The Next Insanely Great New Thing

Necessity is the mother of invention as they say, and we have a big hairy necessity staring us right in the face. In talking about climate change last week, a British environmental scientist who co-chairs the United Nations panel on climate change had this to say, "We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it's us."

That got my attention. A terrible thing is something that happens to others, but a real tragedy is something that happens to me. Lately I’ve suspected that things are happening a lot faster than we figured they would even a few years ago. Polar ice caps are melting faster than we thought; developing countries like India and China are developing faster than we thought. And I spent some quality time at the beach this weekend; it was just another sunny and balmy 85 degree (Fahrenheit) October morning in Chicago (??!!).

With these words to confirm my suspicions, I’ve been doing some thinking and here is an idea that keeps coming up. Let me preface this idea with a sentiment expressed by a great Chicago architect, Daniel Burnham, he said to make no small plans because they fail to stir men’s souls. Okay, here’s the idea: What do you get when you combine Google Earth with Second Life and then add in the game Halo 3?

[ I do lively presentations on this and related topics - www.MichaelHugos.com ]

You get a system we can all use to figure out how to deal with global warming. You get a way for our collective creativity and innovation to try out different courses of action and see what combinations of thousands of possible actions work best; you also get the chance to find out what doesn't work and to find this out by screwing up a virtual world instead of the real one. We get to learn from our failures and mistakes without destroying ourselves in the process.
 
"Halo 3 embodies our vision for the future of entertainment, where some of the world's greatest creative minds will deliver a new generation of interactive storytelling," said Bill Gates last week. I agree Bill, only you haven't yet realized the full power of game playing, the full power of what people are starting to call "serious games".

Serious games are the games pilots play in flight simulators where they learn how to fly their airliner through a storm after their left engine falls off. Serious games are what soldiers and generals use to plan and execute battles and try different strategies and tactics to see what works best. Serious games are what surgeons play when they try out new surgical procedures and equipment to see if they will help the patient or kill the patient.

What pilots, soldiers and surgeons learn in these games also works in real life. They make lots of mistakes on the way to finding the right way, but unlike in the real world, they don't die and other people don’t die either and they keep trying different actions until they find something that works. As these games and computer simulations get more sophisticated and more and more lifelike, their usefulness as serious research and learning tools is growing exponentially.
 
In Halo 3 players battle the alien species of the Covenant to save the earth from destruction. Good players get good because they play the game a lot and they try a lot of different approaches, they make a lot of mistakes and they die a lot

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