I just listened to a report about this from Friday's (12-19-14) BBC World Business News. It got me to thinking - What if more games were designed to show what may be really happening in different levels of business/politics?
I am presented with news of corruption and business/political practice that I find extremely distasteful, if not outright abhorrent. And yet so many of my fellow country people seem either totally unaware of said practices, or are looking the other way.
Maybe presenting games showcasing some of these practices can bring these subjects out into the room for observation, to see if enough other people agree changes need to be made?
I think using games as a rhetorical method could work, but if done badly it would backfire.
This reminds me of something Danny Hillis talked about once. In the 1980s the price of oil was continuously going up, and all of the oil companies were just drilling as quickly as they could. At Shell Oil the analysts realized that the price of oil might start to dive, which was very bad if you were expanding as quickly as possible. The analysts couldn't see any other way to convince the executives this might happen, so they built a simulation of the oil industry, and had the executives play the game repeatedly. In every scenario they did, the price of oil would crash. The executives thought this was very silly. However, after they played for a while, they learned the patterns (in the safety of the game), and this influenced them enough to take some mitigating steps, and were the only major oil company to come through the oil price collapse in good shape.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 18.8 ms ] threadI am presented with news of corruption and business/political practice that I find extremely distasteful, if not outright abhorrent. And yet so many of my fellow country people seem either totally unaware of said practices, or are looking the other way.
Maybe presenting games showcasing some of these practices can bring these subjects out into the room for observation, to see if enough other people agree changes need to be made?
This reminds me of something Danny Hillis talked about once. In the 1980s the price of oil was continuously going up, and all of the oil companies were just drilling as quickly as they could. At Shell Oil the analysts realized that the price of oil might start to dive, which was very bad if you were expanding as quickly as possible. The analysts couldn't see any other way to convince the executives this might happen, so they built a simulation of the oil industry, and had the executives play the game repeatedly. In every scenario they did, the price of oil would crash. The executives thought this was very silly. However, after they played for a while, they learned the patterns (in the safety of the game), and this influenced them enough to take some mitigating steps, and were the only major oil company to come through the oil price collapse in good shape.
This is cribbed from a talk he gave, On Game Software Development, which was on Technetcast, but has since gone offline. The archived page for the talk is https://web.archive.org/web/20010426140020/http://technetcas...