A week of wonders. Here are some:
A visit to a green-field mine in Central America where I realized that ordinary miners with a mission to open a new mine talk the talk of corporate social responsibility and license to mine as a matter of ordinary converse and normal mining practice. We almost no longer need exhortations from the media, academics, or London-based organizations on these topics.
A long discussion with a knowledgeable geologist who opinion is that Rosemont Copper — a proposed mine near Tucson — is the most undervalued stock on the market right now. He urged me to buy and told me they could not but go up in price. I will check this out this weekend.
An hour with two with the young bucks in the office who play EVE, that massive on-line game based on mining. They are extraordinarily skilled. Asked why they do not apply the same skills to real-work mining, they said it is cheaper to do it on-line considering their resources.
Then a beer in a local pub where the mature theoretician opined that maybe we can play real-time games on EVE to test the theories of mining. I hope he gets to try this out. He promised to spend time this weekend looking at EVE.
So to the weekend. Enjoy. For I am off to a bottle of Guatemalan rum, Ron Zacapa 23-year old
thanks for the beer, Jack, and the link to EVE. Must say I found it disappointing, to the extent that I could quickly understand it – an escape, but not an obvious route to understanding the complexities of real life as we encounter them in the real world of mining. I am looking forward though to the debut of Continuous Conferencing, even though we will be the guinea pigs. I am convinced though that we need to continue to search for better ways to build our knowledge bases using new IT tools, and also develop some reality games that can be effective and inclusive learning processes. The two go together very well.
Though EVE isn’t the best of simulators, there are several promising ways of simulating a mining environment at a relatively low cost with existing software, though at a somewhat simpler level. There are a number of previously existing games with extensive modification software and communities dedicated to creating new games with the same ‘game engine’. People have, in their spare time for their own enjoyment, created entirely new games that rival those of studios which spend tens of millions of dollars to create the same quality of game.
Perhaps in keeping with Alex Bell’s post on his own blog (http://www.xanderbuilt.ca/blog/?p=72P), there is a possibility of crowd sourcing a ‘mod’ of a popular game that would simulate a number of the complications of the mining industry, and serve as a lab of sorts to experimentation with new techniques. If a large company were willing to bankroll a semi-professional team of independent developers, there would be real potential.
Going even further, if the company was willing to go through with purchasing the rights to use a popular game engine that has been throughly debugged through several years of use (after all, even a relatively unpopular mainstream game will have had several hundred-thousand players, who have likely played a collective several million hours of play), it could be offered free to the world. With a relatively simple online scoreboard, prizes could be offered to those who are able to eke as much efficiency out of their resources, and complete various challenges in a creative fashion.
If automation truly does play as much of a role in the future of mining, this may yield benefits.
-Kyle