Because some folks may not fol­low me on Twit­ter, and I’m prob­a­bly not going to adver­tise on Facebook:

THE WISDOM OF FUN: HARNESSING GAMES & PLAY FOR USEFUL WORK

Humans are habit­ual problem-​​solvers, so obsessed with puz­zles and pat­terns that for mil­len­nia we’ve posed rid­dles and cre­ated games to fill our “idle time.” But these obses­sive problem-​​solving habits are tra­di­tion­ally seen as a dis­trac­tion from the “real work” of busi­ness, schol­ar­ship and pub­lic policy.

That is no longer true… if it ever was.

This is the first of a series of three open-​​format work­shops sched­uled for 2009 & 2010, where we’ll gather to explore the new ways game play is becom­ing “use­ful” work—useful for peo­ple and institutions.

On Sep­tem­ber 19, 2009 please join us for an open-​​format meet­ing in which the atten­dees set the sched­ule and spe­cific focus for each ses­sion. In this first of three work­shops, we hope to discuss

• immer­sive eco­nomic games and MMORPGs with devel­op­ing social norms and vir­tual economies larger in actual value than some real nations;
• seri­ous games designed to use humans’ innate skills to sup­port search and optimization;
• pre­dic­tion mar­kets and related col­lec­tive intel­li­gence sys­tems that har­ness the wis­dom of crowds for robust busi­ness deci­sion, fore­cast­ing and policy-​​making;
• crowd­sourc­ing sys­tems that divide up oth­er­wise insur­mount­able com­plex prob­lems so that thou­sands of dis­trib­uted human solvers can incre­men­tally attack them;
• agent-​​based sim­u­la­tions used to under­stand emer­gent behav­ior, and game-​​inspired clas­si­cal arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tems for explor­ing decision-​​making and analytics;
• changes in the busi­ness and tech­nol­ogy of game design within the enter­tain­ment industry;
• Sec­ond Life and sim­i­lar game-​​like vir­tual plat­forms, and the social worlds devel­op­ing there, in which real insti­tu­tions are strug­gling to dis­cover their role.

…

Full infor­ma­tion is avail­able at the EventBrite reg­is­tra­tion site. Please con­sider pass­ing it along or join­ing in if you’re able.