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

Body Swapping Experiment

(hat tip Nicholas)

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This reminds me of a New Yorker article that my friend Jason told me about the other day.

The article tells the story of a woman who contracted HIV, then got shingles, and eventually developed an insatiable itch on her head:

She simply felt itchy, on the area of her scalp that was left numb from the shingles. Although she could sometimes distract herself from it—by watching television or talking with a friend—the itch did not fluctuate with her mood or level of stress. The only thing that came close to offering relief was to scratch.

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One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

Doctors, having tried all kinds of other stuff, decided to sever the remaining nerves to the itchy region on her head.

The itch went away for a while but eventually returned.

In the end, the itch was not a sensation rooted in her body. It was rooted in her brain.

The article goes on to discuss a new way of looking at how our brain relates to the body:

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

I’d argue that all of this is evidence that the mind and do not run in sequence, they run in parallel. The mind keeps it’s own representation of the body, separate from the actual nerves in our flesh.

A mental avatar of sorts.

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Just as the swedish study demonstrates how our bodily perceptions are very malleable, the story of this lady’s itch shows how the mind maintains a separate representation of the body which can sometimes get messed up, or possibly even hacked.

I was disappointed with AP’s treatment above.

The philosophical and metaphysical ramifications of this research are pretty rich and it’s lame that AP didn’t pick up those threads.

National Geographic’s treatment was a lot more in depth…

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Radiolab did a really good show called ‘Who am I‘ on some of these themes of the mind-body connection and what happens when wiring gets off.

In the show, they talk to U.C. San Diego Neurologist, V.S. Ramachandran who has done some really awesome research and treatment with people suffering pain in their phantom limbs.