Sunday 4 March 2012

Gaming vs Science


So in my spare time I’m a sad gaming addict. Always have been and I think that’s unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Over time, my gaming has gone through an evolution from old school pen and paper role playing games like D&D, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu; to board games such as World in Flames and Empires in Arms; to computer strategy games like Civilization, Age of Empires, Starcraft; to massive multiplayer online time sinks like Everquest, World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online. Currently I’m playing on the Xbox Kinect mostly- Skyrim, LA Noire, Fitness Evolved, and waiting for Mass Effect 3 to come out.
At times, for instance when I was a raid leader in Everquest or in the top raiding guild of my server in WoW, I think its undoubtedly true that my gaming hobby absorbed far more hours of my life than science did. In my very rare reflective moments, I wonder if I’d spent less time gaming would I have significantly more scientific output? (Would I have double the number of publications?) On the other hand, has my gaming addiction aided my scientific career in any way? I definitely believe my strategy gaming experience helps me in gaming whatever byzantine systems the university adopts. And I’m sure playing role playing games in my youth helped my confidence as a public speaker. I’m less convinced that my experience as a raid leader in EQ has had any noticeable benefit towards managing my research group, although I guess both experiences are pretty much akin to herding cats.
I know a variety of my colleagues are also gamers (Derek and Uwe, you know who you are!); I’m wondering how other researchers are addicted gamers and whether that’s been a positive or negative influence on your careers?

Old School WoW and EQ

12 comments:

  1. Great post, Ian. And it's an interesting question - is gaming a positive for people's careers? If you compare the time someone might spend gaming (whether traditional or online) to say, watching TV, I'd agree that the former undoubtedly expands a whole range of skills (such as interpersonal and problem-solving skills) and this must have some useful spill-over effects. However if that person had, say, spent even half that amount of time playing tennis and getting involved in their local tennis club, wouldn't they have developed similar skills, had more time for their career and be healthier to boot?

    Another interesting question comes to mind - do you tell your first date you're a gamer? It's tantamount to writing "I'm a geek" on your forehead - not that there's anything wrong with being who you are, but I've literally had some guys roll their eyes on occasion...

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    1. Hi Michael,

      Interesting questions. With respect to your second question, I don't hide the fact I'm a geek on a first date, as one of the things I'm looking for in a relationship is someone who likes geeky things too. I think hiding who you are and what you like doing is probably not a great way to get off to a relationship. Having said that, its probably a strategic error for your first words on a date to be "Hi, I'm a gaming geek" :).

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  2. I thought you went cold turkey for awhile. Did you write more papers or mope around wishing you were gaming.

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    1. Hi Unknown,

      I'm not sure, I've ever gone long term cold turkey from gaming. I can do it for a while without my hands shaking, for example when I travelled around Europe as a tourist for 3 months. I have gone cold turkey from MMORPG gaming like WoW, which is maybe what you are thinking of. I am planning a post in the near future analyzing my publication record with my gaming at the time overlaid. I'll be interested to see if I can find any correlations, though i suspect the data will be too noisy.

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  3. Hi Ian

    You may like this TED talk about how videogames may help solving complex problems
    http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

    and this other one:
    http://www.nature.com/news/gamers-outdo-computers-at-matching-up-disease-genes-1.10203

    or tell us if you play Foldit -the game that solves 3D protein structures

    regards,

    Julio

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    1. Hi Julio,

      Thanks for the links, I'll check them out. I've heard of FoldIt but I've never actually played it.
      When I was a faculty member at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), I had some discussions with Owen White (Director of Bioinformatics at TIGR) exploring the notion of designing a game around annotating genomes. Since manual annotation of genomes is expensive (~$200,000 per bacterial genome) but is much more accurate than computer-based automatic annotation, we thought this had the potential to drammatically lower costs. Unfortunately, it remains an interesting idea, but not a reality.
      Cheers,

      Ian

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  4. As a member of the research group I'd just like to say "meow"....

    Liam.

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    1. Stop meowing Liam! Don't forget, the beatings will continue until morale improves!

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    2. "meow - ouch - meow - ouch - meow - ouch...."

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  5. As a former undergraduate student of yours, I would like to say...

    We should totally play some games sometime.

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  6. Hi David

    Sounds good. I'm sure lots of my former students would like to kill me in Halo, Counterstrike, etc :)
    Cheers,

    Ian

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    1. Why go FPS, when you can go many hour long games of Civ?

      Not that halo isn't fun.

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