Category Archives: hobby

Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge recently air an interesting program on gaming.  From their website:

“Parents worry that their kids spend too much time playing video games, but according to one new study, if you need surgery, you want the surgeon who grew up with a game controller in one hand. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, why the future belongs to gamers. Imagine a world in which whatever you want to know you can learn from a game.”

SEGMENT 1:

Video games used to be for kids and geeks. Today – just try to find someone who doesn’t play at least one electronic game. Electronic games began as entertainment, but they’re fast becoming much, much more. Already we use games to teach kids and to train doctors, to meet friends and to wage war. Today – how games could transform the world. British writer and game theorist Tom Chatfield is the author of “Fun, Inc: Why Gaming Will Dominate the 21st Century.” He tells Jim Fleming he believes games also have the potential to revolutionize a field that could use a dose of fun – education. Imagine a game the let’s you blast imaginary cancer cells – except they’re from a real cancer patient, and your game you play may help save her life. That’s the future an interdisciplinary team of biologists, education researchers and game designers is working on at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. Anne Strainchamps got professors Susan Millar & Kurt Squire to show her a game.

SEGMENT 2:

If you’ve ever played one of the big online multi-player fantasy games – like World of Warcraft or… ., you know that in the beginning, there’s a certain amount of drudge work. But you can cheat and get someone else to do it for you. Cory Doctorow has written a novel about it, called “For the Win,” and tells Anne Strainchamps about gold-farming, and why people do it. Commentator Aubrey Ralph understands the pleasure of it. He explains his enthusiasm for the Society for Creative Anachronism, or SCA. Ethan Gilsdorf also understands. He is the author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks” and tells Steve Paulson it began for him when he was 12.

SEGMENT 3:

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff says the writing’s on the wall: in the future, you can either make the software… or you can BE the software. Rushkoff has a new book – Program or Be Programmed. It opens with a story he told Anne Strainchamps – about a recent visit to an Air Force general.