A****e 发帖数: 184 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/science/07tierney.html?_r=1&ref=technology
By the age of 21, the typical American has spent 10,000 hours playing
computer games, and endured a smaller but much drearier chunk of time
listening to sermons about this sinful habit. Why, the experts wail, are so
many people wasting their lives solving meaningless puzzles in virtual
worlds?
Now some other experts — ones who have actually played these games — are
asking more interesting questions. Why are these virtual worlds so much more
absorbing than school and work? How could these gamers’ labors be used to
solve real-world puzzles? Why can’t life be more like a video game?
“Gamers are engaged, focused, and happy,” says Edward Castronova, a
professor of telecommunications at Indiana University who has studied and
designed online games. “How many employers wish they could say that about
even a tenth of their work force?
“Many activities in games are not very different from work activities. Look
at information on a screen, discern immediate objectives, choose what to
click and drag.”
Jane McGonigal, a game designer and researcher at the Institute for the
Future, sums up the new argument in her coming book, “Reality Is Broken:
Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.” It’s a
manifesto urging designers to aim high — why not a Nobel Prize? — with
games that solve scientific problems and promote happiness in daily life.
In the past, puzzles and games were sometimes considered useful
instructional tools. The emperor Charlemagne hired a scholar to compile “
Problems to Sharpen the Young,” a collection of puzzles like the old one
about ferrying animals across a river (without leaving the hungry fox on the
same bank as the defenseless goat). The British credited their victory over
Napoleon to the games played on the fields of Eton.
But once puzzles and gaming went digital, once the industry’s revenues
rivaled Hollywood’s, once children and adults became so absorbed that they
forsook even television, then the activity was routinely denounced as “
escapism” and an “addiction.” Meanwhile, a few researchers were more
interested in understanding why players were becoming so absorbed and
focused. They seemed to be achieving the state of “flow” that
psychologists had used to describe master musicians and champion athletes,
but the gamers were getting there right away instead of having to train for
years.
One game-design consultant, Nicole Lazzaro, the president of XEODesign,
recorded the facial expressions of players and interviewed them along with
their friends and relatives to identify the crucial ingredients of a good
game. One ingredient is “hard fun,” which Ms. Lazzaro defines as
overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a goal. That’s the same appeal of old-
fashioned puzzles, but the video games provide something new: instantaneous
feedback and continual encouragement, both from the computer and from the
other players.
Players get steady rewards for little achievements as they amass points and
progress to higher levels, with the challenges becoming harder as their
skill increases.
Even though they fail over and over, they remain motivated to keep going
until they succeed and experience what game researchers call “fiero.” The
term (Italian for “proud”) describes the feeling that makes a gamer lift
both arms above the head in triumph.
It’s not a gesture you see often in classrooms or offices or on the street,
but game designers like Dr. McGonigal are working on that. She has designed
Cruel 2 B Kind, a game in which players advance by being nice to strangers
in public places, and which has been played in more than 50 cities on four
continents.
She and her husband are among the avid players of Chorewars, an online game
in which they earn real rewards (like the privilege of choosing the music
for their next car ride) by doing chores at their apartment in San Francisco
. Cleaning the bathroom is worth so many points that she has sometimes hid
the toilet brush to prevent him from getting too far ahead.
Other people, working through a “microvolunteering” Web site called
Sparked, are using a smartphone app undertake quests for nonprofit groups
like First Aid Corps, which is compiling a worldwide map of the locations of
defibrillators available for cardiac emergencies. Instead of looking for
magical healing potions in virtual worlds, these players scour buildings for
defibrillators that haven’t been cataloged yet. If that defibrillator
later helps save someone’s life, the player’s online glory increases (
along with the sense of fiero).
To properly apply gaming techniques to school and work and other
institutions, there are certain core principles to keep in mind, says Tom
Chatfield, a British journalist and the author of “Fun Inc.: Why Gaming
Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century.” These include using an “
experience system” (like an avatar or a profile that levels up), creating a
variety of short-term and long-term goals, and rewarding effort continually
while also providing occasional unexpected rewards.
“One of the most profound transformations we can learn from games,” he
says, “is how to turn the sense that someone has ‘failed’ into the sense
that they ‘haven’t succeeded yet.’”
