I attended a panel at the Supernova 2008 conference entitled “All the World’s A Game” and then posted about it at length on the UpTake blog. The panel was meant to answer the following questions:
Massively multiplayer online games offer glimpses of how social interactions and work will develop in the Network Age. What can they teach us? How can businesses and online communities leverage insights from virtual worlds to develop more effective systems and practices?
At CNReviews we’ve blogged about Gaming in a Strange Land and China Vortex has some great posts about the sordid reality (and some more choice words here in part 2) of the Chinese internet cafe and by extension the Chinese internet user.
I posted detailed notes on this panel on the UpTake blog. I won’t repost the whole post here. But I wanted to highlight Professor Douglas Thomas’ thesis that the Five Characteristics of the Gaming Disposition can help gamers deal with the workplace of the future better than non gamers. Do these apply to Chinese gamers?
source: The Guardian UK
Five Characteristics of the Gaming Disposition
Douglas Thomas’ thesis is well described on a post on the Harvard Business School Publishing Blog here. I will excerpt from this liberally below:
1. Gamers are bottom-line oriented
From the HBS post:
Today’s online games have embedded systems of measurement or assessment. Gamers like to be evaluated, even compared with one another, through systems of points, rankings, titles, and external measures. Their goal is not to be rewarded but to improve. Game worlds are meritocracies where assessment is symmetrical (leaders are assessed just as players are), and after-action reviews are meaningful only as ways of enhancing individual and group performance.
2. Gamers understand the power of diversity
From the post:
Diversity is essential in the world of the online game. One person can’t do it all; each player is by definition incomplete. The key to achievement is teamwork, and the strongest teams are a rich mix of diverse talents and abilities. The criterion for advancement is not “How good am I?”; it’s “How much have I helped the group?” Entire categories of game characters (such as healers) have little or no advantage in individual play, but they are indispensable members of every team.
3. Gamers thrive on change
From the post:
Nothing is constant in a game; it changes in myriad ways, mainly through the actions of the participants themselves. As players, groups, and guilds progress through game content, they literally transform the world they inhabit. Part of the gamer disposition is grounded in an expectation of flux. Gamers do not simply manage change; they create it, thrive on it, seek it out.
4. Gamers see learning as fun
From the post:
For most players, the fun of the game lies in learning how to overcome obstacles. The game world provides all the tools to do this. For gamers, play amounts to assembling and combining tools and resources that will help them learn. The reward is converting new knowledge into action and recognizing that current successes are resources for solving future problems.
5. They tend to “Marinate on the Edge”
From the post:
Finally, gamers often explore radical alternatives and innovative strategies for completing tasks, quests, and challenges. Even when common solutions are known, the gamer disposition demands a better way, a more original response to the problem. Players often reconstruct their characters in outrageous ways simply to try something new. Part of the gamer disposition, then, is a desire to seek and explore the edges in order to discover some new insight or useful information that deepens one’s understanding of the game.
I have a feeling that the theory that multiplayer gaming cultivates this kind of behavior is a little utopian. These behaviors may be great qualities that successful gamers have, but I’m not sure that games actually create these behaviors. On the other hand, these qualities seem to be what it takes to be successful in China. Let me rephrase and see if it fits:
- Successful people in China are bottom-line oriented
- successful people in China understand the power of diversity
- Successful people in China thrive on change
- Successful people in China see learning as fun
- Successful people in China “marinate on the edge”
Seems to fit pretty well, eh? Or at least 1,3, and 5 do in my mind. Doesn’t mean you should hang out in s—holes and firetraps to cultivate these qualities!
Certainly for foreigners coming to China, I see these 5 characteristics as helpful. Maybe that is why Sinosplice says that Living in China is like an RPG, and Tom Melcher says that China is like a video game and why Meg Stivison says that China is Like being the protagonist in a fantasy novel. (also on Meg Stivison’s new blog).
