In some sense I consider myself a visionary (maybe not the best in the world, but one nevertheless). Also, I consider myself somewhat of a gamer (certainly not the best here). One of the key’s about being a visionary is seeing something the majority does not see. Jane McGonigal is a visionary worth watching/reading/following. She is a game designer with a PhD researching performance studies.
I enjoyed listening to her TED video, but have one argument… World of Warcraft. That is the ONLY game she references (that is not one she designed). I understand why she would pick this game, it fits her presentation/argument perfectly. World of Warcraft is an anomaly however. No video game in history has been as successful, nowhere close and it’s been out for five years. 10 million people subscribe to this game… that is around 1 / 700th of the world’s population. You know what that tells me? World of Warcraft is such a rarity, it may be decades before we see this amount of gamers in a single game again. Therefore, I would be cautious about using a group of gamers to solve a pressing issue. I hope the weight of her studies isn’t only in World of Warcraft.
A comparison would be Avatar which has made 734 MILLION dollars domestic (as of Mar 19). This movie touched 60 times more people than WoW… let’s use that as a platform… but wait, ah crap, someone was smoking in the movie. If I asked random people for a movie that literally changed their life, I would get a long list of inspiration. If movies can change individual’s lives, then they can change the world.
Now, because “movies” could do it better than “games” and others, does not mean we should abandon all other sources of human horse power. But I get the feeling after listening to Jane McGonigal talk about solving problems, that is what she is doing, but with the problems. Focusing on solving world hunger is great, trying to figure how to live in a world without oil, fantastic. But maybe, just maybe, we should not abandon all the smaller world issues.
Some reasons gamers play? Well, simple. Kill stuff and build stuff (to be knocked down by someone stronger) oh and escape.
Here are real world fixes that I see games influencing in our near future:
• Amazing surgeons.
• Successful managers.
• Combat where human casualties don’t exist (heck we already do this with UAVs).
• A species that can live without sunlight.
My advice to her, please please please keep pushing. If you could somehow focus the efforts on something smaller perhaps to give the ‘non-gaming’ community (you know, the other 90% of the planet) a result that they can see, your support would grow to mind-blowing numbers.
If you are inspired by her speech (and by the way she is a fantastic presenter) then I would suggest checking out the Folding at Home project [LINK]. They have goals in mind that requires a ton of computer processing power so they decided to create a network where users can ‘donate’ their CPU power during downtime. To apply this to a ‘game’ they created a point system where the leading contributors are rewarded with a ranking ’score.’