Games: Becoming Social by Learning Rules of Engagement

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Games Becoming Social by Learning Rules of
Engagement

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Have you noticed?

• Social exchanges over games
• Personally, in cafes, airports
• Families, Friends, Strangers
• From Bingo to video gambling elderly
• Poker playing world events
• Mah Jong, risk taking, and business success
• Kids capacity to multi-task interrelate
  globally

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The Games of our Lives

• Consider your earliest memory of games
• Based on this recollection, draw Game

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The multi-faceted nature of games in our
lives

• With each table, put the drawings in the center.
• As a group, consider the drawings, without
  discussing them
• Rearrange the drawings on the table to an order
  that makes sense to you

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Discussing the Games of Others

• Considering the drawings of others (not your
  own), comment on what you see.
• After these comments, ask questions about the
  drawings of others.
• Share the story of your own game

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What are we discovering at our tables?

• At each table, discuss and record
• What do you notice in the stories?
• What aspects of being human are represented in
  the way we play games?
• What are our similarities, differences?

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Consider, in small groups

• What aspects of our selves that emerged from our
  drawings of our childhood memories of games, are
  still part of who we are today, as adults?

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As a large group

• What did we notice
• What is the nature of our games?
• How much do we remember about games?
• Can we trace our own attributes and attitudes
  from our remembrances of games as children?
• How much of who we are is connected to the ways
  we learned to play games?

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Playing Games A key facet of who we are

• Our ways of being with others and relating
• Our sense of belonging/ not belonging
• Our ways of competing, winning, losing
• The importance of completing, continuing
• Food, drink, merriment
• Risk taking
• Types of strategies
• Our views of rules

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Poker

• Childhood memories
• Pervasive in international politics as well as in
  the homes and neighborhoods
• Nature of poker and culture
• Regardless of language, culture, age, the game
  creates bonds of poker players
• Do players form Communities of Interest?

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Mah Jong

• Taking financial risk key to entrepreneurial
  success
• Networks of players
• Is the thinking, strategy, and vision different
  for Mah Jong players than poker players?
• Consider the world scene

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Video Computer Games

• Are video games part of a transformation in
  culture, paradigm, and way of being social?
• Are they building new social and relational
  capacities?

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Power of video Internet games

• Overt and Secret escalation of commitment
• http//web.mit.edu/cms/games/transcripts.html
• Some ideas from an MIT conference on video games
  in 2000
• 42.5 of the players were female
• 70 over 18 and 40 over 35

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Growing up digital Don Tapscott

• Yesterdays children are now young adults who
  have grown up in a digitally interactive world
  where video games often define their lives. As
  they play video games, they analyze,
  authenticate, strategize, evaluate, categorize,
  create new games.

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Social Cognition

• Our social cognition is influenced by the ways in
  which we learn to play games
• How we learn the rules
• The social context of games
• Our way of being in games
• Playing to win or winning to play
• Is it the game or is it the score?

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The Lively Arts

• Gilbert Seldes, (1924) The Seven Lively Arts
• Arts are for every citizen
• The lively arts are passionate, open our eyes,
• Technological and urban
• Are todays video/computer games emerging as the
  defining art form of the 21st century?

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Game Theory

• Rich background to exploring the nature of games,
  especially tied to economics, biology, and social
  systems.
• Classic game theory the actions of agents are
  strategic reactions to the actions of other
  agents
• Predict rational human behavior
• http//cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/game.htm
• Evolutionary game theory
• Stable or dynamic strategies
• http//plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-evolutionar
  y/2
• http//www.holycross.edu/departments/biology/kpres
  twi/behavior/ESS/ESS_index_frmset.html

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Do rules of the game create the structure
of our lives?

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• Pierre Bourdieu, (1980) practices come from
  underlying structure, habitus, while Wenger
  argues that the habitus, is an emerging
  phenomenon comes from practice.
• When we play games as children, are we creating
  our habitus?
•                                                   
         

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Games cas

• John Holland. In Complex Adaptive Systems (cas),
  there is always an underlying rule set that is
  established at the formative moment of the cas.
  All of the complexity that follows is intimately
  connected to the initial rule set.
• Do the rules of the game create cas?

