The Dawning of a New Right: To Hive
No, not “right” as in conservative vs. liberal. “Right” as in “inalienable right.” The Freedom to Hive. I was thumbing through the new copy of Wired Magazine which just arrived today. There’s an article on how game designers are working to foil the “wisdom of crowds.” I flipped past the page, as I am not a big gamer. But, something caught me and I turned back. It started a train of thought. I confess to not having read the article yet – I need to get this down uncontaminated. Follow me here for a moment ….
I presume the author is referring to the practice of many gamers to subvert in-game challenges by soliciting help, both indirect (“how do I defeat the monster on level 9?”) and direct (multiple players collaborating in-game to solve a problem).
This is an extension of what people use the internet for every day. Earlier today I googled how to fix something on my old car, and found newgroup postings from others with similar questions. Elsewhere, the business models of folks like Amazon, Ask.com and especially Google are all built on the wisdom of crowds.
To old farts like me there is still a tinge of novelty to this. “Ooo! I’m not the only one trying to keep a 10 year old beater like mine still going! Wow, that guy’s even has the same velour seats!”. In all seriousness, though, think of our kids, and our future grand-kids for a moment. They will know nothing different. Pervasive collaboration, coordination and information sharing will be enmeshed in their learning, in their play, and ultimately in their work. Collaboration to the point where it ceases to be a conscious choice. Two thoughts follow:
- Collaboration will be pervasive to the point where it is no longer value-add, but assumed. Like freedom of choice or freedom of association. What would we call this? Freedom to Hive? Sounds silly. But, collaboration already is essentially frictionless today. That will continue as technology improves and costs decline. Take education. With collaboration so pervasive outside school, will it become an expectation within the school? Education is still fundamentally based on individual performance. Working together on a test today is (usually) considered cheating. In the future will it instead be unjust to grade on individual merit?
- Paradoxically, in the future individual success will be achieved through the use of the collective. In a way this has, of course, always been true. But the pace and granularity of and emphasis on such collaborations are shifting. More collaborations are happening. They are more frequent. And each collaborative transaction will be smaller and smaller (witness the evolution from blogs to microblogs like Twitter).
Additional Reading:
- Steven Johnson touches on the flipside of this toward the end of his book Emergence. After living with games like The Sims, WoW, etc. how will the future’s adults approach, and influence, complex systems? Good book – time to reread it.
- The new science of networks is relevant, and probably more than just at the edges. Decent primer: Duncan Watts’ Six Degrees.
Maybe this old classic was wrong after all, and the kids do need to be playing games to get their competitive edge.
Cheers,
Eric
~ by Eric Kristoff on April 18, 2009.
Posted in Chat Communities, Cognitive Framework, Social Networking
Interesting thoughts. Having played the huge MMO games at a very deep level I can tell you that even there the “hive” mind that you discuss fails, at least to a degree. It does exist but not ideally. Teams of people naturally fall to hierarchal relationships. So while it may appear that you have 70 people collaborating to defeat the super villain in a game close inspection will show that what you have is a well organized “militia”. There is the “raid leader” who puts everything together. Under that person you have “officers” whose general role is to keep the minions in line. Parallel to officers you have team leaders who are very skilled players. For most fantasy games these teams are pretty specific units. They are Melee or “fighters” who have high armor and health values but low damage output and also known as “tanks”. Their job is to get hit and keep the bad guy away from everyone else. Healers who keep the Melee healed and kicking. “Casters” who have a very high damage output through “spells” but very little to no armor and low health values… so if you get hit you get squished. Finally you have “utility” casters who do things like make the bad guy weaker through spells or “buff up” the melee to make them stronger. Each team has a leader, and a general hierarchy evolves below that. The leaders for each team are usually assigned but the hierarchy below that will self-evolve based on player skill and attitude. So, in part you’re right in that this self-evolution is part of what makes the games so addictive… “how do I get as good as him so that other gamers respect me.” It drives involvement and builds innovation but at the top of it all the well defined organizational structure that we find so comfortable remains.