Remember Ender's Game, the sci fi novel in which children are so good at playing military games that their "parent" society tricks them into fighting "real" wars that the kids think are just games until all is revealed in the end? This item in Business Week called "The Power of Us" contained the following niblet that reminded me of Ender (thanks to Daniel O'Connor of Catallaxis for pointing the article out):
One investment-management firm, Marketocracy Inc., even runs a sort of stock market rotisserie league for 70,000 virtual traders. It skims the cream of the best-performing portfolios to buy and sell real stocks for its $60 million mutual fund.
As Steven Johnson says in Everything Bad is Good for You, the ability to play video games is paying off in new skills and varieties of intelligence. But then we already knew that play was productive, right--or is that Protestant work ethic still hovering around, ruining all your fun? I do battle with it daily.
I thought I was the only one who battles that (and I'm from a Catholic family). Lots of people give me a hard time for working on the weekends and most evenings when I get in from the office, but their admonishment makes me feel bad. These people think I'm toiling away, but most of what I'm doing is enjoyable. The "It's not work if it doesn't suck" idea is one that I probably picked up on the back of growing up in the industrial and agricultural areas of the Midwest, but it can be quite damaging.
Posted by: Jackie Danicki | July 16, 2005 at 07:26 AM
And on the video game note, check out Sonic the Hedgehog as Individualist Hero (http://www.capital.demon.co.uk/LA/cultural/smesonic.txt), by Iain Smedley. It's from 1993, but stands up in 2005 (and will in 3005).
Posted by: Jackie Danicki | July 16, 2005 at 09:22 AM