Reading assignment #1

KNOWLEDGE MAPS
THE RULES OF THE GAME
RULES, PLAY AND CULTURE

The first piece, "Knowledge Maps", addresses the difference between what a business values these days versus a while ago (way back when). Instead of being able to take account of assets, equipment, labor, etc., in an attempt to find a business's worth, it has come to light, especially in the age of high-tech and internet connections, that it is the knowledge possessed by those in an organization which is truly valuable. Fine, but there's more; it has been said that a great leveling of the field, a "flattening of heirarchy" in companies' structure would result from the tech spread. The author points out, through the lens of a knowledge management seminar in the Netherlands where several professionals from various disciplines voiced their concerns over the issue of the importance of knowledge in business structures, how the hoarding and concealment of knowledge creates far less harmony in the management picture than previously thought. Approaches bearing incentives for employee contribution rather than threat of punishment for betrayal are suggested as a means of helping to form a new heirarchical system for tomorrow. I found it somewhat interesting, but a bit dry and distant.

"Rules of the Game" was much more engaging. It deals with the stage-like quality of the gameboard, carefully designed but not functional until surrounded by the human players meant to put it in motion. It is the quality of the interactivity in the design of boardgames that measures which games will remain timeless and important, not the slickness or flashiness of the graphics printed on them. The author comes full circle by saying that though, now, with the vertical "mirror" of the computer screen serving the vanity of the single player, when you connect computers across a landscape (as in increasingly popular network games like Myst and World of Warcraft) what you get is just another game board, writ large in cyberspace. How this applies to what we are up to? Seems to me the board and materials need to be designed (or the website, or the animation, or the, or the.....) but it is most important to have a plan, a system, in mind for the INTERACTION involved. A leads to B, causing C or D. It must all come back to A. It must take the audience, the players, on a sensible journey, preferably a round trip one.

The third article, "Rules, Play and Culture: Towards an Aestetic of Games" in essence breaks the consideration of games down into three categories or levels:

1) games as sets of rules
2) games as play
3) games as culture

As sets of rules, games underscore the confines, the systems, which meaningful human interaction needs in order to proceed sensibly. Rules provide structure, a map, but they of course also tempt us to break them. Progress and change is made this way.

Play has been shown by lots of National Geographic-types to be a neccesary and healthy function in life-forms. Play is not simple nonsense, per se (though it can be), but rather a complex "agreement" to reach an end through (hopefully) peaceful means. The uncertainty involved in even the most simple and rigid rule system for a game is what drives the players to participate in the first place. What fun is it to have everything figured out from square one? That is not a game, that is a business plan.

The author uses the game of Monopoly to brief but good effect in illustrating the culutural ramifications and reflections a game has. Who plays it? When? Why? Monopoly embodies the depression-era angst of financial boom or bust in a simple, timelessly designed microcosm. It teaches you capitalism. You play capitalism. Greed is adopted for a brief time not as a deadly sin but rather a means to have fun at others' transitory expense.