Very big subject and very complex…

Not much I can add casually except…

A lot depends upon the direction that games take in the future. If they can be used to educate, then some positive things can come from the approach. But, no matter what, businesses will have a tough time dealing with people who have learned that failure is the way to learn. Even though I know that this is true, the flippant attitude that business is game will be tough for executives to handle.

Real flight can cause death. Death is scary.

If you can pretend to be flying without risking death, why would you bother flying for real? You can get some of the benefits of flying by pretending to fly, after all.

Isn’t that where the risk of addiction to games arises? Partial benefit without risk, confabulation about the value of the what is being missed.

Simulation breaks from reality. No matter how hard you try, you can’t get from point A to point B in a flight simulator. It’s a matter of whether you care about that or not.

How many Americans live their entire lives without moving more than ten miles from their home town?

I like the name “serious play” too — “game” emphasizes the simulation, but “play” emphasizes the real process.

I had this ironic thought, that games are sometimes about forgetting to play. Because playing is about experimenting, and experimenting requires an object to experiment upon. But when you’re addicted to the fantasy world of a game, aren’t you giving up experimentation for a facsimile?

Even these massive, online games which involve people and an interactive element necessarily restrict the nature of possible interactions to a set of rule-governed possibilities So there might be more rules, and the spectrum of possible interactions may be much broader than in chess, say, but how’s that any different from increasing the resolution of a digital camera? You still see the pixels when you zoom in close enough, right? I still wonder whether that matters, or not (though to be fair, I believe it does — I believe that simulations, no matter how faithful and no matter how many people they fool, are never the real thing).

Dunno. I’m just playing around with these words and ideas. I think about games a lot as I try to get computers to learn how to play them.

Nonaka’s thoughts on knowledge creation and transfer…going fom implcit to explicit understanding. Unfortunately the nature of a list is that it reads in order, however, as you will see…I believe it is a never ending cycle. Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization I like his model because it shows the importance of both individual and group work. Further it supports the notion that knowlege is really a social process. On a playful note because of the truth it holds…watch this Steven Colbert commentary…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmHm0rGns4I.

Howard Gardner’s thoughts on “frames of mind”. Ways in which the human mind categorizes and holds knowledge. Concepts, Stories, Theories, Skills. Again, the list reads as if there exists a linear progression. I believe we start at any of these places and go through them. I like his model because each frame serves as the vehicle for moving through Nonaka’s model.

Stuart Brown “institute for play” reinforces the whole notion of play. Separate from game. Your quote suggests that our games get more serious as we get older…true enough…but the bigger issue is that we forget to play. I believe that our protestant work ethic has taught us that play is for kids. However, it is exactly the state of open ended discovery that creates new things…Stuarts quote, “The opposite of play is not work…it’s depression”

So in typical Greg think, I have tried to mash all of these thoughts and ideas into a model. To make sense of them all simultaneously. Attached is a slide deck that holds some of these thoughts. Feel free to post the play graphic if you can.

Lastly there is the why. Why do people do this? Why are we so inclined to follow this path? For this I lean on Maturana (cognition) and Lawrence & Nohria “Driven”. From Maturana on the “nature of nature” I take that there are three intrinsic human drives (almost reasons to exist and think) 1) the search for truth, 2) the search for operational coherence, 3) the search for mythical causes. I’ve often thought that you could apply these three “rules” or measure the existence of them to determine the overall heatth of something. If any of the three are missing in an endeavor, be it personal or business, will it be found lifeless?

Similarly, Driven gives us these four human drives: 1) Drive to learn, 2) the drive to bond, 3) the drive to defend, 4) the drive to acquire.

So what does this have to do with gaming? Well….I believe the most successful games are those that deliver on all these fronts. Games that do are intrinsically addictive. Why are marriages breaking up over games? Why do I have to beg/punish my kids to do their homework, but can’t seem to get them to stop playing games? When will we both appreciate the power of games, and develop them responsibly to a greater social end? There is a segment of the gaming population who share this perspective…they call their work Serious Games….I think it should be called Serious Play.

I acknowledge that there is a simple that exists. But an oil painting that has been painted with oils on a canvas that is as simple as an oil painting gets. Making an image that simulates an oil painting, in my thinking, strips the oil painting of many layers that are essential to our experience of it at a bodily and beyond seeing level…

I am concerned that this is what we are allowing to happen all over the world - we are creating interactions with things that have stripped away qualities that are inherent / healthy and accepted the virtual or simpler than simple form.

Simple is beautiful, simpler than simple is scary.

This doesn’t mean I don’t want to learn and grow my understanding knowledge and love for virtual spaces..it means I want to also hold the space of concern for what we are giving up in the process if we substitute rather than compliment the physical…

A story, a truth:
The nasty line ‘the best thing since sliced bread’ is rearing its head…in a post-WWII world, the triumph of industrialisation was convincing people to give up healthy rye bread, a more complex form of simple sugar, in favour of simple white bread…which is worse for us…we then chose frozen over fresh and longer lasting than lasting as long as it does on its own and…so forth…

The worst part is, sliced processed white bread was / is a simpler than simple thing … it reduced the quality of our bread …and marks an interesting departure in our age…

we were willing in the name of progress to accept and believe something was BETTER even though it was worse for us. We were willing to give up old in favour of new even if it meant giving up healthier, or perhaps an even better word is, more NOURISHING choices. What is it about us that allows us to do that?

Your question, does the difference matter? continues to knaw..it does, and it does not…it does not and it does…

thank you for opening up my thinking to re-visit this conversation with Oren and document it, and making it accessible, something I am committed to do currently and connect it to one I had with a dialogue partner colleague and friend, futurist Paul Schumann on ‘best thing since sliced bread’. thank you also to Greg for your response via email. I will post it following his permission.

Language typically involves signs and semantics.

Semantics usually grounds in geometrical and physical intuition, though with enough education just about anything can act as ground.

Experienced Go players talk of groups “making a living,” “having Ko fights,” etc., even though they’re “only” stones on a piece of wood.

Virtual reality leverages the baseline geometrical and physical intuition we all develop by modelling that inside a computer.

Online Go communities exist with players engaged in an extended dialogue most of us cannot understand because we lack the education to interpret what was said on the Go board.

Computers discretize/granularize data. You look at a screen and see a tree, but really it’s a bunch of dots so small your brain connects them into an image. Can the butterfly effect take hold between the dots?

We say a machine is “buggy when it doesn’t do what we think it should do. What we think it should do is physically realize an abstract model of behavior. E.g., a soda machine should implement a “put $1 in and push button, get soda out” model. But the buggy machine is doing exactly and only what it should be doing as a physical object. What’s “wrong” or “buggy” about obeying the laws of physics?

Who controls the model of reality implemented in the virtual, and why do we trust them with this power? Could they, by creating these realities, be trying to convince us that the model is more important than the reality? That you always get a soda when you put $1 into a (virtual) soda machine? That, for the sake of the game, it’s not important that real soda machines don’t act that way?

You might argue that virtual reality, and games, factor reality and education out of interaction. One can specify what needs to be learned before communication can occur (rules of the game), and one can specify the contexts in which those communications gain meaning (virtual physical laws).

Is what remains after such a factorization really “interaction,” or is it a digitized approximation which our brains dutifully smooth over till it looks real? Does the difference matter? Will it matter to children raised in a world bent on asserting, without really knowing yet, that it doesn’t?