Measuring Liminality

I had the immense pleasure of spending a couple of days in Santa Fe, bumping into the smartest minds in complexity, science and business.

One panel on gaming really caught my attention, where e–sports took a significant part of the conversation, with some sidebar comments on education and personal agency.

It brought me back to liminal thinking and the ability to train the mental models that allow the zoom out / zoom in techniques (maybe something anthropologists would call inside–out perspective, but applied to self).

If I were an academic I could have attempted to draft a research proposal looking at the effect of gaming (and technology) at liminal thinking*.

e-sports is a natural place to look for cognitive enhancements. I guess one possible method might be an unannounced and absurd anomaly to the physical nature of the gameplay (say no gravity), and measure the time of adaptability, or other related metrics.

Being able to quantify such capabilities could be very valuable in a business context, team training and the future of work.

• Please get in touch if you’re aware of any similar work in the field