The other day Johnnie raised something about how we play Games
What's so intriguing is how animated and committed the players become... suggesting that in an apparently pointless activity, something fundamentally important is going on... to do with our innate desire to learn and our preoccupations with relationships and status. We may think our business meetings are about the formal agenda, but I suspect we're really playing a version of Werewolf without really acknowledging it.
I think it is much, MUCH more important than that.
I think games are a huge key to what makes us tick; I think we are so wrapped into a games psychology that, like fish in water, we no longer detect it, that we can't, in fact, tell the difference between games and not-games at a very fundamental level, down among the endocrine system.
Get this, via Schenier to Clive Thompson at Wired: Suicide Bombing Makes Sick Sense in 'Halo 3'.
But the fact remains that something quite interesting happened to me because of Halo.
Even though I've read scores of articles, white papers and books on the psychology of terrorists in recent years, and even though I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, something about playing the game gave me an "aha" moment that I'd never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act.
Games take us to places that we cannot, or would rather not, or should not, experience for ourselves.
And its why, whenever I get the chance, I push the notion that when it comes to dealing with a pandemic, or in fact any of the massive challenges that we face right now, we can suffer a bombardment of facts, figures and opinions and, as we do with most propaganda and other advertising shticks, ignore it, or we can be offered the chance to PLAY.
A game can put us in a place that we get to by ourselves, one that is part of who we are and the decisions we make and our attitudes, and in that psychological place we discover that we either win or lose. And if the game is a good one, we get hooked, and then we have the ahah! moment.
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