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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....
Congratulations, you made it to the Senate.
Unlocking funds.
Congratulations, you made it into the White House.
Unlocking interns bras.
Congratulations, you became president.
Unlocking WMD.
liqbase
welcome our pasty-white girlfriend-less overlords.
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.
_____
Thank you.
Just like the squares are the ones from the hippie generation that are in power, the lamers are the ones from the gamer generation that will be in power.
You know, the kinds of kids whos parents idolize people like Jack Thompson and Hillary.
Living With a Nerd
There is no save-reload in real life.
Not to say that the experience offered by games isn't worthwhile but I find myself doing a lot of reloads too since I like to see if I can do stupid stuff and get away with it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
It's not an entirely original article. A book was reviewed on /. along this line of thinking over 2 years ago.
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/09/2050249
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
How about we just recognise that since his very dawn, man has filled his life with things he *MUST* do in order to survive (i.e. eat, hunt, have sex, etc.) & things he *LIKES* to do when he's not doing the things he *MUST* do (i.e. eat, play games, have sex, etc.) so that computer games are just another facet of the the things man has always done to entertain himself?
Also, can we make the assumption that any human being with an IQ higher than a sub-normal woodlouse knows that *REALITY* is *OUTSIDE* of his head and *FANTASY* is *INSIDE* it? Therefore , in all likelihood, the online *FANTASY* persona a gamer portrays in a game (or indeed elsewhere online) is probably far removed from the *REAL* person in *REAL* life. Thus, a great "Commander Napoleon Patton" in Battlefield 1942 might well be "Little Mister Sheepman Incarnate" in real life.
Now, can I please get back to my game?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
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.
Or were you already a leader type?
Cause and effect, did WoW make you a good leader because you were a succesfull guild leader OR where you a succesfull guild leader because you were already a good leader?
Winning the olympics improves your condition, why yeah, but some might say that having an excellent condition comes BEFORE you win the olympics.
I must admit, I like PUG's (Pick up groups, grouping with strangers) because they can be a lot of fun to see how different people play. You get some amazing idiots. The biggest I am currently faced with is pulling in Lotro. The hardest quests in Lotro don't require pulling, you are clearing an area, not trying to kill X of Y. Since the enemies are either far enough apart to not alert each other, OR so close you pull everything anyway, the best attack is to charge in with melee.
There is another reason for this. In LOTRO hunters are NOT good at melee. They are very good at damage, in fact they are the primary nuke class. This means that if a hunter pulls and criticals that the guardian (tank) has a hell of a job getting agro back. Meanwhile the minstrel (healer) has to spam heal to keep the hunter alive, creating even more agro.
Worse, most mobs in LOTRO consist of melee AND ranged, YOU CAN'T PULL RANGED, they simply shoot back. Ranged damage is often far more lethal, especially since a lot of people are incapable of spotting it. Most guardians can see it if a enemy starts beating up the support players but are unable to spot if they are being killed very fast by a hail of arrows.
Worse, the guardian and champion who both like enemies to be clumped together now got to pull the melee of the puller, then run to the archer to force it in melee mode, hoping the melee stays on them
DO NOT PULL
DO NOT PULL
DO NOT PULL
It is fun to see the players that know this, who have managed to learn that NOT all games play the same and when a certain tactic should be used and when it should not.
But I very much doubt that MMO's can teach you this. The reason? I seen to many player who sucked at level 1 and still suck at level 50. The good ones just stay good.
You can see a similar thing in IT, while the number of people who grow up with computers is on the increase, the number of people who actually know how they work is decreasing. It is getting almost impossible to hire developers who REALLY understand programming. I have had to deal with programmers who didn't even understand basic logic. They could use it, but only as long they got it right by accident, they could not spot bugs introduced by logical errors. The most bizarre case had to do with 0 == false. That does NOT mean 1 == true. Even if you accept that it sure as hell don't mean true == 1.
