Clark Abt's 1970 book Serious Games offered a definition of serious games that mimic the adversarial tradition of our society: "Reduced to its formal essence, a game is an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some limiting context. A more conventional definition would say that a game is a context with rules among adversaries trying to win objectives. We are concerned with serious games in the sense that these games have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose."

The focus here is on how games harness and manifest principles of collaborative intelligence and can be used to enhance support systems for collaborative intelligence — non-adversarial, non zero-sum games. See also the discussion of crowd-sourcing and games.

Two streams dominate the game space:
• first, narrative storyworlds and performance art in games, and
• second, the community of interest in games as rule-based systems.

For the latter community, games serve as models for collaborative intelligence in that the rules of the game are shared, constituting an agreed language that makes play possible as each player manifests collaborative autonomy — his own style of play, criteria for making decisions and strategy. If you wondered what the rules of The Glass Bead Game (Hermann Hesse) might have been, were fascinated by Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance (Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler), and want to explore how games can be used for problem-solving, we're on the same page. The focus here is on the gaming analogy to multi-agent systems.

Planet Innovation explores
21st century learning games.

Francis Crick’s Card Game Metaphor, as modified by Zann Gill to illustrate collaborative intelligence, highlights the role of internal pattern recognition in evolution’s advance toward complexity, showing how chance and choice are complementary as the player uses his pattern recognition capabilities to adapt his hand each time he discards a card and draws a new card from the deck. Assume now that the dealer deals out only part of the deck, say seven cards to each player, and puts the rest in the center. The picks up his hand, recognizes what he can do with his hand, discards a card, draws another card and gradually improves his hand until he has a straight flush. What counts is not just the "genetic inheritance" of the hand he's dealt, but what he does with his cards after they’ve been dealt to him.


Chess
In chess, figuring out which pattern can achieve checkmate in a particular game is the goal, whose precise form cannot be predicted independent of the moves of one’s opponent. Innovation by its nature assumes that something must be discovered or invented that could not be specified in advance as a goal. If it could be specified, the process wouldn’t be innovation. In chess the pattern of possible next moves on the chess board evolves because of the pattern of strategies motivating those moves in the minds of the players. Reality and perception of reality are intertwined.

Of World Game Buckminster Fuller wrote: “I review planetary resources in terms of today’s gained know-how, to see whether there’s any way we might be able to do much more with much less, to be able to take care of everybody. All political systems and wars based on scarcity would become obsolete. World Gaming is played, not like checkers against an enemy but against ignorance, inertia, and fear. The World Game proves that John Von Neumann’s theory of war gaming, which holds that one side or the other must ultimately die, either by war or starvation, is invalid and offers a heretofore unconsidered alternative way to play the war game in which, as in mountain climbing, the object is to find all the moves by which the whole field of climbers would win as each helped the other so that everyone reached the mountaintop successfully. I think of my World Game as a way to bypass politics, human ignorance, prejudice, and war and put the facts before man and the whole world to try to deal with them coherently. We have never so far made the attempt to take our collective destiny into our own hands, and shape it.”

How did he propose to implement a vision so ambitious? Buckminster Fuller’s 1961 proposal for World Game was a vehicle to stimulate collective brainstorming about how to address global sustainability. In the decades of the 1960s and 1970s large groups met in school gymnasia with butcher paper and colored markers to develop strategies to match world resources to world needs. These sessions raised awareness about the challenges of resource distribution, population growth, and the interconnectedness of global sustainability challenges.

The Tower of Babel speaks to the fundamental requirement of games.
Without shared rules, a system for collaboration, no one can play. This collaborative environment, the gaming ecosystem, is a prerequisite for competition. In other words, collaboration precedes, and is a prerequisite for, competition in games.

Situation architecture addresses the key factor of contextualization in games. The meaning of the other players' moves are interpreted in the context of the game and may differ, not only with different interpreters, but in different contexts.

Pioneer of genetic algorithms John Holland saw in games the potential for discovery: "As with seeds, much comes from little. . . . Newton’s laws of gravity, or Maxwell’s equations describing electromagnetic phenomena, have much in common with the definition of the game. . . . As in games, we uncover possibilities quite unsuspected by the authors. Newton could not have guessed that his equations would reveal the gravity-assisted boost that takes space probes to the outer planets. . . ." John H. Holland

References
Abt, C. 1970. Serious Games. New York: The Viking Press.

©2011 Zann Gill Please attribute, linking to this site.
Contact: webmaster at collaborative-intelligence. org

to top | home | links | compass