At Bowling Green State University yesterday afternoon (January 24, 2006 at 3:30 PM) John Beck gave a talk as part of the Presidential Lecture Series. John Beck is a co-author of a book titled Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever. From the the site about the book:
John C. Beck is President of the North Star Leadership Group, a Senior Research Fellow at the Annenberg Center of the Digital Future at the University of Southern California (USC), and a Senior Advisor at Monitor Group. He leads research and consulting projects on topics of strategic thinking, wireless communication, the global internet, and global leadership.
His lecture was related to his book’s title. (I know, shocking, right?) I only saw a small sampling of his actual research data, but the results were interesting. Some of the key things they found out were that, on average, gamers were more likely than non-gamers to say that:
- they are more confident of the abilities,
- winning is everything,
- they are more global in thier thinking, and
- that they have a greater need for human relationships.
Some of the results, such as the last one mentioned there were quite surprising.
I suppose I should actually say who members of the “Gamer Generation” are? For the purpose of their research, they considered anyone born during/after 1975 to be a member of the Gamer Generation (henceforth “GG”). Flipping through the book (which I purchased after the talk), it appears that they “zoomed” out on their view of generation groups. The GG, also refered to as the “Echo Boomers”, includes those who would be members of the Generation X and Y (or whatever you wish to name that generation). The main thing to make someone a member of the GG is whether they grew up playing video games, not if they play them now.
Some main points he touched on included on how differently members of the GG think of things. They’ve been growing up while immersed in worlds that, while similar to the real world, are based on different rules. He commented that, while gesturing towards an image on the screen of a fireball (possibly from a fighting game, my view wasn’t good), as a kid, he never had to worry about a fireball erupting out of the ground while he was playing basketball. Life was linear, and that was not an eventuality that he had planned for. He said, however, that gamers think of things like that non-GG members might not, because games can throw anything at you at any time and you need to be ready for it. This is similar to a comment I made to Meghan once the first real ice-on-the-roads snow of the winter finally came. I’m driving us to school one morning an after her making some suggestion or something similar for me to be careful, I commented that it was okay, because this was nothing I couldn’t handle because of all the practice I had playing video games involving driving a car in non-desirable conditions. She was a bit put off by this, by I really felt confident in my ability to deal with my car if it happened to slide whie I was stopping or turning. I felt that in the event of my car sliding, instinct would take over and the decisions I would have to make would be easy because I had already foresaw that it might be an issue and I had practiced it before. That pratice had just been in a game called Burnout 2.
For those that don’t know, half of Burnout 2 is a racing game. The other half is on how to crash a car to do the most damage to yourself and other vehicles. Take that for what you will. 
A major point he made was that the older generation(s) need to figure out what is going on, as the GG is already in the workplace, and some of them were a big part of the dot-com era. His comment: the Dot Coms were just like video games. Dot-coms were new and different, and you could try anything you wanted if you were in charge. And if you failed? Reset. The bank foreclosed and maybe you went bankrupt, but chances are you moved on to something new. There were 20-somethings who had been CFOs. He believes that if you asked most 20-somethings about their experience with the dot-coms, they would say it was a good or great time, whereas an older individual might say differently.
Why is this? He mentions some neuroscience, which Meghan may correct me on. Children, as they develop, create neural pathways. These pathways become more static as the child goes through puberty, roughly around age 13. Unlike previous generations, gamers have had video games changing the way their neural pathways are formed. (Yes, the baby-boomers had TV, but there is a counter to that: (according to his numbers as best I recall them) you remember 10% of what you hear, 25% of what you see (hear and see might be swapped) and 70.8% of what you do, so watching TV would have a lower effect.) This is causing them to think differently, as they’re used to situations where there is a way to win, you just have to find what that way is, and sometimes, trial-and-error is the best way to do this. And if you lose? Reset and try again.
Why is all this important? He predicts that in about 5 years, the GG’s will be starting to change business models. They’ll be applying methods that the boomers would never have considered, and they’ll even be doing it in the way business schools have been suggesting it be done for years, but that people have only considered to work “in theory but not practice”.
I have many other things to add to this stream-of-consciousness blog post, such as using this article to counter a post on Publishing 2.0, or to propose why MS is losing ground in the browser market, but I’ll save that for another post.
If you’d like to read the article in which a student employee and I are quoted, please see this Toledo Blade article.
If you are 35 and under, we have a world to change. If you are over 35, we’ll give you a couple more years, then you’ll have to play by our rules.
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