Game theory magazine articles

Students develop the skills to make sense of densely cluttered information and to decipher how events and choices shape outcomes. In the work place, the art of strategy is learned on the job and supplemented by training and mentoring. Game theory teaches strategy by exposing student to canonical models.

Examples, rather than thick case studies, are the vehicles by which students develop the skills to engage a variety of problems. Though each discipline has grown in popularity, each has had a negligible influence on the other. And game theory receives cursory mention in most strategic management texts see, for instance, Contemporary Strategy Analysis by Robert Grant.

Business strategy as described above does not merit more than the odd paragraph or footnote in most game theory text books see, for instance, Games of Strategy by Avinash Dixit, Susan Skeath and David McAdams. CEOs and corporate boards would do well to learn the rudiments of Game Theory. And Management and Game Theory will develop a wider world view if each discipline were to develop a degree of proficiency with the scope and methods of the other.

Here are the 4 dimensions along which the disciplines approach business strategy in distinct ways. Management and Game Theory start with different agendas.

The aim is to improve the quality of decision-making, sharpen the clarity of the message, and enable a high degree of coordination of activities and initiatives across the company.

Game Theory does not attempt to assist CEOs and leadership teams establish company goals, articulate vision or develop a plan. At least, not directly. This includes a formal assessment of what the company stands to gain and lose in contests including the recognition that business is not a zero sum game. The business landscape is complex, dynamic and uncertain. Companies recognize that their business prospects are shaped by a number of forces including technological change, regulation and deregulation, and globalization and de-globalization.

Social media has accelerated the speed with which advantage is won and lost. Information flows thick and fast. And it is unstructured, multidimensional, and ambiguous.

What is one to pay attention to? The here and the now or the future? Actual competitors or potential competitors? The behemoths or the upstarts? And retailers such as Radio Shack and Toys R Us failed because they could not develop the right capabilities. Management seeks to provide CEOs with the frameworks and tools to make sense of this maze. Its most significant contribution to management practice was and is that it sensitized CEOs, boards of directors, consultants and others to the forces that expand and constrain the potential profits of their industries.

In the forty years since the publication of the book, dozens of frameworks and models have been proposed to assess the changing landscape including industry evolution, disruptive innovation, product diffusion, and technology diffusion models. Still, she was intrigued by the concept of studying them and likes the idea of a new field that has many angles left unexamined.

She's considering working with Lenoir on independent video-game research, which in an odd way, she says, is "more academic" than her current job working with mice in a science lab. Worlds within worlds: In the virtual Nasher museum created by Lenoir and his students, avatars view exhibit on social commentary in video games.

Lenoir is, by training, a historian of science. His initial interest in video games stemmed from research he conducted on the military's battle simulations and the idea of the "military-entertainment complex," or the ties between simulations developed by the military and commercially available war games.

In the late s, he collaborated with Henry Lowood, an archivist at Stanford who shared his interest in military games, to establish a new research project that they called "How They Got Game. When Lenoir came to Duke, he brought the class with him.

He initially taught the course as an upper-level seminar, but last year, folded it into the Focus program. The themes visited by Lenoir's class are the grist of the rapidly turning modern-game-studies mill. Video games have been around, in one form or another, almost as long as computers, and articles analyzing games have been published in scholarly journals since at least the early s.

But until , scholarly production in the field was sparse, says Jesper Juul, a noted game theorist, game designer, and co-editor of the online journal Game Studies. The beginning of the decade was a turning point for the field. In and , several academic conferences and journals, including Game Studies, appeared for the first time.

Juul, who has a background in the humanities and earned his Ph. Alliance gathering: A guild comprising a dwarf, an elf, and humans prepares for a quest in World of Warcraft Blizzard Entertainment. Breaking the law: Main character C. Rockstar Games. In writing the syllabus, they had planned for a small seminar of fifteen to twenty students, Lowood says.

But they were overwhelmed when more than showed up. The fire marshal came," he recalls. He remembers a particularly telling moment during one class discussion that first semester.

A student was discussing ways in which the idea of character is different in the classic Nintendo games The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. Everyone was listening to him intently. He said, 'God, I love this class. Since that time the critical mass has continued to grow and expand, bringing with it a sense of legitimacy. In the early days, Juul says, "every paper we wrote started out with the question, 'Why should you study video games?

The resulting rise in critical scholarship has been reflected in the publishing world. Doug Sery, senior acquisitions editor for computer science, new media, and game studies at the MIT Press, published his first game-studies book in Now he estimates that he receives five to seven book proposals a month on the topic of video games. This year, he'll publish four. He has contracts with writers for five more and is considering another five to seven projects.

