One of my favorite metaphors for the Networked World comes from a source I can’t attribute. I believe I came across it in Wired Magazine in the late 1990s. In the article, the writer cited a sci-fi story that describes a future in which game kiosks have been installed on busy street corners. The kiosks alert passersby when there’s some kind of rotten thing happening to the human organism — a famine, a war, a currency devaluation, a water shortage, etc. When the alert is issued, pedestrians take to the kiosks and play a massively multplayer game designed so that the playing generates whatever kind of energy or economies are needed to correct the imbalance in the world.

If anyone remembers the Wired article or the original sci-fi story cited by the article’s author, please let me know. I’d like to give proper credit. (Thus correcting an imbalance : )

I am reminded of this article/scenario a lot these days, because we are seeing it happen for real. As a generation of gamers enters the workforce, gaming is getting more serious. In the next five years, the levels of participation and consequences of game play will be one of the most profound changes we will see in the networked economy.

As games and gamers have matured and evolved, the culture of gaming has gotten more sophisticated, and the levels of engagement have become more meaningful. Flight simulators are an example of a serious game that have gotten much more realistic in the 3o+ years their existence. The guilds in Worlds of Warcraft can be like family to their members. Facebook’s cause-related apps, Procter & Gamble’s online innovation lab, and the massively multiplayer game Superstruct, which the Institute for the Future launches later this month, are examples of games with a serious purpose. Procter & Gamble wants to externalize more of its creative engineering and in the process expand the pool of productive ideas entering its network. Superstruct is designed to forecast and positively impact a future that will improve the lives of cerebral palsy victims around the world. Serious games, those. Backed by serious money and talent.

Of course the serious consequences of games are not going to be 100% beneficial. The dark destruction of Yin always accompanies the bright optimism of Yang. The line between playing a war simulation game and actually killing other human beings is perilously thin, if it even exists any more at all.

So what purpose should games serve? What objectives should the playing of games achieve? The sci-fi story cited above expressed an idea about it. Post-Apocalyptic MMORPG games like Fallout set players in gloomier futures. Microsoft has one take on the question, the Pentagon another, Electronic Arts another. Here’s how an improviser sees it: We play games to solve problems.

Modern improvisation began in the 1930s, with theater games devised by two schoolteachers, Viola Spolin and Neva Boyd, to help children from multi-cultural backgrounds on Chicago’s South Side — first generation Serbs and Croats and Poles and Germans and Jews and Blacks and Czechs — find ways to communicate and learn from one another instead of beating each other over the head with bowling pins. For Spolin and Boyd and their students, improvisation became a way to transcend fear, ego and ethnic differences so that productive collaborations could occur. Improvisation was the conduit to learning, and games were the basis of improvisation.

The improvisation required by the playing of games — the spontaneous interactions between players — lets players collaboratively discover innovative solutions to problems. It’s true in theater, true in business. True for children, and for grown-ups, too.

Improvisation as conceived by Viola Spolin and Neva Boyd holds that the playing of games equates with doing some good in the world. Games are a means of supporting one another, and connecting with our communities.

The founding teachers believed in no uncertain terms that our interactions should arise from a spirit of hopefulness instead of being necessitated by our fears, and that the choice is always ours to make.

Obama ‘08.