TED Community » Mehrad Yaghmai

More About Me

Talk to me about

Cherry Blossom trees, Biomimicry, the Pareto Principle, the future, gaming, the internet(s)

People don't know that I'm good at

using my imagination machine...

My TED Story

I started seeing TED a few years ago. At first it was all innocent fun, but after sometime we decided to take it a step further and that's when I decided to 'assist' and 'contribute'. Every experience with TED brought a smile to my face and I knew it would be selfish to keep TED all to myself so I decided to share TED with the rest of my 'social network', eventually TED made me start to do things I had never thought of doing before...

Comments

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  A reply on Conversation: We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames. Is it worth it? How could it be MORE worth it?

  Feb 15 2011: I agree with Erik about the not-so-obvious benefits of gaming and I feel that there is much gaming can offer that non-gamers might overlook or at times, gamers ourselves tend to overlook because it is learning in a new form something that we wouldn’t consider learning by our ‘Enlightenment’ period definition, whether that is puzzle solving, money/skill investment strategies, people/resource management, etc.
  
  That being said, I wish to provide a caveat emptor, in regards to the proliferation of gaming due to Apple/Google devices and their ecosystems. I wish that both gamers and non-gamers understand the risk of allowing such ‘marketplace’ devices that are blurring the lines of what they are and what they say they are. We don’t consider the Xbox/PS3 ‘media consoles that do everything’ (no matter what their marketers said), we still have our personal computers that are connected to the full open web. However these closed eco systems are slowly becoming the norm (maybe not among all of us, but certainly our future generations). Sure, Facebook and iPhone/iPad apps have allowed for a wave of new games (quality is debatable), but the idea that these games are locked within these ecosystems and people becoming tied to such ecosystems further limits our collective openness as a society. By beginning to accept these ecosystems as the future of the web/games we are turning our backs on the open ‘web’ (remember Net Neutrality?). Don’t get me wrong; these ecosystems are great at also sharing and spreading ideas, but only to a certain extent, “only eco-system approved ideas are worth spreading”. We as gamers and non-gamers need to understand there are clear boundaries between gaming consoles/’electronic marketplace devices’ (i.e. iPad) and our open PC/Macs. We should not lead our future generations on a path that will make them question the relevance of open systems or the open ‘web’ - such isolated closed systems will not allow us to share our ideas with others...

• A comment on Talk: Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks

  Jun 22 2009: The fact that Johnny Lee is on Microsoft's Project Natal development team makes Natal's ambitious goals and promises a lot more feasible! Bravo Johnny!

• A comment on Talk: Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of time

  Jun 22 2009: That was a captivating talk and he really wasn't kidding about going over a lot in a short amount of time! It's very interesting to think about the paradox of time perspective Zimbardo discussed in this talk, makes one question which time profile they fall under.