Karsten Wysk

Game of Life - What if game designers ruled the world? Karsten Wysk

Game of Life - What if game designers ruled the world? This book looks at 10 problems the (western) world is currently facing - from the financial crisis to the educational system - and discusses how the experience and mindset of a video game designer would tackle these problems. The basic assumption is that game designers have two big advantages: Firstly, they have a much more realistic view of how people really behave because they are constantly measuring and analyzing millions of people playing their games and do not rely on theories like the homo oeconomicus. Secondly, game designers are much more used to optimizing and creating environments which certain incentives set in place: While they create a new game every year or so, states are normally only founded every 100 years. It's obviously easier to iterate in a game than in a state to drive a certain behavior. The book discusses each of the real world problems thoroughly and then tries to adopt key learnings from the gaming world to these issues in the real world. It wants to encourage collaboration between the gaming world and politics/economics to improve the (real) game of life.