Scenario planning has a lot in common with how chess players approach their game. Research has shown that chess masters don’t approach a game with a master plan that they rigidly execute. Nor do they just react to the moves of their opponents. Rather, they are adept at “reading” the board at each stage of the game and hypothesizing their opponent’s likely near-future actions, and then planning accordingly.
Strategies akin to seizing the middle are also used in areas such as business, economics, and negotiation. Analogous strategies involve limiting an opponent’s options by asserting control over a resource or area, be it physical or conceptual. Some of the most profitable businesses throughout history employed this strategy and treated the world like a chessboard.
Source: Seizing The Middle: Chess Strategy in Business – Farnam Street
Some of the savviest strategists are street corner chess masters.
The one thing I tell my students is that when you get to a confrontation of any type, you have to remain calm. When you remain calm, you can see the board a lot clearer. You can see the person you’re playing or arguing with a lot more clearly, for who and what they are. So you don’t even have to entertain that shit. You understand?
“They timid, they’re not willing to take a chance. See this? [He moves a pawn forward one space.] That means sometimes people don’t want to be hurt. They have a fear of losing.”
Inspiration is the other strand that runs throughout genuine play. The mental skill here was defined by the philosopher Aristotle, who pointed out two bad extremes in discussions: being too serious and dull, and being too frivolous — which is dull in its own way. In between these two lies a mental quality Aristotle called eutrapelia, or ‘good-turning’: being able to change direction playfully from serious to fun and back, engaging others in a rich but also light-hearted discussion.¹⁴ Somewhere between the t
Debord is best known as the author of The Society of the Spectacle (1967), but in many ways it is not quite a representative text. Lately there has also been a revival of Debord the filmmaker, but beside being a writer, a filmmaker, an editor, and a first rate professional of no profession, he was also a game designer. According to Debord’s second wife, Alice Becker-Ho, he patented his Game of War in 1965 ten years after conceiving it. In 1977, he partnered with his then publisher Gérard Lebovici to form a
At work, “playing” with problems can spur creativity and enhance your critical thinking, speeding up your learning and making you more productive. Play is also a lynchpin of trust, helping you lower your guard and connect with others to forge more resilient relationships. That adaptability often extends to your overall physical and mental health, reducing cortisol (your body’s primary “stress” hormone), decreasing your blood pressure, and increasing your sense of well-being.
Source: Being playful is a biological imperative, even for adults
Summary: People from cultures that frequently engage in conflicts with other cultures tend to play more cooperative games than competitive ones. However, in cultures where there are frequent conflicts within their own communities, there is a greater tendency to play more competitive games.
Source: Those That Game Together, Stay Together – Neuroscience News
“It was also really interesting to see that how the children corrected each other varied by location. To our surprise, children from rural small-scale communities protested as much or even more than children from urban settings. We assumed that, because everyone knows everyone else in small scale communities, direct interventions would be less common, as people could rely on more indirect ways such as reputation to ensure compliance with rules. But we actually found the opposite to be true.
No surprise there’s a strong link between play and learning. As far as we know, every species that isn’t hard-wired with instinctual behavior engages in some forms of play. But who knows? Perhaps someday we’ll discover that ants play a subtle massive multiplayer game.
These findings come at a time when many experts are calling for more play for kids to mitigate the trauma children have experienced during the pandemic. Last year, a report by the LEGO Foundation that looked at 26 studies of play from 18 countries found play is so powerful it can reduce inequality and close achievement gaps between children ages 3 to 6. Those studies, which also looked at free play in addition to guided play, found children progressed in several domains of learning, including language and literacy, math and social-emotional skills.
Source: Kids can learn more from guided play than direct instruction, studies say
The key lies in our definition of distraction. Screen learning must involve distracting students towards the things that really matter. In education, as in gaming, we can “court risk” without the fear of failing.
Rather than admonishing learners for not focusing when sitting at desks in school or in front of screens, we should work within our distracted world. We need to play with distraction, work with distraction and learn with distraction.
https://theconversation.com/gamers-know-the-power-of-flow-what-if-learners-could-harness-it-too-164943