I'm an mechanical engineer by training and I used to spend hundreds of hours simulating load on virtual mechanical parts using finite element analysis. It was great I could try various permutations of length, width, tapers etc to optimize the load bearing capacity of the part and minimize the amount of material needed. I didn't have to build 50 different parts and test them in a lab. I learned many things in the simulations and after a while I intuitively knew where to start and was able to optimize the parts in 2 or 3 passes.
That's the power of games, you can simulate complex (economic, organizational, etc) models and have real humans run through the system to test your designs . We can tap massive player pools we can leverage the collective actions to understand if the models work or don't work. As we send new people through these models they can walk out with a better understanding of the whole system. Another advantage games provide over just learning from life experience is that we can do time compression in games. What if we make a simulation of our projected human population growths and current resource consumption patterns and have it run a 10X speed in Second Life. That would have an impact on the players, how would they react, how would the work together to solve this collective problem?
I've always been interested in social and political editorial in the media (e.g The Simpsons, South Park, The Daily Show and Colbert Report). Often humor is the best tool for analyzing our society and politics. Historically Lampoon cartoons have been a very effective political tool. How about games with some of these models and a political/social editorial edge?
I think Serious Fun Games is an untapped market and could help us understand our systems better.
Ian Bogost (of Persuasive Games) wants to
Check out his interview on the Colbert Report:
The rest of the article is here:
Game On Ian Bogost Dished on The Colbert Report
That's the power of games, you can simulate complex (economic, organizational, etc) models and have real humans run through the system to test your designs . We can tap massive player pools we can leverage the collective actions to understand if the models work or don't work. As we send new people through these models they can walk out with a better understanding of the whole system. Another advantage games provide over just learning from life experience is that we can do time compression in games. What if we make a simulation of our projected human population growths and current resource consumption patterns and have it run a 10X speed in Second Life. That would have an impact on the players, how would they react, how would the work together to solve this collective problem?
I've always been interested in social and political editorial in the media (e.g The Simpsons, South Park, The Daily Show and Colbert Report). Often humor is the best tool for analyzing our society and politics. Historically Lampoon cartoons have been a very effective political tool. How about games with some of these models and a political/social editorial edge?
I think Serious Fun Games is an untapped market and could help us understand our systems better.
Ian Bogost (of Persuasive Games) wants to
harness interactive entertainment for more than just tooling around in fantasy la-la land. Let the wonks have their Civ 4s and Age of Empires 3s, but why not also casual games that make engaging everything from food inspection to oil economics more...well, frankly more entertaining.
Check out his interview on the Colbert Report:
The rest of the article is here:
Game On Ian Bogost Dished on The Colbert Report
I'm pretty jazzed about what Georgia Institute of Technology Assistant Professor Ian Bogost is up to these days with his Persuasive Games consulting/development project (see my review of Food Import Folly). Okay, you pick up his latest book (also called Persuasive Games) and it's still a little heavy with the theory (though it does drop most of the unnecessary in-crowd jargon that plagued his prior uber-treatise, Unit Operations). But its hook? Fascinating. Bogost wants to harness interactive entertainment for more than just tooling around in fantasy la-la land. Let the wonks have their Civ 4s and Age of Empires 3s, but why not also casual games that make engaging everything from food inspection to oil economics more...well, frankly more entertaining. Get over your Puritan-esque pleasure-guilt -- having fun while learning is hardly "entertaining yourself to death," (where studying socio-politically irrelevant nobodies like Paris Hilton, on the other hand, is). How about a game that deals with China's treasury bond threats against the U.S. dollar? The international political and economic factors post-global catastrophe in terms of responsibility, cooperation, bureaucracy, and aid management? Cultural collisions (and compromises) when global economies collide?
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