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December 16, 2008
Raph Koster has a blog now
Raph Koster (a long time figure in the MMO game design world) now has a blog and here is a funny entry from it about a number of related issues: how does the new generation of people act? Are games too much at variance with real life?
Some exerpts:
I have mentioned before that one of the possible great strengths of games is that they can present complex problems as being amenable to analysis.
…games are by definition tractable. They teach you to chunk up, to chop apart, to disentangle. Perhaps this is where games can most change society: a way to look at the problems so that we no longer throw up our hands…
— Games for Change, closing address
But when we look at that list from the top, about Millenial workplace attitudes, it’s hard not to draw the analogy to a generation raised in a system where there are always rules, always correct answers, where you geta pat on the head every time you do something right, and curves are always easily projected.
It was pointed out that all this sounds like I am slamming Millenials; in fact, I did write a whole book about how good games are as teaching tools, so let me point out the clear benefits of gamist thinking as reflected in Millenials: team-oriented practices, clear goal orientations, high self-confidence, a firm belief that things are solvable, a lack of the cynicism and skepticism common to GenX... it's not all bad!
And this:
- games are, because of their inherently mathematical nature, limited in conveying certain types of information. But I think it is also worth asking whether the scope of their models is effectively misleading, or even actively lying, about how the world works.
In Taleb’s books, the bogeyman is the extremely rare event with a high impact, which he calls a black swan. These are historically visible, but exist on timeframes long enough that we consider them arbitrarily rare: essentially, a non-event in our planning. Yet they also have a highly disproportionate effect on the environment in which they occur.
Interesting ideas.
Posted by rakhier at December 16, 2008 10:07 AM