If you’ve been following Bill Hooke’s blog, Living on the Real World, you know the AMS Policy Program director has been exploring the analogies been contemporary life and various types of games.
Yesterday’s post likened life to a Massively Multiple On-line Role-Playing Game:
On the real world as in the videogame, as time passes, and as gamers surmount one set of challenges after another, the pace quickens and the level of difficulty jumps. On the real world, as we’ve gone from say 1 billion people to 7 billion, each one of which on average may be consuming resources at ten times of her ancestor a century earlier, and as social change had accelerated, the level of difficulty has hit unprecedented heights.
Saturday at the AMS Student Conference, Hooke challenged attendees to become the “Greatest Generation,” by becoming engaged in a modern world that is increasingly insulated and virtual and to equip themselves to thrive on a real planet with real, escalating problems.
In both gaming and life, “it’s easier to lose than to win,” Hooke said, but in life there are “no do-overs, no pause button.” So keep in mind that the videos below may be mere electronic do-overs, with pause buttons, of the complete luncheon talk, but this indeed happened in the real world today in Seattle, before 400 people, with some real answers and real hope for a future informed by science and good policy.