Jane McGonigal - Can Games Change The World?

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

Jane McGonigal is a games designer who believes that playing games online together can make changes to the world in real life. She says in her talk that gamers work hard in games to solve problems so can we change games so that players work as hard to solve real world problems. Games are all about solving problems for a reward so is it possible to take that and convert it to a real world situation.

 "I did my PhD on why we're better in games than we are in real life. And this is a problem that a lot of gamers have. We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games."

Mcgonigal makes a very interesting point that in games, we as players, never feel like there are things we can't achieve whereas in real life people often feel the opposite, especially when thinking about world wide problems like poverty or hunger. So is it possible to find a way to harness he optimism that we feel while playing a game and use that in real life.

She goes on to talk about the online RPG World of Warcraft and how games like this can help us to co-operate and to achieve goals. In online RPGs every player has a specific role, whether they are the medic who looks after the team or the warrior who does the most damage, and the only way to be truly successful is to collaborate with other players. Also the missions or quests that you undertake are always suited to your level of play so the player is never presented with anything they can't achieve. The players have to work hard to achieve the goal but it will always be possible.

"They never give you a challenge that you can't achieve. But it is on the verge of what you're capable of. So, you have to try hard, but there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft. There is no sitting around wringing your hands, there's always something specific and important to be done. And there are also tons of collaborators. Everywhere you go, hundreds of thousands of people ready to work with you to achieve your epic mission."

The only problem with games like this is that often the player feels like they are better than reality, because they are constantly being rewarded for achievement, by leveling up etc. Therefore the player becomes more invested in the online environment than in their everyday life. I think this is why players begin to become addicted to online games because of the kind of rewards and achievement they don't feel like they get in their own lives.

"The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21. Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two reasons. First of all, for children in the United States 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance."

We can see that players spend a lot of time building skills and investing time in playing games but what kind of skills are gamers learning? And can any of these skills be transferred into real life. There is the co-operation and community building type skills of online games like WoW, the self motivation to keep trying to achieve goals and targets, the sense of productivity that comes from working together as a team to achieve something great.

"We know that we are optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they're given the right work."

In order to experiment whether it is possible to use games to solve real world problems Jane McGonigal designed some games which would test this theory. First there is "World Without Oil", which is a game where the player has to survive in a world with a severe oil shortage. 1,700 people played the game and were subsequently tracked for three years, the results showed that the players went on to make real changes to the way they lived and how they used oil.

"Nobody wants to change how they live just because it's good for the world, or because we're supposed to.But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, "We've run out of oil. This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive," most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game."

Another game was "Superstruct at the Institute for the Future" where players were told that the world would end in 23 years if we kept living the way we are now so players had to come up with solutions to save the future in terms of things like energy, health and finance.

""Everybody's on the dream team, and it's your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net." We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, if you Google "Superstruct," and see."

Another example of people working together to create something is Wikipedia, which is made and edited entirely by volunteers online. Wikipedia is a huge database of knowledge on all kinda of subjects and is used regularly by lots of different types of people. There is also the example of the MP expenses game, when there was the scandal of a lot of MPs using their expenses for ridiculous things in order to go through and sort out all the records, an online game was created in which players would sort through real expenses evidence. Without people participating in this game it wouldn't have been as easy or quick to gather evidence needed to prove which MPs were responsible.

These examples show that if games are used in the right kinds of ways that they can make a difference in the real world. But can games like these examples become as popular as games used purely for entertainment or escapism?