This past summer, the Library of Congress announced an initiative aimed at preserving games and real-time clips of online game environments for future study. Earlier in the year, the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin announced the creation of a new archive of video games and systems; marketing materials, magazines, and websites; and documents relating to the game-design business. Although these are groundbreaking events, they came seven years after Lenoir and Lowood oversaw the creation of a massive video-game archive at Stanford that started with a donation of some 25, titles—representing nearly every game published commercially from the s through —from the family of an avid collector.

Video-game scholar: Lenoir's interest in video games stemmed from research on military battle simulations and the "military-entertainment complex". Megan Morr. The Digital Games Research Association, which describes itself as an "association for academics and professionals who research digital games and associated phenomena," drew delegates from twenty-nine countries to its most recent biennial conference, held in Tokyo in September. The organization's website, which notifies members of other relevant video-game conferences around the world, listed seven for that month alone in addition to its own.

On the flip side, the video-gaming industry has also become more accepting of scholars, Juul says. In fact, in recent years, it has undertaken collaborations with many West Coast universities, along with the movie industry. They saw them as back-seat drivers. A sampling of articles from a recent issue of Game Studies hints at the range of topics covered by the field—and the types of scholars covering them: A lecturer in new media and media theory at Victoria University in New Zealand writes on "the gamer addiction myth"; a Ph.

Other academics in the field have made names for themselves developing "serious" games—games created not for entertainment or commercial success but as vehicles for social critique or education. Some deal with war or famine. One game created by Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner of the game-design studio Persuasive Games, essentially lets the player see how boring it is to work at FedEx Kinko's. Plugged in: Students like freshman Ben Arnstein are given class time to try out the games they study.

Video games have also begun to gain a reputation as tools for research in more mainstream fields. Many universities have been active in posting academic resources and hosting meetings in Second Life, the online world that many compare to a video game though others argue is not, because players do not seek to achieve some set purpose or objective.

In August, epidemiological researchers at Tufts University made national headlines with a journal article that explored the epidemic spread of a virtual virus called Corrupted Blood through the online game World of Warcraft WoW. Useful skills, to be sure, but exercised excessively they can also become problems. After all, when kids become so accustomed to multi-tasking and processing large amounts of information simultaneously, they may have trouble focusing on a lecture in a classroom setting.

The very nature of action-entertainment games not only attracts young people with focus, attention, and anger issues particularly in the case of violent games ; it also tends to reinforce these negative behaviors. While a number of companies have tried to create beneficial games for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD , they've had limited success.

Instead, kids with ADHD often play action video games to flood their senses with visual stimulation, motor challenges, and immediate rewards. In this environment, the ADHD brain functions in a way that allows these children to focus, so much so that they don't exhibit symptoms, such as distractibility, while gaming. The stakes may be higher for a child with anger and behavior issues who finds solace in violent video games. While experts disagree about what if any impact violent games have on actual violent behavior, some research shows a link between playing violent games and aggressive thoughts and behavior.

For a kid who already has an aggressive personality, that could be a problem, say experts, since video games reward those aggressive tendencies.

In fact, two separate studies found that playing a violent video game for just 10—20 minutes increased aggressive thoughts compared to those who played nonviolent games. However, not all games are equal—and each person's reaction to those games is different, too. They can have benefits or detriments depending what you're looking at. For Rosner, gaming was detrimental. His grades suffered, he missed assignments, and he almost failed to complete his first year of college.

His academic advisor gave him two options: complete all of his essays for the first year within a span of three weeks, or fail and retake the first year. After turning away from the game, Rosner found other sources of pleasure. He joined a gym, started DJing at his university, and became much more active socially. Ironically, World of Warcraft led Rosner to achieve his dream of making films. More than 1 million people worldwide have viewed his film, which can be seen on YouTube.

It has been featured at film festivals, on TV, and in newspapers and magazines. Today, gaming is just one form of entertainment for Rosner. He even plays World of Warcraft occasionally. But gaming no longer controls his life.

With news about video games turning kids into bullies—or zombies—and a growing number of experts warning about the dangers of too much screen time, it may be tempting to ban computers and smartphones altogether. Don't, say experts. If you forbid game play, you'll forfeit any opportunity to influence your children's behavior.

A better approach: play with them, says Judy Willis, M. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms. The key to ensuring your children have a healthy relationship with video games and, yes, there is such a thing means ensuring they take advantage of pleasurable experiences outside these games.