Fun and Games in the Clouds
As the generation M comes of age, the habits of 
work and play this segment of the population are changing. They expect WiFi access on demand to be the norm for their work and play needs.  The corporate work environment is fast changing to the cloud based work tools. The cloud compute services from Amazon, Google, IBM, GoGrid, Microsoft and others are  fast at work facilitating businesses to transition their compute resources to cloud compute model. The entertainment segment is trying to catchup to fulfill the play needs quickly as well. Entertainment and Video games publishing community is scrambling to catch up to claim their share of $s on GenMPlaySpace. The “physical video games consoles” are under tremendous competitive stress from the “virtual cloud games consoles”. While the entertainment devices and the physical video game consoles morph into new shapes and colors to provide multi stream capabilities enabled for different media types, the virtual cloud game consoles take advantage of their capabilities of instant reconfigurability on demand. OnLive seems to be pioneering in cloud gaming gadgets and services.
The Henry J Kaiser Fa
mily Foundation published its studies in March 2005 and then in Jan 2010 about the habits and the social behavior of the generation M. The analysis of the data, in these two studies  suggests that the total media consumption per day, for the age group,  continues to increase. On the other hand the total time spent in consuming it stays relatively constant. That suggests that multiple streams of different types of media are consumed by them simultaneously. For better or for worse multitasking seems to be a new norm developing in these kids. Playing video games has enabled them to excel in processing multiple streams of information simultaneously. Chatting on IMs, listening to music and reading a book or comic while conversing to a friend physically present or on the phone is pretty much a norm for this generation.
As the GenMPlaySpace moves to cloud gaming platform the new games will continue to become more challenging. With more 
people able to participate in a session of game, there will be more and more multitasking skills required and developed by the players. While all this extreme multitasking activity is getting ingrained in a segment of our population the medical community is raising red flags. Their research data is informing us about some of the possible negative effects of multitasking on human brain. It is adversely affecting the learning capacity of the children. Shouldn’t we be heeding to their findings? The parents need to be on top of these issues and moderate the gaming time of their children to safeguard their well being.
AndIThoughT© …….. about the mul
titasking phenomena and long term effects on humans. Are we going to evolve into post human “multicore brain” beings?
AndIWondeR© …….. if it is really beneficial for human beings to have the capacity to multitask to an extreme level at the cost of diminished learning capacity? Does it really provide a competitive edge in terms of increased efficiency and productivity? Are we dumbing down our offsprings by doing so ?
Posted by
Saba Rahman -
June 17, 2010 at 10:48 am
