, and they can SMS drivers alternate routes to take.
Granted, Megaffic is not as sexy as self-driving cars, but it promises to take Nairobi drivers from point A to point B at least 20 percent faster.
And earlier this year, UCLA Health launched its Global Lab for Innovation, which seeks to identify frugal healthcare solutions anywhere in the world that will be at least 20 percent cheaper than existing solutions in the U.S.
and yet more effective.
It also tries to bring together innovators from North and South to cocreate affordable healthcare solutions for all of humanity.
I gave tons of examples of frugal innovators from around the world, but the question is, how do you go about adopting frugal innovation?
Well, I gleaned out three principles from frugal innovators around the world that I want to share with you that you can apply in your own organization to do more with less.
The first principle is: Keep it simple.
Don't create solutions to impress customers.
Make them easy enough to use and widely accessible, like the C.T. scanner we saw in China.
Second principle: Do not reinvent the wheel.
Try to leverage existing resources and assets that are widely available, like using mobile telephony to offer clean energy or Mom and Pop stores to offer banking services.
Third principle is: Think and act horizontally.
Companies tend to scale up vertically by centralizing operations in big factories and warehouses, but if you want to be agile and deal with immense customer diversity, you need to scale out horizontally using a distributed supply chain with smaller manufacturing and distribution units, like Grameen Bank has shown.
The South pioneered frugal innovation out of sheer necessity.
The North is now learning to do more and better with less as it faces resource constraints.
As an Indian-born French national who lives in the United States, my hope is that we transcend this artificial North-South divide so that we can harness the collective ingenuity of innovators from around the world to cocreate frugal solutions that will improve the quality of life of everyone in the world, while preserving our precious planet.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)