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

Being all that you can be

Military culture just got a little weirder in my head (New Yorker):

For years, the military has offered its recruits free tuition, specialized training, and a host of other benefits to compensate for the tremendous sacrifices they are called upon to make. Lately, many of them have been taking advantage of another perk: free cosmetic surgery.

“Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible,” Dr. Bob Lyons, the chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center, said recently, in his office in San Antonio. It is true: personnel in all four branches of the military and members of their immediate families can get face-lifts, nose jobs, breast enlargements, liposuction, or any other kind of elective cosmetic alteration, at taxpayer expense. (For breast enlargements, patients must supply their own implants.)

I heard about this tonight standing in the kitchen w/ a couple guys who have been in the military.

Sounds like there are a lot of boob enlargements and liposuction jobs going on:

According to the Army, between 2000 and 2003 its doctors performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents. In the first three months of 2004, it performed sixty breast enhancements and two hundred and thirty-one liposuctions.

Of course, these surgeries benefit the surgeons:

“The benefit of offering elective cosmetic surgery to soldiers is more for the surgeon than for the patient,” Lyons said. “If there’s a happy soldier or sailor at the end of that operation, that’s an added benefit, but that’s not the reason we do it. We do it to maintain our skills”—skills that are critical, he added, when it comes to doing reconstructive surgery on soldiers who have been wounded.

I’m a little miffed by the idea that doing a lot of boob jobs would keep your surgical skills sharp for working on soldiers with battlefield wounds, but what do I know.

I have not had a boob job or been injured in combat.

The closest I’ve come to combat is paintball. And the worst I got hurt from that was crawling around in baby stinging nettle.

Next time I see an unusually full-bosomed woman in uniform, I might just have to chuckle a little and try not to stare longer than I normally would try not to stare.