rigorousintuition.ca

Talk about sign of the times...

Zakaria: The 'Angry Birds' dress
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com ... hpt=hp_bn4
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

This week there was a gala event held at the Finnish Presidential Palace to celebrate the anniversary of the nation's independence. Guests were dressed to the nines - proud as peacocks of what they were wearing. But one woman was interested in a different kind of bird. Look closely at her dress in the video above. What do you see? It's an Angry Birds dress. Yes, that addictive smartphone game.

So is she the biggest fan ever of the game? No. It turns out she's married to a company executive.

Now, if you think I've just wasted 30 seconds of your time telling you about this, think about this:
The world has wasted a total of 200,000 years playing the game [Angry Birds] - much of that in the last 12 months alone.

Just imagine what we could have accomplished if that time was spent productively.

The only game I've played on line is word search which I use to kill time during slow periods at work. Maybe I don't see the appeal of Angry Birds, Farmville, etc. because I have never played them. Like crack, meth, or heroin I've avoided the addictive allure of games. I feel I'm better for it, but I haven't exactly used my time finding a cure for cancer either.

It's entertaining. How is that a waste of time?

I play FreeRice

I was just thinking about this sort of thing. Every once in a while a game will become massively popular. There was Game Boy Tetris, Snood, Farmville, now Angry Birds. Maybe Pac-Man or Pong before Tetris. I might be missing some others. There must be games between Tetris and Snood and Snood and Farmville.

Sepka wrote:It's entertaining. How is that a waste of time?

I doubt it is entertaining and most people who play it would probably agree that it is a waste of time. I have never played it but assume it is played like I play Minesweeper, not for fun but out of habit. Just clicking mindlessly to satisfy my click fixation.

brekin wrote:Talk about sign of the times...

Zakaria: The 'Angry Birds' dress
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com ... hpt=hp_bn4
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

This week there was a gala event held at the Finnish Presidential Palace to celebrate the anniversary of the nation's independence. Guests were dressed to the nines - proud as peacocks of what they were wearing. But one woman was interested in a different kind of bird. Look closely at her dress in the video above. What do you see? It's an Angry Birds dress. Yes, that addictive smartphone game.

So is she the biggest fan ever of the game? No. It turns out she's married to a company executive.

Now, if you think I've just wasted 30 seconds of your time telling you about this, think about this:
The world has wasted a total of 200,000 years playing the game [Angry Birds] - much of that in the last 12 months alone.

Just imagine what we could have accomplished if that time was spent productively.

In the same period our wasteful species has thrown away about two billion years on the idiot's pablum, sleep.

Just think what we could have done if we were more productive!

Hopefully we'll soon be able to cybernetically enhance ourselves to eliminate wasteful activities such as sleep, love, sensory experience, laughter and computer games.

But think of how much bad things they could also have done in that time...
Who says they wouldn't have been out robbing grannies instead?

(yeah yeah I've wasted probably at least a few weeks or months of my life playing games, even ones where you shoot a lot of people, and even more playing games like soccer, basketball and hockey)

One good thing I have gotten from playing FPS games is faster visual processing. It really does improve that, especially noticing more moving objects in your visual field, faster than non-gamers do. It does help when riding a bike in city traffic, and can be potentially life saving in these conditions.

For example:

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy ... -11858-005

By Spence, Ian; Feng, Jing
Review of General Psychology, Vol 14(2), Jun 2010, 92-104.
Abstract
Video game enthusiasts spend many hours at play, and this intense activity has the potential to alter both brain and behavior. We review studies that investigate the ability of video games to modify processes in spatial cognition. We outline the initial stages of research into the underlying mechanisms of learning, and we also consider possible applications of this new knowledge. Several experiments have shown that playing action games induces changes in a number of sensory, perceptual, and attentional abilities that are important for many tasks in spatial cognition. These basic capacities include contrast sensitivity, spatial resolution, the attentional visual field, enumeration, multiple object tracking, and visuomotor coordination and speed. In addition to altering performance on basic tasks, playing action video games has a beneficial effect on more complex spatial tasks such as mental rotation, thus demonstrating that learning generalizes far beyond the training activities in the game. Far transfer of this sort is generally elusive in learning, and we discuss some early attempts to elucidate the brain functions that are responsible. Finally, we suggest that studying video games may contribute not only to an improved understanding of the mechanisms of learning but may also offer new approaches to teaching spatial skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

Gnomad wrote:But think of how much bad things they could also have done in that time...
Who says they wouldn't have been out robbing grannies instead?

(yeah yeah I've wasted probably at least a few weeks or months of my life playing games, even ones where you shoot a lot of people, and even more playing games like soccer, basketball and hockey)

One good thing I have gotten from playing FPS games is faster visual processing. It really does improve that, especially noticing more moving objects in your visual field, faster than non-gamers do. It does help when riding a bike in city traffic, and can be potentially life saving in these conditions.

This. My reaction times for some things have been vastly improved by playing "twitch"/ FPS games. Though I've found it's mostly used for catching things before they fall on the floor and break And "productivity" is for the birds, why does everything have to be fucking "productive"? Oh yeah it's because hyper-capitalism is the only way of living and all human activity must conform to its strictures

...

You should have seen me play Quake deathmatch back in the day.

Jump! Spin! Shoot!

Jump! Spin! Shoot!

I could become totally in the zone and mindless.

I won a few deathmatches, you know.

I also catch falling objects, before my mind has recognised the fact that an object is falling.

Something happens, I look at my hand, and there is the object nestled safely in my grip.

Usually if I knock something off a shelf or work surface with my right hand, my left has moved to catch it long before I am consciously aware of anything falling.

Just one of my tricks.

...

I'm conflicted about this for sure. I hear you about the cult of productivity and
Lord knows the time the world has spent watching game shows or playing solitaire
(with or without computer) probably dwarfs this number. I think it was Plato who said
the best society would be one in which we were perpetually involved in playing games
and the research about the importance of play and games for children and adults is immense and
pretty much rock solid as far as I can tell. Possibly Angry Birds marathons may keep a few granny robbers off the street at times and just last night I was debating whether to buy an Xbox for a mentally ill relative to keep them occupied but I really can't see this as anything more then a digital bread and circuses.

The world has been going to hell in a express hand basket the last 10 years and the last 12 months I've only seen an acceleration. To think that the equivalent time spent in building human civilization has been spent playing Angry Birds while the very same human civilization is being taken apart piece by piece is beyond words. Not to point the blame just as Angry Birders because I look at my instant viewing activity on Netflix at times and think what I could have done with those hours.

Brekin wrote:I think it was Plato who said the best society would be one in which we were perpetually involved in playing games…

Whoever said that, I'm all for it — just so long as it's our own games we're choosing to play, and not someone else's we're coerced into playing.

Yes, to both of you..

Life spent looking down with our hands touching metal and plastic focusing hard on the pixels we've already chosen.

Now THAT's pumped-up kicks.

That is meant to be something like 200,000 "person-years" (like "man-hours"), I assume?

"Nordic has spent a year and a half at Rigorous Intuition".

Oops.

Heck that might be a low guesstimate.