How games can improve our understanding.
Will Wright's latest creation, Spore, is getting a lot of media attention in the games industry. The hype has been growing since the first demos were displayed and it will be interesting to see if the final product will be able to live up to the expectations -- a task that seems more and more difficult with every month of additional delays and wait.
Rather than speculate further on Spore hype, I wanted to highlight Will Wright's speech at a recent TED conference for a different reason (see the video at the end). He goes a little bit into more detail about his motivation on creating toys like Spore -- how we can use games as toys to help us understand the complex systems that occur in nature, in our world and in the universe.
We tend to get short-sighted by our busy lives and miss the bigger perspective due to our inability to grasp the effects and interactions that occur over longer time periods. We don't stop often enough to reflect on the consequences of our actions. We don't have enough opportunities to experiment and use the failed experiments for learning. The number of connections and the inherent complexity become daunting when we're not trained to dissect the problem.
Will Wright's presentation struck a chord because I was having a brief discussion on the exact same topic just the other night. I also believe it is possible to further knowledge and train ourselves to understand complex connections via games and toys. We need to find the primitives that govern these systems and expose them as game elements and make them entertaining and accessible to everyone and in that way train our neural networks to process the relationships and possibly reveal yet to be discovered models that simplify our understanding.
It is a great challenge and a fascinating opportunity to learn.
Rather than speculate further on Spore hype, I wanted to highlight Will Wright's speech at a recent TED conference for a different reason (see the video at the end). He goes a little bit into more detail about his motivation on creating toys like Spore -- how we can use games as toys to help us understand the complex systems that occur in nature, in our world and in the universe.
We tend to get short-sighted by our busy lives and miss the bigger perspective due to our inability to grasp the effects and interactions that occur over longer time periods. We don't stop often enough to reflect on the consequences of our actions. We don't have enough opportunities to experiment and use the failed experiments for learning. The number of connections and the inherent complexity become daunting when we're not trained to dissect the problem.
Will Wright's presentation struck a chord because I was having a brief discussion on the exact same topic just the other night. I also believe it is possible to further knowledge and train ourselves to understand complex connections via games and toys. We need to find the primitives that govern these systems and expose them as game elements and make them entertaining and accessible to everyone and in that way train our neural networks to process the relationships and possibly reveal yet to be discovered models that simplify our understanding.
It is a great challenge and a fascinating opportunity to learn.
0 comments:
Post a Comment