all in the game

Excerpt from the book - A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown

Imagine an environment that is constantly changing. Imagine an environment where the participants are building, creating, and participating in a massive network of dozens of databases, hundreds of wikis and websites, and thousands of message forums, literally creating a large-scale knowledge economy. Imagine an environment where participants are constantly measuring and evaluating their own performances, even if that requires them to build new tools to do it. Imagine an environment where user interface dashboards are individually and personally constructed by users to help them make sense of the world and their own performance in it. Imagine an environment where evaluation is based on after-action reviews not to determine rewards but to continually enhance performance. Imagine an environment where learning happens on a continuous basis because the participants are internally motivated to find, share and filter new information on a near-constant basis. 

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I know, it sounds almost impossible to create such an environment. But the interesting fact is that we have seen and experienced such environments. Yes, through these new generation games that are available. That is where our tacit knowledge comes in to picture.

Yet, this aspect needs to be much debated because it is not given enough importance. In fact educators constantly dismiss games as a learning tool. 

Where as, all the learning is in the game, or, in the form of game. Games enhance learning. 

Srik

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Decision Equilibrium

A disclaimer tag for most of the soulful lives on this planet is quite usual. The point is that every individual – ‘I’ for example is bound to ‘rise and set’ in the eyes of the other. As far as I am concerned, even before I planned my living, my life is surrendered. Surrendered to one power, that keeps me challenging to extract the maximum. Maximum, out of the limited time I have got. It is that decision which is challenging. Not to decide, but beyond that. I am not philosophical about what I decide and how I decided. But, it is some kind of a natural instinct to do it and do it right. I do not think any of the management theories that I studied during my business program taught me all these. As I said, it is not a philosophy nor is it a theory. Perhaps, I can call it my own theory or my own philosophy. That never existed thus far.

Sometimes, like most of us, I feel lazy to look at it. Look at it just because it was committed to look at it. Doing it is optional, given the alternative lives one can think of. But, deciding on that decision of attending to the wake-up call to play the game, challenged is what I had to perform. Good that I woke up! Woke-up from the dreams or woke-up from the reality. It does not matter because I am going to face the real game; a game that is set on the biggest playground. I see a lot of players, I would never even think of challenging against for a win. And a place I can see all kinds of games on one single playground. When I play, I encounter breathlessness because of the minimum space between the games and the players. I fight out for my place; my right and my game. And I play. I concentrate on my target and others too, not to let them lose or win, but to defend. Defend from the game I play. As I play, they play the same game. I am blocked. Blocked out of the reality and it looks as if I am banned from the game. I get out of the block and run towards the goal. To win!

I played my game. Not because I decided to wake up. But because of the word I gave. To save myself not to convince myself that I do not have integrity. To show integrity in what I have spoken and what I am doing. When I am in between the goals, I think of home, or away from home. Not because I want to get there, but because I need to counter the competition. I want to win in the game. I just need to bounce back at the opposition to reach the other end to conquer them. And when I did, I did not win. I just scored a point. Point is to win. So I need to keep winning more points in life. If I fail, I will not lose the game. I just lose one point. If I did lose another point, I am not good enough for a game. I studied ‘Game theory’ not because I could play game. But it helped to convince myself that there is a theory behind the game I play. And a zero-sum-game is what life is all about.

My non-theoretical and non-philosophical way of dealing with the game of my life is not because I ‘decide’ to wake-up in the morning sun to play the game (that can be fictional sometimes) but because of the ‘word’ given to myself. That word decided the game of my life.

Srik

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