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Learning our ways of being

• Our ways of being (knowing, acting, and adapting
  in complex organizational, political,
  international, and interpersonal systems) are
  influenced by the rules, strategies, grammars,
  ethics and cultures of engagement with others
• Do we learn our ways of being when we play games
  as young children?

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Capacity to play games

•   We have unique capacities to learn verbal
  language at an early age.
• Languages learned after childhood retain some
  structure, pronunciations, concepts, and gestures
  of the early languages we learned.
• Do games have a similar impact on us?

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The continued influence of games

• When we speak languages we learned after
  adulthood, we retain the traces of our native
  languages (revealed as accents and grammatical
  structures). In times of stress, the influence
  of our native languages emerges.
• In times of stress, do our native ways of playing
  games emerge?

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Capacities to learn

• As adults, we have the capacity to learn new
  languages, but this capacity seems to build upon,
  rather than replace, our initial languages.
• Is it valuable for adults to learn new games? To
  expand the games we play?
• When we join a new organization, school, or
  family, do we need to learn to play the new game?

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Learning to be social

• Games have a role, similar to languages, in
  influencing our identities as individuals and as
  actors in social contexts including interpersonal
  relationships, communities, organizations, and
  the global scene.
• Can we expand our capacities?

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The influence of games

• Strategies, rules, ethics, social patterns, of
  our early games remain with us.
• We remember sights, sounds, aromas, feelings
  (emotional and of touch) from our childhood when
  we remember our games.

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The foundational nature of games

•  By understanding the nature of our foundational
  games and their importance in establishing our
  lifes narratives, we can grow as adults.
• By understanding the nature of the games
  themselves, we may be able to better understand
  others who influence the course of our work, our
  communities, our the world.
•    

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Mah Jong, Poker, Video Games

• There are different cultures within these games,
  and the differences matter in the
  inter-relationships of those who learned these
  games as an intimate part of their childhood
  learning.
•     

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Learning to interact with others

• Our games (marbles on streets of NYC, Old Maid
  in a kindergarten, Scrabble around the family
  table, Solitaire in ones bedroom, self-created
  games), may be memories, yet retain a profound
  influence on how we interact with others in all
  capacities as adults.
• Are we most ourselves in games?

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Our prejudices and games

• Social status, ethnicity, prejudice, structural
  inequality may be learned, transferred and
  nourished inter-generationally through our games.
• Except when there is a generational break as
  with video games and the Internet 

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Are Games the foundational narrative of
our lives?

• The continuous retelling of the story of our
  lives
• Plot, drama, suspense
• Beginning, action, ending
• Different roles
• We may be most alive and real when we are playing
  our games

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The restorative power of games

•  Time for energy, recharging
•  May be realest of our worlds
• Playing games may free up our embodied selves to
  reach higher levels of intellectual and
  entrepreneurial accomplishment
• An alternate form of meditation
• Playing a game we know well, may be like coming
  home

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Being with our kind

• We play with those we know, who share the rules
  and the boundaries for stretching the rules We
  recognize our kind even when we have never met,
  when we play the same game together.
• We play with those that are enough like us yet
  different enough to be players together.
• Rush, high, flow the passion of game
•                                                   
      

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Where are we going?

•  Researching aspects of games
• Reflection in action
• Chance, risk, fear, challenge
• Together yet apart
• Escalation within the game, of the games

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Beginning Research

• Wide, multi-disciplinary literature searches
• Collaborative research with in-depth interviews
  of players of different games
• Cooperative research to better understand our
  selves
• Phenomenography for unique ways of meaning making
• Excitement enthusiasm - importance

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Games KM

• Commitment to engagement with the rules
• Wanting to learn knowledge of others
• Communities of Interest Practice
• Virtual communities vibrant
• What is managed, shared, created depends on the
  rules

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The Global Community
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One more round?