[ExI] farmville, was RE: RPGs and transhumanism

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 5:49 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> spike wrote:
> I wonder what games actually make people go out and do things in the real
> world? RPGs have certainly stimulated me to learn odd subjects, and even
> helped my research. But what about other games (computers and boardgames)?

I know that when I was a teenager, some of my friends were playing
Dungeons and Dragons in the tunnels underneath the local college. Does
that count?

I heard about a study, perhaps 20 years ago, about an attempt to teach
people various skills in VR. At that point of the technology, the only
skill they had been able to measure as having improved using VR was
juggling. Apparently, they turned down the gravity so that things
slowed down enough to learn the moves, then they slowly ramped it up
to earth gravity, and finally, the subjects were able to juggle in
reality. I'm sure there are more successes by now, but I found the
report to be very interesting at the time. I looked on the Internet,
but was unable to find the research paper, so it may have just been a
rumor, you know how "studies" are... :-)

-Kelly