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My CTLab colleague Michael Tanji is calling for participants to play a prediction market built at the old groupintel site.

Sounds good. I did this once before, a few years back with a closed Google Group but my attention wandered when the topics drifted away from my core research interests. I suspect this one will be more to my liking.

Dave “the hand of ” Munger at Cognitive Daily points to a study on the powerful effects of massive multiplayer online role playing games like World of Warcraft, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and others :

One type of game — one of the most popular types, in fact — hasn’t been studied nearly as much as the traditional arcade-style game: massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs. One of the studies of this type of game seemed to find that players weren’t more aggressive because the games foster cooperation between players.

But we’ve also heard — and seen, with Jim’s game-play, that MMORPGs like World of Warcraft can be more engaging and distracting than other games, sucking away hours and hours in seemingly endless online quests. Even if it turns out these games don’t promote violent behavior, is it possible that they have other detrimental effects?

….Sleep quality was significantly worse in the MMORPG group than the other groups, and the participants said the game interfered with their academics (although their actual academic performance didn’t suffer compared to the other groups). Yet the MMORPG group was significantly more likely than the other groups to say they planned to continue playing the game after the study was complete.

So is this behavior addictive? Smyth doesn’t offer an assessment, but the fact that the MMORPG appears to be negatively impacting several areas of these students’ lives — and that they continue to play on despite this — suggest it might be. But once again, we must be careful when generalizing results such as this. Just one MMORPG was tested, so we can’t say whether these results apply to other games. What’s more, the students clearly were getting some benefits from the game, building an online social network that was valuable to them. Despite these caveats, to me it’s surprising that such dramatic results occurred even when groups were randomly assigned to the games. Maybe nearly anyone could get “hooked.” Which is why I’m not especially interested in getting started.

We’ve known that gaming is a powerful behavioral tool since the early RAND wargaming studies, making MMORPGs a potential delivery system for education and occupational training in the 21st century

I was amused.

Fabius Maximus has hit his stride as a blogger with a highly informative set of posts on wargaming that later expanded to DNI.

War games, the antidote to “Victory disease”

Are war games a competitive edge of conventional forces vs. non-state 4GW foes?

The Achilles’ Heel of military simulations

At DNI:

During Millenium Challenge 2002

It is generally underestimated by the public (and even academics) how powerful games – especially free-play games- can be as a tool for learning; the cognitive potential of a well-constructed and rigorously moderated game is literally immense. ( and when coupled with mass-collaboration, social-networking, MMORPG  technology a level of validity might be realized that the old Prussian Grossgeneralstab or RAND apparatchiks could only have dreamed. Unfortunately, a rigged game becomes a powerfully persuasive lie, so integrity is key if gaming is to guide decision-making in the real world) A few examples:

” The gamers argued that insights arose from immersion in play. In 1956 Joseph Goldstein noted that the war game demonstrated ‘ the organic nature of complex relationships’ that daily transactions obscured.War-gaming gripped its participants, whipping up the convulsions of diplomacy ‘ more forcefully…than could be experienced through lectures or books’.”

” A team from the Social Science Division [ at RAND ] posed a number of questions which they hoped the unfoldig month of gaming would resolve. Chief among them was whether gaming could be used as a forecasting technique ‘ for sharpening our estimates of the probable consequences of policies pursued by various governments’. Would gaming spark “political inventiveness“, and more importantly, how did it compare to conventional policy analysis? Did gaming uncover problems that might otherwise be neglected? And invoking the emerging touchstone of intuition, did the experience impart to policy analysts and researchers “ a heightened sensitivity to problems of political strategy and policy consequences?”

  Sharon Ghamari- Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn [ emphasis mine]

Another example:

“What we encountered, though, once our game-called Therapy, as it happens-was finished, were two remarkable things, both of which Colin Powell and Richard Duke might have told us. First, of all the professions, psychiatrists and psychologists tended to do worst at the game; secondly, the synthetic process worked even better in reverse. Playing the game expanded people’s grasp of human nature in general and their particular group’s dynamics. But even more, watching people play revealed a depth of information about them, and about the world at large, that you would ordinarily expect only from months of official therapy“

The quote comes from an article “Wanna Play ?” in Psychology Today. Further insights in the article:

“In fact, the phrase “just a game” is a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance. Games are anything but “just” anything. They cover the gamut of human endeavor and come in every package and medium you can imagine. Last year in the United States alone, 126 million board-style games were sold for $1.14 billion; video and computer games accounted for another $5 billion. It is impossible to calculate how much people benefit from games:

* Games are primers on turn-taking, the basis of all relationships.

* They can solve major crises in industry and teach people not to pilfer pencils from the company storeroom; in fact, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on them for that.

* They can be training grounds for legendary generals and make the difference between winning and losing wars.

* Finally, and most important, games can reopen doors into the world of pretending and childhood, reminding us of unadulterated fun, sparking creativity

Psychologically speaking, games have a knack for setting us free”

Instead of reading about games, you should be playing one 🙂