Video Games, Systems, Consequences and the Afterlife

I'm a fan of video games. I think that the world will get better as we build more effective simulators to teach systems dynamics that include the behavior of nations at war, ecosystems, financial and labor markets, popularity, and the change in social norms. Different dynamics are tough to understand as prose or equations; sometimes the patterns become easier to see when they play out in video simulations that let us see causality that simulates centuries within an hour. I don't think that we've really understood how powerful this potential technology is for teaching systems dynamics that so define our world.

There is one lesson that these video games gloss over, though. And it may be the most important lesson of all.

What we enjoy or suffer today rarely has anything to do with today.

Mark Zuckerberg made $1.5 billion today. I'm not even sure he went into the office today. He may have stayed home with a cold or may have had a really important strategic meeting. I don't know what he did today but I guarantee you that it does not explain his gain in wealth today. That is the consequence of things he did years ago.

Probably 99.9% of what we enjoy or suffer from today is the consequence of something done in the past. Little of it even done by us. Today my portfolio is up. It is the result of investments and sacrifices I made in the past, but that's the least of it. It's also the result of the Dutch who came over to New Amsterdam and recreated the stock market they'd first established in Amsterdam. It's the result of countless employees and entrepreneurs who have created equity out of thin air. It's the result of laws that protect private property. And so on.

That lesson that evolutionary biologists and religious teachers would both teach you is that causality does not stop at death. There is an afterlife. The lives of people in the future will be diminished or enhanced based on what you do in your lifetime. I suppose it is a kind of evil to believe that your life has no consequence and a sort of good to believe that it does.

If you are looking for cause and effect that can be experienced within a day or even a year, it is easy to get discouraged. Little of consequence plays out that rapidly and if you are measuring the impact of yesterday or last month's efforts on today, you'll conclude that there's not much that can be done. But the stories that inspire are those of the immigrant mom who worked two jobs to get her kids through college. There is generational causality and it doesn't end with her grandkids. One of the reasons I love history is that it explains so much of what defines today. We are the product of decisions made centuries earlier.

The community you live in is the product of the despair or hope of past generations, their action or inaction, their creativity or conformity. One definition of foolishness might be to believe that nothing we do has any consequence; one definition of wisdom might be to believe that what we do has consequences for generations. (Even if that consequence is to have made no difference because even not making a difference makes a difference.)

Finally, I leave you these words of advice from one of my favorite people.

The Buddhists have a good piece of advice: “Act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.” It is this serious playfulness, a combination of concern and humility, that makes it possible to be both engaged and carefree at the same time. One does not need to win to feel content; helping to maintain order in the universe becomes its own reward, regardless of the consequences. - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Making a Game of Education

Games provide flow but rarely provide meaning. Education provides meaning but rarely provides flow. Time to bring gamers into the classroom?

Csikszentmihalyi has spent decades studying flow, the psychology of what engages and absorbs people. It seems to me that successful game designers are experts at creating flow. However, even though games offer an abundance of flow they don't offer much meaning; success at games rarely changes society or provides a living to the game player.

By contrast, education is meaningful. A degree can lead to a job and the work started in pursuit of an education can lead people to rethink society at its most basic level. (The founding fathers, for instance, were all students of the Enlightenment.)

It seems as though there is enormous potential that could come from creating a dialogue between educators and game designers. Perhaps the simplest thing would be to have gamers either enter the classroom or study curriculum to look for opportunities for creating flow. These gamers could work with educators on one simple, but impactful, goal: increase the amount of time each day that students spend in flow. Once they reach a critical point in this - say, once students are in flow for 20% of the day - they could begin to share educational practices.

I suspect that this seemingly simple goal would have profound implications for education. One condition for flow is feedback on how one is doing. Another is a balance between skill and challenge. Yet another is a clear goal. Creating flow experiences for students would mean - among other things - changing how and how rapidly students receive feedback. It would mean accepting where students are and starting there before pulling them to the next level (maintaining a balance between challenge and skill). And it would mean thinking about which goals would be meaningful to 8 or 10 or 14 year olds. This would mean redesigning education.

For now, education still seems heavily influenced by the goals and setting of religious instruction from the early days of formal education. We generally don't trust pleasure or the child's impulses as guides to learning. Beliefs from this orientation form a pattern. Children's attention needs to be directed with rebukes and reminders. Students may find education distasteful, but with enough self discipline, students can succeed. We cannot trust the self but instead have to repress it. And feedback comes instead in the form of judgment, often long after the task is done.

