We are gaming animals

At a conference a while back in SF, futurist Ray Kurzweil evidently said:

“Information technology will be most of the economy in the 2020s…games will have taken over the world.”

Who knows if Kurzweil is right (about anything), but on the gaming piece, I definitely think he’s onto something.

This morning, NPR ran a story about a video game created by a Columbia University student that is arguably the largest competition between ivy league college students ever.

In my mind, this game represents an increasing trend…a hybrid game that straddles the virtual and non-virtual. A game that transforms the mundane into incentivized play.

This is significant because play taps the mindroot of our pre-culture past….at least according to Dutch historian Johan Huizinga:

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing. We can safely assert, even, that human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play. Animals play just like men.”

So, if Plato is out there listening, we are not only social animals, we are gaming animals.

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A scary irony embedded in the above Kurzweil quote is the increasing game-ification (?) of US Military operations.

The Military has a history of leveraging video game/simulations for training purposes, but recent developments have enabled gamers to actually control weaponized UAVs:

“Gaming companies have spent millions to develop user-friendly graphic interfaces, so why not put them to work on UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]?” says Mark Bigham, business development director for Raytheon’s tactical intelligence systems. “The video-game industry always will outspend the military on improving human-computer interaction.”

It is becoming increasingly possible that by ostensibly playing a video game (ie sitting in front of a screen w/ a joystick), you could literally fight a war and presumably ‘take over the world.’

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Related links:

NPR: Interactive Games Make Museums A Place To Play
NYTimes: Storming the Campus
Mother Jones: Peter W. Singer’s Killer Robots