It’s interesting to listen to what people talk about: girls talking about fashion, boys talking about sports and video games. The specific details are usually a complete mystery to anybody outside of that particular loop, and necessarily so. People have a vested interest in developing such loops- it gives them an in-group to be a part of, with its own cultural rites, attitudes, and values. It makes them feel like they belong to something greater than themselves.<\/p>\n
Some observers are quick to label such groups a waste of time, often neglecting to admit that they’re doing the labelling in groups of their own.\u00a0We are all parts of such groups, whether we realize it or not. No man is an island.<\/p>\n
It might seem silly from the outside, but from within, it can mean everything. An exaggerated analogy: Life would be absurd if perceived externally, but somehow makes intuitive sense from within.<\/p>\n
I won’t try to explain why video games and football teams matter to boys- let’s just assume for now that it must, considering the amount of time and energy put into it. [1]<\/p>\n
Philosophical head-scratching aside, reality remains as it is: lots of time and money is spent on seemingly trivial pursuits.<\/p>\n
I’m curious to know if the process can be gamed and hacked- to get ordinary people as interested and passionate about ‘noble’ causes that enrich our species.<\/p>\n
Think about it- it’s spectacular how much work an adolescent boy puts into being successful at video games these days- it takes planning, practice, perseverance, calculation, teamwork- all of the skills that we need to survive and excel in the real world. Unfortunately, not many\u00a0gamers get around to seeing life as the ultimate video game.<\/p>\n
If you find the idea of life as a game to be a bit trivial, you need to remember that many gamers put more effort into gaming than living. I’m curious to know if non-gamers have any similar parallels in their own lives- women in particular. I suppose… identity management? Identity performance? Makeup, etc?<\/p>\n
Maybe the reason why games, fashion and football engage more people than school, politics or philosophy is that the former are more highly evolved than the latter. School is literally primitive and obsolete when it comes to holding a teenage boy’s attention, compared with video games.<\/p>\n
Video games, operating in a free market, undergo far more trial and error, variation and selection. A mediocre game does not survive- it gets outdone by better ones. (A mediocre education system, on the other hand, stagnates. There’s no competition.) As a result, video games have been evolving at a tremendous rate. Far more people dedicate their time and energy to excelling at World Of Warcraft rather than academic study.<\/p>\n
Gamers don’t have as many spokespeople and lobbyists to speak on their behalf, so they’re marginalized- we presume that this apparently undesirable allocation of resources is to be blamed on the incompetence of gamers- faulty value systems, maybe.<\/p>\n
I believe that video game designers have a lot to teach us about the world. They have, through trial-and-error, developed an intuitive understanding of human nature that most of us don’t have. I would love to see the guys from Blizzard redesign our education systems, for instance, putting the student’s experience at the heart of it.<\/p>\n
Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n [1]\u00a0Assumption: If you voluntarily spend time and energy on something, it must matter to you. I suppose it might not always be the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Games People Play It’s interesting to listen to what people talk about: girls talking about fashion, boys talking about sports and video games. The specific details are usually a complete mystery to anybody outside of that particular loop, and necessarily so. People have a vested interest in developing such loops-… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23],"tags":[142,154,181,569],"class_list":["post-3498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-education","tag-evolution","tag-gamification","tag-self-evaluation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-Uq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9906,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3498\/revisions\/9906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}