The New Rules: In Gaming the Future, Don't Bet Against the Millennial Generation

By Thomas P.M. Barnett | 12 Mar 2012 Column

As someone who thinks long and hard about global futures, I participate in a lot of professional forums where experts discuss the growing complexity of this world and question the ability of existing political systems, both democratic and authoritarian, to handle it. Some professionals, like Thomas Homer-Dixon, fret about an ingenuity gap, while regular readers of this column can attest to my frequent accusation that todays political leaders lack strategic imagination. In short, were all arguing that politics isnt keeping up with economics, much less technology. And it scares us. Things get more depressing when the subject of future generations comes up, because we professionals, overwhelmingly aging white males, have a tendency to deeply discount the talents of the onrushing Millennial generation. Its not just their overdeveloped sense of self-esteem that we loathe. Its also the driven-to-distraction way they lose themselves in their ever-expanding world of devices -- most prominently their obsession with games. Of course, aging white males arent immune to this sort of thing. But clearly, the Millennials embrace this lifestyle of pervasive gaming more than any previous generation, reflecting both gamings growing ubiquity and recent advances in technical wizardry. And as someone who, over the course of a career, has both participated in and designed very elaborate war games for government and corporate leaders, the fidelity of these electronic games -- meaning their ability to render realworld situations with great accuracy -- is becoming downright stunning. A favorite example of mine is the uncanny ability of the Madden NFL video game to predict the outcome of recent Super Bowls, which drove me -- back in my 2005 book, Blueprint for Action -- to project ahead to the day when a massively multiplayer online game simulating an anticipated U.S. military invasion of a small country could actually convince the targeted dictator to abandon the scene rather than face the inevitable outcome. Seriously. So imagine how intrigued I was to recently discover that the Obama White House actually has a presidential task force looking into the civic benefits of serious gaming. Admittedly, for now, this is mostly about exploring how gaming the search for solutions -- like having a crowd of intense gamers figure out some medical mystery that has eluded classically trained scientists for years -- improves outcomes. But again, as someone who thinks deep into the future, what really interests me is whether or not were rearing future generations of leaders better-prepared to handle the worlds skyrocketing

complexity. On this score, more and more scientific data suggests that gaming is not the braindrainer we old fogies imagine it to be. Indeed, its quite the opposite. A Wall Street Journal feature summarizing recent research showed that: - Players of action videogames made correct decisions up to 25 percent faster than a control group that had been trained on a slower-paced game. - A group of surgeons that had played videogames for at least three hours a week made 37 percent fewer errors on tests of advanced surgical skills than those who did not. - Test scores for middle-school students on the widely used Torrance Test of Creativity correlated directly with time spent playing electronic games. - And, my personal favorite, skilled players of the online strategy-action game Starcraft performed up to 400 actions per minute during game play, a pace that was up to four times faster than most people. The reason why the White House felt the need to place the modifier serious in front of the noun gaming is that its Office of Science and Technology didnt want to appear goofy in the eyes of us older generations. But consider this: The generational cohort of serious gamers is now hitting its early 40s, which means these kids will be the heads of all sorts of serious enterprises within the next decade. And not just in the United States, but globally. Gamers will be running this world -- as well as its wars, its trade negotiations and everything else -- faster than most people realize. So what do we have to look forward to in this future? A comparison between me and my 11-year-old son is illustrative here. I played football throughout my youth and have followed the professional game obsessively for more than four decades. Indeed, my level of expertise is significant enough to allow me to hold my own with professional analysts and commentators. In contrast, my son really didnt know anything about football, despite my taking him to NFL games for the past half-decade or so, until about four months ago, when he began playing the aforementioned Madden NFLs 2011 edition. After just four months of gaming, my son can now debate any technical aspect of the professional game you care to mention, from blitz packages to Tampa Cover-2 pass defense schemes. In a word, his elevation from near-complete ignorance to impressively deep knowledge has been stunning. But what really gives an interesting glimpse of the Millennials future decision-making capacity is how my son reacted to our beloved Green Bay Packers loss in the playoffs to the eventual Super Bowl champion New York Giants: He actually used the videogame to replay all the Packers losses over the past few seasons so that the team ends up winning the virtual Super Bowl several years in a row. In fact, he went so far as to redesign individual plays when they didnt work as programmed, operating more on the level of a virtual coach than a virtual player, while utilizing analytic techniques that, quite frankly, surpass some aspects of my own knowledge of a game that Ive actually played and followed for four decades.

Were not just talking about rewiring the brain here, a serious enough scientific matter in itself, but rather the Millennial generations mental expectation of being able to re-engineer solutions from the inside out. Critics often rightfully accuse todays political leaders tendency to keep trying the same sad solutions over and over again, despite their track record of consistent failures. Clearly, the Millennials will not suffer that decision-making deficiency. Raised on videogames, they have no problem trying 47 possible approaches before finding the solution. They dont consider that path failure, but a rather enjoyable search -- a game, if you will. And I think that generational mindset bodes very well for our planet in the decades ahead. Thomas P.M. Barnett is chief analyst at Wikistrat and a contributing editor for Esquire magazine. His eBook serial is "The Emily Updates: One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived" (September-December 2011). His weekly WPR column, The New Rules, appears every Monday. Reach him and his blog at thomaspmbarnett.com.