InformationGaming
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Gaming means a number of things:
- participating in an entertainment game culture(Role Playing, Capture the Flag, Video Games)
- engineering optimized strategies around some formal rule set, such as patent law or tax law
- organized gambling, also known as the "gaming industry"
(Please add to this list other senses of the word "gaming")
Information means so many things that I|'d just as soon not list them.
GameTheory is all the rage these days. It's part of a growing constellation of (what I like to think are) intellectual fads:
- GameTheory
- memetics
- evolution
- [[|http://www.swcollege.com/bef/landsburg/landsburg5e/landsburg5e.html PriceTheory]]
- SignalingTheory
(this list can and will be expanded indefinitely)
As far as I can tell, these are all minor variations on the theme of SocialDarwinism. To their credit, these disciplines seem to draw on the ScientificMethod and build on a sound theoretical framework. This means they probably aren't going away any time soon :(
I frown because the conclusions reached in these sciences invariably amount to protracted hammering in of precisely those truths that depress me most:
- survival of the fittest
- the inevitable triumph of image over substance (the inevitable ubiquity of advertising)
- the inherently competitive nature of existence
- the fact that sophistication owes its existence to a basically competitive process
- the inevitable failure of non-adversarial models of social structure
Back in 1970, a bestseller was published that dealt with the subject of games from a psychological rather than evolutionary perspective. It is [[|http://www.mouthshut.com/readproduct/925000689-1.html "Games People Play" by Eric Berne]] and is a pretty entertaining read. It's part of the TransactionalAnalysis fad of that time. The book deals with gaming in interpersonal communication, especially among intimates. This is probably the sense of the word "game" in the personals: "no game players please". Berne's exposition of mind games comes with an entertaining alphabet soup nomenclature:
- see what you made me do (SWYMD)
- gee you're wonderful, professor (GYWP)
- wooden leg
- let's pull a fast one on Joey
. . and my personal favorite,
- let's you and him fight (LYAHF)
The book explains that mind games, like board games or card games, are games in which people take turns making 'moves'. Dr. Berne suggested deconstructing these games, and neutralizing them by making moves that aren't in the "script". This throws the game player off guard and in effect monkeywrenches the game.
What about the title of this rant...InformationGaming?
I wouldn't have sprouted this node if I didn't believe there was such a thing. Not being the career track type, I've never been privy to the CentralView (thankx for the apropos nomenclature, StarPilot) in an "enterprise" context. My sense of information gaming comes from the consumer marketplace. I have been making a rough outline of a strategy for dealing with B2C gaming, which I call PubWan. My interest is moe in deconstructing these games than in playing them. I'm sick of playing games.
InformationGaming... makes me think of a "sanitized" naming for InformationWarfare.
I find it odd that Jim didn't counter your discussion of GameTheory with his favorite subject EvolutionaryGameTheory. I personally love GameTheory (it's been listed on my home page here since I made it :-), but then I have a very high interest in Games, and so have come into it from that personal angle. GameTheory is depressing in that it is generally presumed that what is being gamed is a zero-sum, confrontational sort of game. In other words, you cannot get ahead of me while playing Othello/Reversi without taking from me. That makes for depressive material. However, in looking at Nature, what we see is that because you cannot get ahead of me without taking resources from me, we are motivated to find ways to break into new areas (specialize) so we both can utilize resources that are not competed over as much, and thereby we both effectively gain more resources. This is effectively creating verticle space or creating new layers in the eco-system. So, if it wasn't for GameTheory and Zero Sum games, we wouldn't have nearly the natural drive to diversify as we currently do. Or in other words... there wouldn't be so many interesting and wonderous things in the world.
See, even selfishness can create diversity and prosperity. It is only a matter of scale... short term effects or long term effects. ---StarPilot