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Today's Gamers, Tomorrow's Leaders?
slash-sa writes "Video games have become problem-solving exercises wrapped in the veneer of
an exotic adventure. In today's fast and rapidly-changing business environment,
the strategic skills they teach are more important than ever. From realistic battlefield simulations to the building of great nations, from
fantastic voyages through worlds of mythology to conquering space, "Generation
G" could well offer the answer to unlocking
great 21st century strategists and leaders."
If these people are the best and brightest we are fingered. play WoW sometime and you'll see.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Maybe video games teach problem solving skills, but equally important in the business world is paying attention to things that aren't an orgy of colors. In the end problem solving only comes after analysis, and video games aren't teaching that.
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Thank you.
The idea that you can train someone to disassociate the "person" from the "target" is well known and well applied in the modern military. Especially in the modern American military where nighttime raids are carried out in pitch darkness with only moving infrared blips representing the fleeing victims of computer-guided missiles, such disassociation has reached a very high level.
By getting kids into games earlier, and especially into games which allow multiple "lives" with very little cost for respawn, we can teach them to better separate their feelings towards others from their actions.
I can see only good things for military planning and warmaking coming from this.
Another point not mentioned in the article is that, yes, these people are more used to working in groups thanks to MMOGs and such. But group work is also far, far more prevalent in schools (from kindergarten straight through college math classes) than it was 20, even 10 years ago. More and more, students come out of school being thoroughly used to working in groups, delegating tasks, collaborating on the final product, etc. Some of this has been due to bottom-up pressure from educational researchers saying this works well, some of it has been top-down pressure from employers saying that this is a skill they want in their workforce. Either way, I'm not sure you can give video games all of the credit.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Yet for some reason after only 11 comments the dicussion is already focused on these... what does this tell us about the slashdot readership?
OTOH, I for one welcome our BFG-toting million-polygon new overlords.
Hmph, I might change my title from Services Director to Services Masterchief.
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
Calling your enemies dogs and infidels, inferior beings who deserve to die because God said so? That has worked very well in the past and is still actively used.
Getting your own side to view the enemy as less then human, yeah lets blame that on the americans and video games, it is not like that hasn't happened since mankind decided there was US and THEM.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Why would this be a 21st century phenomenon? In my ancient opinion games today are easier and more linear then yesterday's finest (and it didn't get us anywhere, did it?).
Try to have a kid today figure out one of Infocom's or Sierra's best adventure games from the 80's...they neither have the patience nor the attention span for it.
A kid today trying to play twelve hours of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended? No chance for the future.
for producing problem solving leaders, for the simple reason that the supply of individual problem solving ability has always exceeded the number of leadership slots. The real difficulty is getting the problem solving individuals into those slots, then training them on how to exploit their problem solving capabilities in the real world.
There are two kinds of people: those who want to find a good enough solution as quickly as possible, and those who want to find the best solution and are willing to take as long as it takes. Neither extreme is right. Their's an art to making decisions, and much of that art is knowing when you don't have enough facts, and when gathering more facts will put you behind the pace at which a situation develops.
An effective problem solving leader not only has to find an artful compromise, he has to find a way to make it work where everybody who has to make it happen has a different idea of what the ideal compromise should be. In other words a problem solving leader has to build a flexible, problem solving organization. President Clinton was not my idea of a great president (unless we grade on a curve), but he had a saying that is very true that went something like this: people are policy.
I think computer games have some value in training problem solving, but I don't think they will produce a generation of superior problem solvers, so much as give superior problem solvers of the generation a different and not necessarily superior set of games than their predecessors. Imagine that one of the presidential candidates was a master of three games: chess, poker and bridge. Wouldn't that be just as intriguing as if he were a master of FPS games, strategy games and tetris?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Agreed. The idea that you'll learn to problem-solve from gaming might be a bit off. Besides the save/reload thing you mentioned, there's the fact that games usually have you solve problems using set methods. There is a set way to solve a puzzle, and there's a set way to kill the monster.
When you have to solve real problems, you start to figure out that there aren't clear solutions laid out for you. Usually, there isn't "a solution", but instead an infinite number of possible partial solutions, none of which solve the problem entirely, all of which introduce new problems, and none of which are all that certain to work. You just have to pick the one that you think is best, and hope that your judgement is good.
I'd agree that puzzles are good for keeping your brain active. I'd agree that games can help teach strategy. But as for problem solving skills, often enough you need someone who can "think outside the box" (I know it's a cliché, but it's true!). Games usually teach you specifically to think inside the box and follow the set rules, so I'm just not so sure it's good training for problem-solving.
I've seen a lot of posts here going on about the pasty faced kids or 30somethings locked away in their parents bedrooms etc. and the total lack of social skills. This isn't always the case and from some of the things I have seen from playing online games for 10-15 years now I can see some very real similarities between the business world and running long term guilds. I'm not talking about organizing a few raids in WoW, I'm talking about what it takes to start and keep a guild running for more than a few months. I'm currently in an EQ guild that was started about 6-7 years ago and the behind the scenes headaches of keeping 50-80 people (and these are people who are generally 20-45, not 12yr old kids) 'happy' aren't trivial. When you have that many people with their own agendas and personalities, managing them all, coming up with rules/guildlines/policies and enforcing them (and once again, these are people that average in age to be around 25-30 who are intelligent, employed and married in many cases) is VERY much like trying to run a business and balancing your employee's wants and needs against what you need to keep your business afloat.
sorry, I suck at spelling, I'm sure someone will point out all my mistakes.
No, it's worse than that...The people that are in power now, were the rebels back then. The damn president did cocaine and dodged the draft! For someone of his social class, that's as hippy as it gets.
It's always tempting to think that there must have been this other group of evil people who took over from the idealists and peaceniks, but the truth of it is, it's all the same people. They got older, they got good jobs, and they sold out to the system.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Chess has been a popular metaphor for war, life, strategic thinking, etc. for centuries, but I don't recall many national leaders drawn from the ranks of the Laskers, Capablancas, and Fischers.
Football (both U. S. and Rugby) are often thought to be good training for leadership. Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, famously did not "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," but even if he had, I don't think there's much evidence for correlation between football prowess and skill at national leadership.
As with football, to the extent that video gaming is ubiquitous among today's youth, it is vacuously true that our future leaders will probably have played video games, with varying degrees of skill.
But in seeking our future leaders, one might just as well look to today's [ cell phone users | Harry Potter fans | bottled water drinkers ].
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!