Soon another year will be over and a new one will start. This is not news and as long as I live it always has been like that. One year passes and another one begins. I notice it not only because of the celebrations going on but as my birthday is on the first of January with each beginning year I get older quite literally.
The New Year is the day that marks the time of the beginning of a new calendar year, and is the day on which the year count of the specific calendar used is incremented. For many cultures, the event is celebrated in some manner
As such not that interesting of a quote, I mean we all know what we celebrate on New Year, right? When I watch TV or read around in the web I find a lot of looking back, what has happened in 2011. Today on the Freshly pressed blogs I came across a post entitled “2012: A look ahead“. So my question that I address to you guys now is: Do we celebrate the end of 2011 or do we celebrate the beginning of 2012?
New Year celebrations
I think some people like to use the opportunity to look back whereas others are looking ahead. As I have discovered before: Time is not universally seen in the same way. People are different and they use this day for varying purposes. I personally think that it is a good idea to reflect on the past but it might also be a good motivation to make resolutions. Again others use it as an opportunity for celebration, meeting friends and having fireworks light up the sky. In fact it is just like Seneca says:
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
For Europeans it seems that most of us are used to the first of January as the beginning of the New Year. Even though this has changed only in the 18th century according the above cited Wikipedia article. It seems that no other day is possible. One thing I learned I sociology class is that people get used to their environment and it´s practices or rituals become the norm . Since 25 years I always celebrate New Year on first January, of course it is normal.
But it is not for many people. It is only recently that we changed to this habit and some cultures do not celebrate New Year on the first of January. The Chinese New Year for example occurs every year on the new moon of the first lunar month. This year, I learned, that it will be on 23 of January. The Persian New Year is celebrated around the 21 of March. These are two examples that are just meant to remind you, that not everybody is preparing and making New Years resolutions right now.
Anyways I wish you guys all a good start in the New Year
Video games do not immediately make you think about education. It probably seems weird at first to think about video games as a tool of interaction with the real world but I would like to show, that simulation games deliver a means to understand complex real life phenomena. In fact Will Interactive has launched a project called “$500,000 Simulate a Better World Challenge” that shows that there are companies out there that see an important role of simulation games for changing society.
I however would like to start with a quote by Jesper Juul (2003, S. 5) to give a short definition of game, as he writes:
A game is a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.
The description points out the relevance of rules and a system which produce an outcome, dependent on the players actions. The player, thus is affecting and interacting with the game. Simulation games can model complex real life systems or phenomena into a game and make them more accessible; it becomes possible to play around with the systems and get a basic understanding of its functionality as well as cause and effect relations.
As an example, I would like to put forward the economy system in World of Warcraft, where in fact each player is able to gather different sorts of resources and than either sell them directly or craft useful tools out of them. An auction house, that is accessible to all players of one fraction serves as a selling and buying tool where players compete to sell their materials (either the resources or the crafted tools) and bid, underbid, buy, sell and resell.
Just like a real market, this simulated market place follows rules like supply and demand. On the internet, there are several guides, tutorials and wikis, that help players get useful tips on how to earn more money. Some players even consider this market place a game inside the game, as they have fun looking for underpriced goods, buy them and then try to resell them, just like real merchants. It is even fair to say, that this virtual market functions similarly to ebay (Corneliussen & Rettberg, 2008, S. 29). SimCity is another kind of simulation, where you have to build your own city and try to make your virtual citizens happy by acknowledging their needs. Lew (1989) quotes Jeff Braun, the president of the company that made SimCity as follows:
‘There’s no one way to do something. [...]Everything affects everything else. The real goal is to try to create the most wonderful city you can and learn by experimentation what works and what doesn’t.
He brings forth an important feature of simulations, which are the trial and error in the experimentation that is possible in the virtual world. There are no real consequences so that the player can truly explore what would happen in specific scenarios and thus build more elaborate mental models of the systems at play.
Image via Wikipedia
One could argue, that the game remains a game and has nothing to do with reality, but Will Wright, the developer of SimCity clearly acknowledges that “while developing SimCity” he “cultivated a real love of the intricacies and theories of urban planning and acknowledges the influence of System Dynamics which was developed by Jay Wright Forrester and whose book on the subject laid the foundations for the simulation.” (SimCity, 2011)
Suarez-Orozco (2007, S. 80) argues, that “simulations do not give players real experience in city planning, but [that] they do provide virtual experiences. And when it comes to understanding process, such experiences are valuable substitutes. Because the student can interactively control a number of variables, she may acquire a rather rich experience of different causal connections in the system […].” It can be said, that these simulations show a great potential of learning experiences, that the player could not experience without the help of the game-tool. Exploring the rules of the game as well as the underlying structures provide rich opportunities to get a better and more fundamental representation of complex systems that are at work in the real world.