But what if we thought instead that what humans find naturally fascinating is, itself, a basis for an education? What if educational success was less a matter of self discipline than passion? And what if the joy a baby finds in learning to walk or talk is something that could continue to animate learning into one's 30s or 60s?

One last thing that I'll mention about the benefits that would follow from this approach to designing education is simply this: many of the same issues of flow and meaning that need to be addressed in education need to be addressed in knowledge work. Advances in education could hardly be contained to learning but would impact productivity as well.

Instead of telling kids to leave their games outside the classroom, maybe we should ask them to bring them in.

Campaigning to Impress the Video Gaming Generation

Enough with the debates. The same. Old. Words. and ideas. Again and again. And again.

Meanwhile, the first generation to grow up with video games is now voting. In large numbers.

So, here's my proposal. Instead of having the candidates answer questions, put them into simulations. They sit at a laptop or with a joy stick in hand, and are fed scenarios: dollar in free fall, terrorist attack in Miami, find the balance between environmental sustainability and economic prosperity, president of France marries your sister ...

The candidates then have, say, fifteen minutes to craft responses. This could even go in rounds, with them responding to the response of their first response, a recursive causality just like the real world.

We might even give them a life line. As Life Hiker points out, the candidates decision about who to turn to for advice is at least as important as any other decision they make. Who do they call in the middle of financial crisis, for instance?

This, it seems to me, would be a great way to see what a candidate is made of, how quickly and well they think. We might even open it up nationwide, having debates for the final 10, top-scoring candidates. Or, we could just keep listening to them talk.

Blogging, Video Games, the Progression of Art & the Future of Politics

I saw a recent report that suggested that blogging has peaked. I'd like to suggest that the full influence of blogging has yet to be felt.

Renaissance art changed how people thought about reality. The art went from iconic to realistic, from celebrating divinity that merely happened to take a human form to celebrating the human form. The Renaissance, with its emphasis on secular issues and response to market forces, represented a shift from heaven to earth. How people perceive the world through their art makes a huge difference in their expectations about how the world ought to be.

In the last generation, video games have become a huge market. It is not just true that the video game industry has become bigger than movie videos, but I would strongly suspect that time spent with any one video game is a multiple of the time spent with any one video; gamers play for hours and movie fans watch for about 100 minutes. Hence, the time spent on video games is even greater than the money spent on video games. These games have changed the consciousness of a generation of youth.

What makes video games unique in the progression of dominant art forms?

Through the history of the West, the dominant art has arguably progressed from the painting and sculptures of the Renaissance (think DaVinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli) the classical music of the Enlightenment (think Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach), and the novels of the age of capitalism (think Dickens, Faulkner, and Twain) and, most recently, movies. In each of these past forms, the spectator is expected to admire. You are expected to gaze in awe at Michelangelo's David, to listen enraptured to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or become engrossed in Faulkner's Sound & the Fury or sit in admiration of Benigni's film, Life is Beautiful. By contrast, I am expected to become a participant in the video games Civilization or Halo. Video games, although not yet the dominant art form, are different from any other “art” form in the history of the West.

Blogging is to news and commentary what video games are to entertainment; blogs thrust the spectator into the role (however briefly and for however small of an audience) of performer. Blogs blur the boundary between spectator and participant.

Has blogging peaked? I doubt it. Rather, I suspect that the real influence of blogging has only begun to be felt. Just as the orchestration and precision of classical music symphony presaged the factories of the industrial age and Renaissance art shifted focus to the here and now, video games and blogging have changed the definition of spectator and will change what it means to be consumers or voters. The generation that grows up blogging and playing video games is going to scoff at being excluded from participation in formulating policy or having to choose options that have been defined by others. Rather, the politics of this generation will be a politics of participation.

The successful politicians and parties won't pretend to offer a tightly plotted narrative like a filmmaker; rather, they will offer a context and platform for participation, like the designer of a video game. The successful policy makers won’t be those who craft the most admirable policy; they’ll be the policy-makers who are best able to create mechanisms for policy formulation that engage the average citizen.

Whoever first makes this shift will win over a new generation of voters. Has blogging peaked? No. Rather, the medium of blogging has only just begun to change our expectations of politics, policy, and community. As with all technology, the really interesting stage of adoption occurs when new technological inventions trigger new social inventions. This is the dance of social evolution and the popularity of blogging is just the first step in that dance. Get ready. Soon the floor will begin shaking.