Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Virtual World grows real economy
On Thursday, January 31, 2002, at 03:43 PM, Peter Jones wrote:
>
> It is a shame all those fantasy world spare competitive mental cycles
> couldn't be harnessed for solving real wicked problems.
> Maybe you could just trick folks into thinking they were playing a
> fantasy
> game when in fact they were solving world poverty? (01)
That in fact is the theme of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", where a
young genius is being trained in battle game simulations, with the final
battle turning out to have been real [cf http://www.ender.com/ender/;
the http://www.ender.com address is, um, whimsical?). (02)
This also relates to the "use" of "play" and of "simulation". (03)
Note that Buckminster Fuller's "World Game" concept included running
simulations of hard problems, in public (even in football stadiums). (04)
Related also is use, by us human mammals, of night-time sleep and dream
cycles to re-create, embed, re-solve... (05)
Anyone here played the "Civilization" games (I haven't)? (06)
The peer-to-peer problem solving systems such as SETI show how
collaborative "any time" (but maybe not "any way") are technically
feasible. (07)
All the best,
Mark (08)
>
> Something else: This might sound like a platitude, but perhaps wicked
> problems don't get solved easily because there isn't a large enough
> mass of
> participants competing for a big enough (individual winner) prize. That
> is,
> you need both the critical mass of intellectual input and sufficient
> individual incentive to make it work. And also, perhaps the framework or
> rubric within which the 'competition' is supported *needs* to support
> any
> time, any way, contribution so that players can contribute with an
> individual strategy but the whole gets augmented as a result of play no
> matter what.
>
> --
> Peter (09)