These are only two brief examples of how gaming and education are related but it has been acknowledged in Gestalt-theory or Montessori pedagogy, that hands on experiences are an important factor in learning.
I think the time has come to add a virtual simulation experience to that idea. Through interaction with the environment, players get to know characteristics of the real world. They however rarely get in touch with complex system mechanics such as economic theory or the systems at work in the functioning of a city. Video games provide an extraordinary way to add these kinds of experiences and after all it´s also a lot of fun!
References
Corneliussen, H., & Rettberg, J. W. (2008). Digital culture, play, and identity: a World of Warcraft reader. MIT Press.
Juul. (2003). The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.
Suárez-Orozco, M. M. (2007). Learning in the global era: international perspectives on globalization and education. University of California Press.
SimCity. (2011, June 16). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:33, June 19, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SimCity&oldid=434588498
Lew, J. (June 15, 1989). “Making City Planning a Game” . nytimes.com. Retrieved May 18, 2007
In a previous post I have commented on the “suicide notes” of Mitchell Heisman but now as I have read the first 100 pages I want to reflect on it. Before I go on I want to make it clear and explicit here that I will not comment on the validity of his claims. Why you ask? Well first of all I simply do not have the required knowledge to check all of his claims and secondly I think that ideologies might be as important as “facts”. After all ideologies are what guide us, they are our lens through which we see the world.
My previous post was entitled “Hunters after reality, wherever it may lead”, I think I should start out with an explanation. The quote is actually by George Steiner who Heisman quotes in order to show that people seek truth at all costs. Steiner further writes:
We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, onto realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control.
I like the analogy of “hunters” that go for their prey whatever it costs because they passionately want it. As much as they like the reward, the chase is what makes them go on. I have the impression that Heisman is honest in his pursuit of knowledge and even if his ideas seem radical sometimes close to some sort of insanity he manages to capture the reader. He argues his way through and at the end I find myself thinking.
I cannot possibly explain Heisman´s ideas here but I can show you what I got from it. He starts with an “experiment on nihilism” where he brings up the idea that our rationality is based on the assumption that life is superior to death. The “conservation of self” is seen as the rational for our thinking. In his paper Heisman challenges this assumption and writes:
Challenging every living value by willing death is how I will test this question and how I will test this question is the experiment in nihilism.
After his first chapter he goes on to talk about God which he sees in the Singularity or the emergence of a “God-AI”. He analyzes the Bible in a new perspective which is interesting to say the least. He turns upside down the whole notion of the Bible and God when he looks at it as an “ought”. God does not exist but it will evolve from technological evolution. In fact this is one of these moments where I personally thought that this is close to insanity but when I thought about it a lot of points actually made sense.
...and now approaching God
Imagine you are a cellular organism some million years ago, you would not have thought at all but you surely would not have imagined that one day you would become a human. Now imagine you are among the first humans walking earth. Would not seem possible to drive through the bushes with a car, right? Your grandparents probably did not think that you would be reading this on the internet today. So does it really seem impossible that one day we will build God?
As an atheist I do not believe in God but what Heisman proposes here is a total re-conceptualization of it. If God is created by us as a super-intelligence what does it mean if I say that I am an atheist. Monotheistic religions so far seem oriented towards past or present but never have I heard about an “emergence of God”. Heisman notes that the biblical prophets could not have known about evolution or the technologies we have now but he makes a point in explaining that they saw “social life” all around them so that they were primitive social scientists. In that sense they used the “Mosaic law” in order to overcome social challenges. He depicts their image of God as a perfect being and gives an interesting analysis about it.
When reading through the paper it sometimes sounds closer to science fiction than science or philosophy but the second look more often than not makes me think. Like for example:
If God’s rule over “creation” represents the rule of postbiological evolution over biological evolution, and God represents the evolutionary successor to biology at the point at which biology becomes obsolete, then “creation” appears distinctly anti-evolutionary for a specific evolutionary reason: the point at which God rules is precisely the point at which biological evolution has been slowed to a stop. “Creation” would then be analogous to the creation of a virtual world (i.e. a computer simulation) that preserves the memory of biology in postbiological form.
He makes some compelling points and even if I am not entirely sure about most of it I have to admit that its thought provoking and different.Is that enough? Well I think it is interesting because it is that different. We are constantly around familiar people, in familiar context and talk about familiar subjects. Heismans ideas are fresh, they scream for criticism and further elaboration, he opens doors. In the words of Nietzsche:
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently
Personally I think it is worth at least looking at it and checking out the first two chapters because at the very least it is a total re-interpretation of the world.
