I am a committed believer in determinism (as opposed - that is - to believing in the concept of free will). I don't find it restricting or philosophically stifling. It just is the way it is. The future is going to be the future whether you go out and do something with your life or whether you mope around in your bedroom like a teenager, deciding it's all pointless because nothing can change what's going to happen. Doesn't matter. Have fun. Makes no difference to the future, but at least you're going to get layed occassionally if you stop hiding in the dark.
When I was about fourteen or fifteen I remember going for walk with a friend of mine (his name was Eddie Ball...I have no idea where he might be now). During the course of that walk, he and I developed this whole idea for a game we were going to build - or not so much really a game as a "simulation". It would be computer based and would feature a complete universe in which we could fly our space ships around. We'd build these space ships in our wardrobes so that they'd be nice and dark, and give the impression of being out in the infinite. We really had the whole thing worked out, from how we were going to build the user interface and how we were going to get our two space ships in two separate wardrobes and in two separate parts of town, to know where each other where.
We'd need to do a lot of software development to get the environment realistic, and to manage to keep our two space ships operating in a synchronized universe, but that was okay, because we were forteen or fifteen, we were not into sports, we had not discovered the joy of sex (except in the occassional discarded magazine we'd find out the back of school) and the consequential social outcast status meant we had plenty of time on our hands.
The electronics part of the deal we could handle. We'd both been hobbyists for a long time and our teenage confidence and enthusiasm meant we could overcome any minor issues of where we'd get the parts or get them to work.
The main problem was that this was about 1979, and we couldn't get our hands on one computer - never mind the two/three we envisaged we'd probably need to run this thing.
So did we give up? Nope. We were fourteen/fifteen. Did we build the thing? Nope...I doubt we could build what we'd designed in our heads on that walk through the woods even today and with NASA's budget to spend!
But together we did end up building computers a couple years later, and we did end up spending an awful lot of teenage energy writing games on those computers and others that came later. Without that walk through the woods I may not have become an assembly language wiz, and so may not have ended up in embedded product development when I grew up.
Last time I touched a computer game was a month or so ago on a FlyDubai flight to Kuwait playing Solitair on the seatback screen because I forgot to bring headphones and was too lazy to get a book from my back in the overhead. I don't do WoW or SecondLife or any of those things and I don't own a console (I have a PSP I use for MP3 playing and Skype now and then), and I don't feel drawn to buying one (mostly...). I would go so far as to say that I have had a life-long fascination with games, but the problem is that Eddie and I set our expectations really high that day in the woods, and we (me anyway) still haven't found something to match it.
I was really interested to read a couple of days ago an article about how some companies are now developing games that turn employee activity into a game that they play. End result is the job gets done and the workers (maybe) have fun...I think that generally speaking the fun probably wears off real quick and the competitiveness spills out into the workplace, but hell - what do I know??
But the concept is not a bad thing, and possibly specifically not in the "security game" where we frequently have operators of systems who are minimum-wage, untrained staff who do not have the experience to do what the management want them to do anyway. Training costs money, but because of the game culture so many people have grown up in, a lot of "game related activity" has become intuitive for people who play games.
Replace the Pelco joystick with an XBox or PS3 joypad and people can operate the systems quicker and more easily.
Take away that generic VMS front-end screen (you know the one...device tree on the left, split screen in the middle, alarm stack at the bottom) and put a slick looking skin on it, and you'll minimize your learning curve.
But it's not only about the user interface, I think there's quite a lot of the things people do that maybe don't actually relate to what you'd think a security control room operator should be doing, but ba doing them you are encouraging the operators to actually take notice of what's happening with the system. They'll notice and report faulty or out-of-focus cameras much more quickly, they'll maybe become more adept at recalling footage associated with people they spot on the screen. They're much more likely to actually look at the screen and not chat or read the newspaper.
I'm going to begin to try it out with our operators and score them based on information out of the system activity log. I'm going to think of some games to play and see how it goes down.
