(Reflections on the Gamer Generation)

My father never wore blue jeans. I can't recall my grandfather ever without a tie. By the time baby boomers made their entrance at end of World War II, the formality of years past was already on the floor. John E Kennedy seldom wore a hat-and the men's hat-wear industry crashed. Baby boomers crushed formal wear once and for all beneath their heels.

We boomers like to believe we're the barbarians at the gate. Our central conceit is that our sheer size and mass drives societal change and technological innovation. We believe we are more influential than any generation that preceded us, and we will be a very tough act to follow. But we're no different than our parents or any generation that lived before us whose time is growing short. The young always push the old aside, remaking culture and values in their own image. The only question from one generation to the next is the speed at which the usurpers take control.

Meet your masters

Each generation's new technologies are the ever-more powerful fuel that drives the engines of change.

"The child is father of the man," wrote the poet William Wordsworth two centuries ago. Adults draw upon childhood experiences to interpret and master the challenges of life and nature as they age. But Wordsworth's figurative musings today compose a more immediate and tangible truth for boomers. Those who trail us are driving change at an even faster and unprecedented rate, influencing our politics, public institutions, and any and all businesses, including those that provide financial services. Our children have become, literally, our teachers and, perhaps, our masters.

Socrates wrote that children are tyrants. They love luxury, have bad manners, and treat authority with contempt. So the ongoing conflict between generations is nothing new. Consider, as a case in point, the world of gamers. These are the "kids" who spend their lives playing one video or online game after another. It's easy-too easy-to dismiss the increasing influence that gamers have on the way we live, work, and play We stereotype them as nothing more than obsessive and compulsive teenagers and gawky geeks. But most boomers have no better understanding of gamers or their intelligence, abilities, and drive than our parents had regarding our cultural mores.

John Beck and Mitchell Wade, authors of a new business book, "Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever," have a far better understanding of the importance of the gamer generation. Beck and Wade claim that the only real issue when comparing the young to the old (or aging) is whether the behavior of the young changes the world in any way that really matters. That, they argue, is exactly what gamers are doing now.

Fifty-six million gamers are already in the workplace. They work in the basement mailroom and even in the executive suite on the top floor. Millions more are still at home. This generation learns differently They think differently They work, play and relate differently. Their attitudes and expectations can differ significantly from ours. What one central factor accounts for these differences? According to Beck and Wade, it's simple: They've grown up with video and online games.

What gamers know

No one will dispute that gaming is a massively large business, or that the Sonys and Microsofts of the world touch just about every household and workplace, whether it's through a Playstation or Xbox game or a virtual-world game played over the Internet. Just about any parent can tell stories of their children disappearing into the bowels of the house or back bedroom to play video games until they are forced to surface for air. But otherwise, we dismiss gaming as a nuisance-something that interferes with family dinners and homework. At a higher level, we may admit to a vague concern that our child will lose the skills to interact socially or that he or she will fail when confronted with real-life challenges as adults.

But Beck and Wade claim we are missing the point. Yes, gaming can be addictive, and like any addictive experience the consequences can be bad. Some studies of online gamers reveal that as many as 2 of 10 consider the virtual world to be iheir home and physical world is "earth"-just a place to visit. "Cyber widows" is a relatively new term for people, usually female, whose personal relationships and marriages have been destroyed by a partner, usually male, who is obsessed with gaming. But the majority of gamers are "normal" people, and they are demonstrating that gaming also has positive effects that can benefit society and business.

The willingness to take risks, for example, is a core gamer characteristic, as is the acceptance that failures will occur and that you need to start again. Obviously, failure within a game in no way equates with failure in life. But why is a lesson learned by gaming any less valuable than a lesson learned the traditional way in a classroom with a business professor or through the latest book from this year's favorite business guru? The rewards of risk taking can also differ between gamer and boomer. Here's what Beck and Ward have to say about the collapse of the dot.corns and the different generational reactions:

"To a baby boomer from the professional classes, (financial) life is supposed to bring both security and rising wealth. God or Adam Smith or Louis Rukeyser set it up that way No matter what we boomers might say about understanding the risks, we know that ordinary companies are not supposed lo crash and burn. That kind of failure is only lor dramatic exceptions, not for our employers or our investments. But to the game generation, risk is real and natural. It includes extreme consequences. And it is the inevitable, acceptable price of seeking any success worth the name."

Avatars and assets

The implication for credit unions is that these attitudes and expectations will directly transfer to the credit union both as an employer and as a provider of financial services. Edward Castronova, an economist at California State University, has taken (he study of gamers further with a narrow but even deeper analysis of the economic consequences of gaming. Specifically, Castronova looks beyond the external economics of gaming to the internal economics within the games themselves, particularly the virtual-world games played over the Internet.

While an obscure figure to mainstream businesses, Castronova is well known among the gaming industry, especially among the major game developers and manufacturers. And his academic while papers reveal that the population of virtual-world gamers has grown by millions since the earliest games were created in the mid 1990s. These players create avatars or virtual representatives of themselves. Also within the game are biots, or characters such as merchants and monsters programmed and controlled by a game's software. Avatars interact with each other visually and orally using chat features. And they interact with the biots, whose scripts are programmed by a games developer. Each of these virtual worlds builds its own economy including the production of goods and services, and the ability to accumulate wealth by the collection of assets with varying values. Avatars can buy (or steal) from biots, and trade among the players is common and increasingly sophisticated. Trade is of particular interest to Castronova because virtual-world economies have crossed over to the real world, and he wonders as they grow in size what their real world, macroeconomic impact will be.

On any given day, for example, you can find thousands of virtual-world gamers buying and selling items on eBay-items that have no real-world presence and exist only within a game, for example, weapons, tools, armor, or clothing for avatars. Even a virtual-world's currency can be purchased in the real world, creating in effect an exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and a virtual currency usable only within the game. Once a buyer and seller strike a deal on price, payment-or the exchange of value-generally occurs using eBay's PayPal technology. The buyer is then directed to a location within the virtual world-a bazaar or marketplace-where the item is exchanged between avatars.

Your future in their hands

Okay, this is pretty new stuff and the long-range impact on society admittedly, is mostly speculative. Castronova devotes hundreds of pages to economic analytics, but even he admits that it is tough to predict what will happen if this kind of behavior becomes more widespread. Beck and Wade, on the other hand, treat the influence of gamers on business from a much more practical and thus predictable standpoint. The younger generation ultimately wins, they say To recognize that simple principle, just track marketing and advertising trends over the years-trends that often presage inevitable changes in corporate culture and societal values.

When you measure the effect of technology on our lives by years or decades, the pace can seem immeasurably slow and you will underestimate the impact. But when you measure change by your own experiences or those of people you've known and loved, then the pace appears exceedingly quick and the impact is more visible. You can clearly see why customs change, values evolve, and the business landscape is littered with the skeletal remains of once successful enterprises that failed to adapt.

The gamers' generation will change business by their nature and their experience, according to Beck and Wade. Sooner or later, they warn, we will all live in the game generations culture. The first step towards taking advantage of this evolution is to understand it. Good luck.

Mark Condon (mcondon@cuna.coop) is senior vice president of CUNA Research and Advisory Services.

Copyright Credit Union National Association, Inc. Jan 2005
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