decision making
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Five social apps to help you make a decision
Anyone who knows me well understands that I hate making decisions. From what to eat to where to go on vacation, I'd rather have little to no choice in the matter. For decision-avoiding people like me, there are a growing number of social decision-making apps that let you turn to your friends or the internet at large to help you make a decision. Here are five of them I have stumbled upon recently. Seesaw for iPhone [iPhone; Free] Seesaw allows you take a photo of your choices and then share them with the community to help you make a decision. You can also send your seesaws to your friends in your address book and they can respond without signing up for the service or installing the app. Loop -- Social Polling [iPhone; Free] Loop is a social polling app that lets you ask any question and get an instant answer. People responding to questions can do so without downloading or installing anything. It's more than just life decisions -- you can loop in your Pinboard or Amazon items, so you can use it for shopping advice and more. The app also allows you to create private polls and display an infographic of the voting results from a poll. Deciderr -- Social Decision-Making [iPhone; Free] Deciderr is a social app that lets you post a "Yes or No" question to help you make a decision. You can post your own questions or respond to questions posted by the people you follow. You can also share your question on Twitter or Facebook. PeepAdvice [iPhone; Free] PeepAdvice allows you to get advice quickly by asking simple questions with two choices that are open for voting. Your followers can then chime in with their favorite choice. PeepAdvice is a wide-open forum for discussing health, romance, purchases and more. Polar [iPhone; Free] Polar is a social polling app that lets people both vote and comment on your polls. As you share polls, you can build a following and follow others on the social network. You can chat with others and create or share polls right within the chat messages. It's a social experience that's part talking, part decision-making.
The Summoner's Guidebook: League of Legends' hardest choices
Sometimes League of Legends gives us hard choices. As a jungler, I'm frequently tasked with the difficult decision of whether to gank or counter-jungle and where I should do so. After a lost teamfight, you also have to make a lot of decisions about how to turn the game around. Should you buy elixirs? Should you try to farm and stall the game out or force another teamfight in a better position? These are all difficult choices. However, most players have to deal with the toughest question of all: Which champion should I unlock next?
The Summoner's Guidebook: Winning LoL games takes good decisions
Decision-making is a broad topic, so I am a bit hesitant to cover it directly. It's the little things that contribute to victory in League of Legends, and decision-making is not a little thing. It's a big topic with a lot of ground to cover. As I've said many times in the past, experience is the best teacher, and I can only tell you what to look for. However, I wanted to bring the column back around to talking about what it takes to step up your game. By now, you've heard me talk at length about mechanical things -- things like last-hitting or aiming skillshots that you can sit down and practice. I've talked more on narrow things like how to make a good team composition or execute ganks. Now I'm going to begin to put everything together and talk about what things you should think about before you click to move on the minimap, place a ward, or ping your team to go for dragon. Good decisions win LoL games, and whether you're a pro or an amateur, you can improve on the choices you make.
The Summoner's Guidebook: Cleaning up after your LoL messes
Two weeks ago, we covered initiation in the Summoner's Guidebook, and last week we covered zoning. Those two elements comprise the early and middle parts of a teamfight, but if you want to win in League of Legends, you need to finish strong. As a fight winds down, wounded players begin to disengage in order to lick their wounds. Some characters just want to pull out early to wait out cooldowns, while in other cases it's purely a matter of health. Sometimes a player will get zoned out of a fight so far that she cannot contribute meaningfully to the teamfight at large. At this point, tough decisions start to crop up. Do you split off and give chase, taking away a large chunk of health from your team to secure the kill? Or do you allow the enemy to get away, giving away potential gold and/or allowing the enemy team a chance to come back? This decision is a non-question for a lot of players, but we should really be thinking about it when we are fighting. There are a lot of questions we should be asking ourselves before we drop out of a fight to chase, but all too often our eyes get filled with the sight of blood and everything else vanishes. I know you can do a little better than that.
Raid Rx: The limits of cognitive bandwidth for healers
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. If you're looking for more healing advice, check out the Plus Heal community. How much cognitive bandwidth does a healer need? At what point is too much "stuff" actually too much? In terms of information processing and responses, healing is a pretty demanding position to play. We're getting additional spells to work with in the expansion. That means there are more situations we need to learn how to "read". But first, let me try to paint what goes on in the mind of a healer (or at least, in my mind). I'll use Sindragosa as an example of an extreme case, in terms of encounter mechanics to watch for and healing that needs to be done.
Gamers make accurate decisions faster than non-gamers, new study finds
Many studies have shown some evidence that spending a lot of time playing video games can mean, for instance, that a person will perform worse in school -- probably because they're too busy playing The Sims to study. Recently, however, some newer studies have begun to show some more complicated evidence. A new study published in Current Biology, for instance, discusses players of standard action games, and how doing so augments their decision making abilities. What gaming does, according to the study's perspective, is help people make probabilistic inferences -- decisions based on incomplete information -- increasing the efficiency of determining odds of something happening or not. The study examined both gamers and non-gamers, and found that given the same rate of accuracy, the gamers would consistently make decisions faster than the non-gamers. The entire article can be found at the source link -- but for now, just take comfort in the knowledge that in some ways, playing video games is making you smarter.
