FROM GAMES TO REALITY
For most of its history, the relationship between games and the real world has been framed around transfer. Do the skills developed in games make somebody better at something outside the game?
By Roald Van Buuren
What if games are becoming one of the most useful environments we have for observing human behaviour?
Across aviation, defence, medicine, science and AI, games are already being used to train people, identify talent, measure decision-making and study how humans respond to pressure, uncertainty and other people.
The FAA is recruiting gamers for air traffic control. Game-based training has improved performance in surgical and emergency medicine scenarios. World of Warcraft accidentally created a behavioural experiment through its Corrupted Blood outbreak. Sea Hero Quest turned navigation into a population-scale research tool. Foldit and EVE Online have used players to solve real scientific problems.
The common thread is that games create controlled environments where people make decisions repeatedly, and those decisions can be measured.
Train → observe → measure → model → simulate.
The first four are already happening, but the fifth is where things get interesting.
We’ve pulled the research together into a new ELO paper exploring what gaming could become as a system for understanding, training and modelling human behaviour.
From Games to Reality
https://elocollective.com/from-games-to-reality