83 Attitude The Game of Life
b'The Game of Life, a real challenge for everybody, the idea of the topic is game. What is a game? We often hear and think in terms of a game. I looked up all kinds of definitions of it. I want to refer to and bring in the idea of The Game of Life.\\nMake projects a game yields a positive Attitude\\nA game, something that is structured, has rules or whatever, you use it for play or enjoyment, but it can also be educational. Gee, if a game can be educational, that brings up other topics and other ideas. There are some definitions that say the difference between game and work is that a game you\\u2019re not paid for, whereas work you\\u2019re paid. But wait a minute, there\\u2019s golf, tennis, baseball, football, and lots of games that people are paid for once they learn how to do it well. Even the video games, there are things out there that people make money competing in a video game. The difference between game and work is really blurred, so what I want to do is get back down into it really deep and talk about how YOU can make life a game.\\n\\nFirst let me start by telling you what I used to do when I would train some of the programmers, developers, database administrators, etc. across the country. Very often I would go in there and they were at their computers already, etc. or I was standing up front as they entered. After we got everybody there and we got started, I would usually say something on this topic because I already noticed many of them playing things like Solitaire.\\n\\nMost of them were playing Solitaire. I would say: \\u201cI can\\u2019t understand why people play games on the computer.\\u201d I\\u2019d get a lot of odd looks as I\\u2019m probably getting right now, but fortunately this is audio, so I can\\u2019t see what you\\u2019re saying or what you\\u2019re thinking, but think about it for a minute. I would say: \\u201cThink of it this way, you\\u2019ve got Solitaire. Okay, you played Solitaire yesterday. How many games did you win or lose?\\u201d They have no idea. \\u201cHow many games did you play?\\u201d They have no idea. It was a mindless exercise of some random occurrence of cards and trying to put them in the right place. What happened? Nothing. You got nothing out of it.\\n\\nInstead, these are people that are there on the computer to learn. By the way, this involves everybody today. There are things on the computer that you need or should know. That could be anything as simple as learning Excel or Word better. For them it was every single object on the computer.\\n\\nYou notice when you right click something, you see all these things, all these choices and actions, etc. You can set things. As a programmer, you actually develop those and write the code for those items. You write the code to decide that when you click on \\u201cOpen,\\u201d it opens it and maybe opens up a new thing with certain colors, certain properties, what size it is, etc. All of those things are done. Even the idea of clicking on the icon or double clicking on the icon has different events, and those events cause different actions. Those are all things they need to learn.\\n\\nSo, what the hell are they doing playing Solitaire?\\n\\nWhat if instead of sitting there, waiting, playing Solitaire, they went to figure one of those things out or two of those things out? I asked them: \\u201cWhat happens if you figure it out? You\\u2019ve won. What happens if you don\\u2019t figure it out? You get to play the game again tomorrow. No big deal, and you\\u2019ve learned something along the way which is what you were supposed to do in the first place, but by making it a game, a challenge.\\u201d\\n\\nBy the way, that\\u2019s the definition or part of the idea of a game. A game, basically you have some sort of goal, you have rules, you have challenges, and you have interaction. I just described what they\\u2019re supposed to be doing. The same thing.\\n\\nThe goal was to figure it out, the goal was to maybe how to set the properties, or figure out how to cause it to do something.\\n\\nThe same thing goes for most of everything you\\u2019re doing. You\\u2019re sitting there in front of your computer.'