US Air Force says decision-making attack drones will be here by 2047
Leave it to the military to dream big. In its recently released "Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047" report, the US Air Force details a drone that could fly over a target and then make the decision whether or not to launch an attack, all without human intervention. The Air Force says that increasingly, humans will monitor situations, rather than be deciders or participants, and that "advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input." Programming of the drone will be based on "human intent," with real actual humans monitoring the execution, while retaining the authority and ability to override the system. It's all still extremely vague, with literally no details on exactly how this drone will come into existence, but we do know this: the Air Force plans to have these dudes operational by 2047. We're just holding out to see what those "classified" pages are all about. [Warning: read link is a PDF] [Via PC World] Read -Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047
Anti-Aliased: Serious business guys, serious business
This is one of those quintessential arguments that pops up time and time again amongst gamers, guilds, groups, and communities. It's an argument that divides people, pisses off people, and causes countless more gamers to alienate other gamers. How serious should you be about playing your game? Of course we laugh about a topic like this one. Games aren't suppose to be serious, that's why they're games! They're suppose to be fun and enjoyable. If you're not having fun, then you're doing something seriously wrong. For the most part, all of this is true. Yet, there are small segments of the games that we play that actually can require everyone to sit down and "get serious."We see it in raiding tactics, player vs. player tactics, loot distribution, and many other areas (including the entire universe of EVE Online, which seems to be played very seriously.) We've even dedicated a segment of our culture to this type of behavior -- the "hardcore" crowd.So, let's go forward and look at the question, "Are games getting too serious?"
Officers' Quarters: Overruled
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.Who knows what's best for a guild, its leader or its members? It's an interesting question. The guild leader certainly has the best perspective on all guild issues (or she should, anyway). But it is her job to keep the members happy. So if the members are against something, should you allow them to overrule you? What if you as an officer think the members are wrong? This week's e-mail comes from a reader who did what his members wanted him to do, but thinks he might have made a mistake.Hey Scott. I'm the GM of a reasonably successful guild who have gotten to Sarth 2d and working on 3d in 25 man raids, so there's not a lot left to do. Back in mid January we were successfully [running three Heroic raids] a week. However some classes were very tight and for the 25 man we had maybe 27 signups and not all of the 'right' class balance, but 'good enough' for Naxx etc. We had the opportunity to take in approximately 10 good raiders [. . .] with whom some of us (including myself) had played in the past and [whose] attitude matched very closely to our own. With those 10 raiders there were approximately 10 other people who did not want to raid with RL commitments but still enjoyed playing WoW etc. The Officers were largely in favor of taking them on, our class leaders had some concerns, but generally thought it was a good idea. So we took the idea to the guild as a whole who were largely against the merger.
IBM exec: Games are great for employees
Hot on the heels of last week's news that employers are staying away from hiring WoW players comes this article from the BBC, quoting an IBM executive who says that gamers are actually exactly the kind of people you want on a team: David Laux, global executive in charge of games and interactive entertainment (wait, maybe that's why he's so keen on game players) says that casual games can improve memorization and the abilty to discern details, first person shooters can help with rapid decision making, and games like World of Warcraft can boost leadership skills. He says WoW specifically helps players learn how to work well on a team, assess risks, and put the group first to achieve a common goal.Which is true -- if you're actually the one in charge of groups. I'm of the opinion that it's very possible to play a game like WoW and get a nice boost to your leadership skills (leading a guild is often a job in itself), but I think it's also very possible that you could play WoW and not get a thing out of it -- I know quite a few people I've grouped with that I'd never want to have sitting next to me in a real office.The bottom line, as always, is somewhere inbetween the two opinions. If you're already interested in taking charge and being a leader, WoW is a great simlulation to let you do those things. And if you're already a lazy worker and interested in helping yourself more than whatever team you're on, WoW probably won't cure you of that (there are certainly plenty of selfish people running around the game every day). In short, if your hiring policies are based on whether or not someone plays videogames, you might want to reconsider them completely.
The Daily Grind: Do MMO leadership skills scale?
According to this article from the India Times, there is a direct correlation between the kinds of skill needed for leaders to excel in an MMO, and the skills required for success in the real world. Namely, these skills break down to "Collaboration is key", "Vision is important", and "Information gathering and synthesis generate results".However, while it all sounds great on paper, there is a literal world's difference between decisions that affect the outcome of a game, and choices that determine the fate of a business. This is not to say that games can't be a testbed for quality decision-making behavior, but it takes real ingenuity to directly apply game experience to the real world and have corresponding value. What do you think? Do gamers make better leaders?