Some schools are starting to borrow gamers’ system of quests and rewards,
and the principles could be applied to lots of enterprises, especially
colossal collaborations online. By one estimate, Dr. McGonigal notes,
creating Wikipedia took eight years and 100 million hours of work, but that
’s only half the number of hours spent in a single week by people playing
World of Warcraft.
“Whoever figures out how to effectively engage them first for real work is
going to reap enormous benefits,” Dr. McGonigal predicts.
Researchers like Dr. Castronova have already benefited by tracking the
economic transactions and social behavior in online games. Now that Facebook
and smartphones have enabled virtual communities to be created fairly
cheaply, Dr. Castronova is hoping to build a prototype that could be adapted
by researchers studying a variety of real-world problems.
“Social media like video games are the only research tool we’ve ever had
that lets us do controlled experiments on large-scale problems like global
warming, terrorism and pandemics,” Dr. Castronova says. “Not everything in
virtual environments maps onto real behavior, but a heck of a lot does.
Rules like ‘buy low, sell high’ and ‘tall people are sexier’ play out
exactly the same way, whether the environment is virtual or real.”
Dr. Castronova envisions creating financial games to study how bubbles and
panics occur, or virtual cities to see how they respond to disasters.
“One reason that policy keeps screwing up — think Katrina — is because it
never gets tested,” he says. “In the real world, you can’t create five
versions of New Orleans and throw five hurricanes at them to test different
logistics. But you can do that in virtual environments.”
Well, you can do it as long as there enough players in that virtual New
Orleans who are having enough fun to keep serving as unpaid lab rats.
Researchers will need the skills exhibited by Tom Sawyer when he persuaded
his friends it would be a joyous privilege to whitewash a fence.
Tom discovered, as Twain explained, “that Work consists of whatever a body
is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged
to do.” The ultimate challenge, when trying to extract work from the World
of Warcraft questers and other players, will be persuading them that it’s
still just a game. | l******n 发帖数: 11737 | | B********e 发帖数: 19317 | | s****t 发帖数: 17096 | 4 我居然看完了,簡單說就是 生活太煩躁,遊戲必須有
so
more
to
【在 A****e 的大作中提到】![](/moin_static193/solenoid/img/up.png) : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/science/07tierney.html?_r=1&ref=technology : By the age of 21, the typical American has spent 10,000 hours playing : computer games, and endured a smaller but much drearier chunk of time : listening to sermons about this sinful habit. Why, the experts wail, are so : many people wasting their lives solving meaningless puzzles in virtual : worlds? : Now some other experts — ones who have actually played these games — are : asking more interesting questions. Why are these virtual worlds so much more : absorbing than school and work? How could these gamers’ labors be used to : solve real-world puzzles? Why can’t life be more like a video game?
| i****a 发帖数: 36252 | 5 I skimmed through it. basically saying real life needs constant rewards for
short and long term tasks, and try to encourage people to keep trying by
telling them they "haven't succeed yet" instead of failed | A****e 发帖数: 184 | 6 呵呵,你这么解读我也没得办法。。。我想这个research的主要意思还是怎样把gaming
里面的constant reward 和可以量化的成长系统 引到教育和现实生活中来。 我也是一
个gamer,公司里也有很多gamers,希望这个可以帮助gamers更好的找到work and
gaming balance.
【在 s****t 的大作中提到】![](/moin_static193/solenoid/img/up.png) : 我居然看完了,簡單說就是 生活太煩躁,遊戲必須有 : : so : more : to
| i****a 发帖数: 36252 | 7 I think the best way is to capture the bio energy from a gamer's brain
cell activity during gaming.
gaming
【在 A****e 的大作中提到】![](/moin_static193/solenoid/img/up.png) : 呵呵,你这么解读我也没得办法。。。我想这个research的主要意思还是怎样把gaming : 里面的constant reward 和可以量化的成长系统 引到教育和现实生活中来。 我也是一 : 个gamer,公司里也有很多gamers,希望这个可以帮助gamers更好的找到work and : gaming balance.
| d*******r 发帖数: 3299 | |
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