I’m not a gamer, and at a recent Social Rockstar Workshop with Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer of Sun Microsystems, when the question was asked “Who in this room identifies themselves as “gamers”, maybe a quarter of the Social Media Rockstar group raised their hands. Melissinos surveyed the room and laughed, “Well, that’s great, and the rest of you are and you don’t realize it yet.”

I guess. But it is pretty hard to ignore what’s going on in gaming and its impact on society and new media in particular. Two big things: First, this is not your grandfather’s Atari. (Grandfather?) But even more important: The term “games” itself is a tad anachronistic, in light of games’ pervasiveness well beyond entertainment, to education, vocational training, business applications, music and the arts, and on and on.

So, when you read up on the topic of gaming, you get a smattering of comments like this one from Scott Sharkey in “Top 5 Things I Learned from Videogames”: “On one hand, they're murder simulators preparing us for shooting sprees (because locking, loading, and firing an M-16 is exactly like pushing the Control key). On the other hand, there's the backhanded admission that maybe they're helping us improve our hand-eye-coordination (whatever the hell that means). I know I never got any better at throwing a baseball; I can't read my own handwriting; and I don't think Duck Hunt taught me anything except the futility of shooting imaginary guns at my pets.” (Snarkey from Sharkey).

Of course, that’s coming from the gaming community itself, probably trying to put a nice spin on spending a lot of time in their mothers’ basements. But when you ask around and you meet pretty respectable guys in the new media community like Lawrence Swiader, formerly CIO of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (and now of National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (www.thenc.org)) spending time gushing about applications and exploring the uses and the really fabulous societal utility of this field, you do start paying more attention. And unlike the porn industry argument about how the perils of ignoring an economic sector so absurdly large and growing, games actually have major potential positive aspects.

Although it’s also hard to scoff at the innovations for the internet driven by the porn industry and its well-heeled fan base.

At Media Future Now our goals are several, but education and knowledge about the business and technology of media and new media are at our core. We have no plans to become a gaming meetup or particular advocates for games and gaming. But we are excited to learn more and introduce our skeptical – but innovative – membership to an important – yes, important – part of our world.

We asked 2 of our members to weigh in:

Mike Proffitt, Associate Director, IT Ops, Atlantic Media (www.atlanticmediacompany.com): “Games are still one of the best ways to impart information. At their simplest level they define rules for interaction and deliver consequences that are in a defined space that encourage strategy. Games are an easy and creative way to engage new media users in a direct or indirect way to spend their time with your content and to interact with it in your defined space.”

Limor Schafman, President, KeystoneTech Group (www.keystonetechgroup.com): “Games and virtual worlds are a medium for telling a story, engaging a player (read that also as a consumer, a constituent, a student, any person interested in a topic) in an interactive, even immersive experience which … leads to true understanding, buy in, involvement, knowledge, recall, engagement, enjoyment. Here’s a simple example – reading about architecture is informative. Having to construct a building brings a whole other level of learning, experience and knowledge. Working with a team to construct the building brings another level of learning. Virtual engagement takes passive knowledge and makes it alive and “visceral.””