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patrissimo comments on Memetic Hazards in Videogames - Less Wrong
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Interestingly, some of the best mathematical analysis I've ever seen happens in WoW, and to a limited extent in other MMOs. When you want to be the top 25, 100 or even 1000 out of 13 million, you need to squeeze out every advantage you can. Often the people testing game mechanics have a better understanding of them than the game designers. Similarly, the first people to defeat new bosses do so because they have a group of people they can depend upon, but also because they have several people capable of analysing boss abilities, and iterating through different stategies until they find one that works.
It's unfortunate that there's so much sharing in the community; players who aren't striving to be the first to finish a fight can just obtain strategies from other people. People who don't care to analyse gameplay changes, or new items, can rely upon those who do to tell them what to wear, what abilities to choose, and what order to use them in. Back when I played one of my biggest frustrations was that nearly everybody in the game out of the few top thousand simply lack the ability to react and strategise on the fly. Throw an unexpect situation at them and maybe 1 in 10 will cope with it.
And that great mathematical analysis is being directed at solving meaningless made-up problems that generate no value for the world. It's pure consumption, zero production. Yet it's complicated, goal-oriented consumption, it feels like doing work, and hence scratches the productive itch for many people...without actually doing any good in the world.
It's a powerful opiate (a drug which makes the time pass pleasantly and users wish to use all the time, as opposed to psychedelics which are used occasionally and make the rest of your life better). Which, I believe, makes it on the side of evil not of good.
At least the first part could be said word-by-word for modern-day astrophysics, except that this is socially accepted and the guys and gals doing it are (in most cases) being paid for (and even the people seeing fundamental knowledge over the universe as goal in itself will agree that there are far more important things to divert workforce to)
I also find it funny when mathematicians pejoratively speak of "recreational mathematics" (problem solving) as opposed to theory building: "If I build a lego hat, that's just for fun, but if I build a lego Empire State Building, that's serious business!"
I don't disagree much with your post (my only complaint is that fun is a reasonable goal in and of itself, and if someone chooses that, then so be it). However my objection is to Blow's (amongst many others') characterisation of the game and the players. Contrary to his thesis, being smart and adept are actually massively rewarded in WoW by comparison to other games; nearly everybody who plays the game is aware of the best players. There is a lot of status up for grabs just by being the best on a server, let alone best in the world.
Accepting his analysis at its face value would lead you to conclude that there are no lessons you can take from WoW or other MMOs. In fact, to me WoW demonstrates ways in which people can be motivated to work upon hard, mathematical problems. It would be a shame if people were to dismiss it off hand, when it has the potential to demonstrate how to structure hard work to make it more palatable and attractive to tackle.
I know several people who used to be the best players on a particular WoW server-- they said it was generally boring and not really as prestigious as one might expect, since the sheer number of servers out there means that being the best on one doesn't even necessarily mean you're all that good at the game as a whole.
I suppose it would depend on the makeup of your particular server. Though we were nowhere near world best, my guild had decent competition on our server and there was always need to strive to be the first to win an encounter. Both groups were reasonably well known on the server, and I would reasonably often have people messaging me out of the blue.
To try to generalise the post a bit better, I think the lesson from this is that to encourage rational analysis and quick thinking in important areas it's important to have good competition, an easily verified criteria for 'winning', preferably milestones towards the ultimate goal, and a reward for winning whether status or monetary. Off the top of my head, the people behind the X-Prizes seem to have used this model well to encourage innovation in select areas.