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