Games Do Stuff LinkDump: Losing lb & Gaining Insight
For my various jobs and roles, I write a lot of research reports. A lot of the time, there are really fascinating statistics and ideas that I come across when I'm compiling research which might not be directly relevant to the report, but which are still worth talking about. Periodically, I want to compile these into little link dumps which I can share. This one is themed loosely around games helping humans do things. Things like...
...losing weight
Losing weight is damn hard work and anyone who says it isn't is lying their perfectly sculpted buttocks off. If games can help people work out more, then that's awesome, and this looks like it would be a super fun way to work out! Seeing this also lends credence to my pet theory that VR has limited domestic application. I don't think that VR will be in the homes of the mainstream, (Stauffer has a big lounge!) sat on the home entertainment hub along with the Playstation and the Skybox. I think VR is a communal experience, and we will see it used far more in gyms, museums cinemas than in the home. VR is much more analogous to IMAX than to TV- it offers a new way of seeing, and its an experience that requires mental work to engage with. TV is increasingly passive; you watch TV whilst doing other things, be it working, texting or chatting. VR is too engaged (NB not necessarily engaging, a VR game can still be dull) an activity to be commonplace yet, so why not use it's engaging/engaged nature to get people to do stuff in VR? Why not use it to explore an ancient city in an educational content, or operate on a patient, or work out by running away from dinosaurs, Jurassic Park style? I see VR headsets going into schools for education, and in an arcade-like setting for entertainment, but less common in the home.
...communicating culture
Culture; Definition: the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. Part of why answering the question What Is A Game is so utterly brain-bendingly impossible is because games are cultural objects, and nobody can claim to have a really solid grasp on what Culture is, let alone what Games, as a Sub-Set of Culture, are. I could have a stab at it, drawing on large sections of my undergraduate degree, which, as far as was possible within the strictures of the syllabus, I angled towards Anthropology, World Religions & Cultures and Theory of Ideas, and away from the heinously dull classes on classical theology, but it would just be one uninformed opinion in a sea of many. Nobody knows what culture really is, or isn't, or if it's a good thing or a bad thing, or a human thing, or just a...Thing. What it is, to me at least, is an interesting Thing. So I enjoyed this short article about an elderly Japanese lady who had taken up coding classes and created an interactive experience to impart a cultural and religious ritual that was important to her to others. That struck me as a pretty neat example of games as both cultural objects in themselves, and as a method of communicating cultural concepts across divides. Games enabled her to make her traditional heritage accessible and comprehensible. I'm not sure she could have managed it so effectively with a non-interactive medium such as a book.