Let me just confirm my suspicion with you, do you in real life before you started working take the leadership role in say your class? A club? I think so.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Great Britain Representative: That "AssMan24" is just a pathetic camper! Look at him! Camper!
Russian Delegate: In Soviet Russia Base Camps You! Hahaha... I AM THE ASSMAN!
US Appointee: Fucking nubs, you better turn on teh ha40rs cuz I'm gunna pwn you all next round!
UN President: Hey! No talk of hacks! I'm demorecording this and it will be reviewed. If I see any sign of cheating your entire team will be banned from competition!
Yep... it's going to happen.
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
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!
...time to export some more democracy!
I remember when these same stories and arguments were being made for Table-top RPGs... yet I don't see much in terms of "leadership" touting the hours they played D&D. Though once we got out of Mom's basement... turns out there were all kinds of interesting reallife problems to solve.
:) Videogames may teach some virtues, but they teach a bunch of crap too... if you're not gonna get all up in arms and pretend it doesn't teach violence or turn you into a High School shooter, perhaps we should shy away from the reverse of that argument... cuz they're both basically equivalent. --Ray
Not to mention, with enough healing potions I was invulnerable...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Well, I'm going to assume that that's just a verbose way of over-dissecting something. That you're not literally playing your game like that, nor literally thinking like that during a game. I haven't met you, I don't know what your play style really is, so I'm going to give you that benefit of the doubt. No need to assume the worst from the start, and all that.
Because, no offense, anyone who literally play the game while thinking about it as setting goals and evaluating performance, and thinking of their team mates as "there has to be consequences for people who are complete flakes"... *sigh* there is no nice way to put it, so I might as well be frank: those are the deranged sociopaths that ruin every last drop of enjoyment for everyone else.
Let's make a couple of things clear:
1. it's just a game. We're all there to have fun. That is the _only_ goal. Getting your MC gear or whatever else is just a prop, not the goal. If you got your prop, but noone had fun in the process, then you've utterly failed the real goal and missed the whole purpose of the exercise.
We're not at work, trying to meet some deadline within a budget. We're there to have fun. We're there to forget the stress of RL, and of dealing with clueless PHBs, and with arbitrary deadlines, and with all that crap. The _last_ thing I want there is some self-appointed PHB to turn a game into the same RL crap that I'm trying to escape from.
Trying to impose deadlines and goals and performance reviews there, is as fucking stupid as doing it when going with your friends at the pub. Do you set goals like "we must go through 100 pints today at all cost" there too? Do you do performance reviews and punish the flakes who drank too little? I should hope not, because it would obviously be just the most idiotic way to ruin everyone's enjoyment at that pub. Then, what madness or idiocy would posses someone to do the same in a friendly online game?
2. Noone is really my boss on a MMO. Sorry. Someone may think that being t3h gr3at guild leader makes him some sort of management, but truth is, that's at most a helper function, with at best advisory powers. It doesn't actually give him much right to tell anyone what to do.
I let some guys tell me what to do at work because they pay my wage. So essentially I sell my work and time in exchange for some money. That's how capitalism works.
That relationship just doesn't work that way in WoW. Unless someone wants to pay me my consultancy fee for my time there, that is. Be warned that it's not cheap, though.
Seriously. If I have to do what someone else tells me, and be subject to performance reviews and pep talks, then that's no longer playing the game, that's _work_. I'm essentially working for that guy, then, instead of having fun. It's only fair that he pays me, if he expects me to work for him.
Briefly, I've seen too many guilds in too many games that plain old sucked, and/or eventually disintegrated because a few people didn't understand point 1 or point 2.
Of course, they often ended up going hand in hand. The ones who didn't understand point 1 and obsessed about finally achieving a bunch of bits and bytes instead of having fun, often ended up grudgingly tolerating a wannabe PHB who didn't understand point 2, in the vain hope that it'll lead them to their precious reward. But then again, sometimes they happen separately too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The lessons learned from playing adventure games should work well in real life:
1. Take everything that isn't nailed down.
2. Touch everything.
3. Put everything on everything until something happens.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.