Complex metaverses
Yesterday a letter to The Times from Prof. Mark Gerstein caught my attention:
One cannot help but wonder whether the way that Dr. Perelman sequestered himself from the minutiae of academic life and from e-mail and correspondence altogether is a principal reason he has been able to think so deeply about a problem.
Grigory Perelman (New Yorker article by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber here) stayed away from everyone for seven years. Then he emerged with a key theorem but refused to receive the leading mathematics prize for it (and also refused to joust for credit with others).
Consider Paul Erdos. His life was a long collaboration with innumerable mathematicians:
In a never-ending search for good mathematical problems and fresh mathematical talent, Erdös crisscrossed four continents at a frenzied pace, moving from one university or research center to the next. His modus operandi was to show up on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare, “My brain is open,” work with his host for a day or two, until he was bored or his host was run down, and then move on to another home.
Erdos was the polychronic mathematician, happiest when he was working with six colleagues at a time, constantly finding and attacking new problems.
Convinced that guilds in WoW are harbingers of effective group work online (and remembering Joi Ito's astonishing video of his guild on a raid), I went off looking for what people were saying about their WoW experiences. I found this remarkable thread on Terranova: “WoW-nnui.” Lots of thoughtful comments about why some WoW players have had enough, and well worth reading.
Gerstein and Perelman wouldn't have liked being in a guild in the first place. They're usefully off on their own, avoiding academic committees and thinking carefully.
But there are other kinds of minds — minds like Paul Erdos's, although his was really one of a kind — who would stay with the guild experience for a long time. Under certain conditions. It's telling that some of the talented commentators on Terranova have had their fill.
Some minds want more meaningful things to do in a guild than just scrabble around leveling up their character. They'd probably like problems to solve and predictions to make and development plans to carry out. Paychecks to earn. It wouldn't have to be all earnest work — there could still be a 20lb catfish around every once in a while — but it would have to be more than what they're getting in current game settings, and for payoffs more closely tied to their investments of time and experience. (Some of the comments about just how long it takes to get things done, and how boring the tasks are, are painful.)
Surely all of this is just around the corner.