The Gamer Disposition

John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas

Named as one of Harvard Business Review's "Breakthrough Ideas of 2008," our work on the Gamer Disposition examines how business and education might look toward the kinds of things gamers are doing for guidance in embracing change in the 21st century. We outline some of the ways gamers learn, share ideas, and deal with the challenges of a rapidly changing environment and suggest that it might be time for business to start taking the world of play seriously.

Network Culture at USC

I am the director and lead investigator on a year long project supported by the MacArthur Foundation on the topic of Philanthropy and Virtual Worlds. In addition to hosting a series of ground breaking events in virtual worlds, we also created a Community Challenge to fund projects that advanced the notion of the public good in virtual worlds.

The Role of the Foundation in Virtual Worlds

This project, led by Douglas Thomas, and made possible with a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundaiton, is an effort to better understand what role philanthropic organizations might play in the context of virtual worlds. As virtual worlds grow in size and scope so do the opportunities for engagement with the players who visit them, the communities they build, and the spaces they inhabit. In order to access the ways in which foundations might be integrated into virtual worlds, we ask the following three questions to help us understand the purpose of philanthropy in virtual worlds:

How do we define “public good” in the context of virtual worlds?
How do we use the capabilities of virtual worlds to further the goals of foundations?
How do you build “real world” connections between physical and virtual spaces?

Each of these questions forms the basis for groups of projects that we believe will help define what virtual communities in these worlds look like, how foundations might build communities of interest around key topics, and how activities in virtual worlds might contribute back to communities with which they are connected. In what follows, we will expand on these basic questions to envision how we might understand, utilize, and connect virtual worlds to the goals of philanthropic organizations.

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Supernova 2008

In June, I gave a talk for a panel titled “All the World’s A Game” along with Dave Elving and Raph Koster. The panel got a nice write up at Elliot Ny's UpTake Blog along with an interesting follow up on my presentation wondering whether or not Chinese gamers have the gamer disposition?

You can also see a video of the entire panel here.

Doing the Impossible in Virtual Worlds

When we enter a virtual world, we are making an agreement to play by a new set of rules. Those rules emerge from a mixture of elements. The “rules of the world” (everything from its physics to its user interface) provide a structure for participants, while the emergent culture defines a set of cultural norms or mores which provide the community with another set of rules, values, and meanings. What makes virtual worlds special is that both of these elements depart from the conventions of the physical world.

Aspen Ideas Festival

July 1st, I was on a panel with Eric Brown (co-creator of PeaceMaker) and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. The topic of the panel was "Games for Good."

We got to hear a bit about the game Justice O'Connor is working on at Arizona State, called "Our Courts," which is a game designed to engage students with the justice system and to provide a deeper understanding of how the courts work. It looks like a promising project.

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Featured Work

Why Virtual Worlds Can Matter

Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown