I gotta confess, I just don't get the video game thing. It seems weird and alien to me. Not because of the technology, but because of the solitariness and alternative universe aspects of it.
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A reasonable response because gamer *culture* often is all these things.
But there may be something behind the strangeness and, at times, machine assisted navel gazing (unprecedented, or a modern twist on previously seen styles of human behavior?).
I think of video games as a tangent and precursor of the sort of human/machine interface described by William Gibson in his *sprawl* series of novels (*Neuromancer* being the most well known): our screens, mice, keyboards and icons are replaced by alternative universes representing data -- a necessary advance in the world he depicts (and in the real one too I think) because there's far too much intel to track using older methods.
Considering the complexity of managing the world -- something we'd have to concern ourselves with if folks like us ever came to power -- I think new methods of gathering, tracking, retrieving and analyzing the inevitable torrent of info are sorely needed. Video games, believe it or not, show a potential route.
There are possibilities there that are in their embryonic stage and which may never mature. Even so, well worth following closely.
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I feel exactly the same about Walmart's undeniable achievements in maximizing command and control of their datastream. We need that level of tool so we'll be as sharp as them.
.d.