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How Gaming Can Save the World
An anonymous reader writes "Game designer and all-around interesting person Jane McGonigal just published a book arguing that playing games will help solve the urgent problems of the real world. To mark the publication, Discover Magazine has a Q&A with McGonigal on several topics, such as: exactly how much gaming is too much? 'There was a really significant study that tracked 1,100 soldiers for a year, and looked at how they were spending their free time with things they considered coping mechanisms—using Facebook, listening to music, reading, working out, or playing video games. They correlated this with incidences of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, suicide attempts, and domestic violence. The found that by a very wide margin, the most psychologically protected individuals—who had the lowest rates of any of these negative experiences—were people who were playing video games 3 to 4 hours a day. ... That was fascinating—it was more beneficial than anything but working out 7 hours a day.' She also talks about how relationships forged in games can change the world, and which world problems exactly is she trying to solve via games. (Hint: think big.)"
workout for 7 hours and game for 3-4 hours after that!
Someone's been reading Ender's Game. Or watching SG Universe.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
The two main ways in which gaming will "save the world": solving obesity and world peace.
Better known as 318230.
There was a study a decade or so ago where, if you can believe it, patients with severe burns were asked to rate how much they "enjoyed" having their dressings changed on a scale of one to ten. Changing the dressings on a burns victim is generally regarded as one of the most traumatic procedures a patient can undergo outside of surgery, and answers generally ranged from "crying" to "What kind of inhuman monster would even ask me that?" to "minus fifty".
The patients were then asked to play a videogame (I think it was Tetris) while their dressings were changed, for a few days/weeks/whatever.
When asked again how much they enjoyed having their burns changed, the same set of patients would reply with answers averaging around 6 and 7.
No citations, no nothing, but I think I remember reading about it back around the Xth anniversary of Tetris, when everyone kept going on about what a cognitive miracle Tetris is...
Here we go again! Did game playing really prevent PTSD or are people who play games less susceptible to PTSD?
Gaming can save the world's food crisis by sending people on quests to collect 20 Talbuk ears, the carcass left over afterwards provides a sustainable supply of meat if the respawn rate is high enough.
figured out whether shrooms have the magical properties of getting bigger ?
Certain 'magical' shrooms will appear bigger, more colourful and possibly even talk to you after consumption.
Soldiers that are able to play games for 3-4 hours might tend to be those that:
:).
a) spend less time in combat or "PTSD inducing" situations.
b) are inherently less affected by such stuff _therefore_ they are able to play games rather than spend the rest of the day traumatized or too exhausted to recover properly.
Too lazy to RTFA
please toss out COD and get battlefield bad company 2. for the troops.
All of the local casinos.
Stopped calling it gambling and now advertise gaming LOL.
Saving the world by disengaging for 3-4 hours a day? Are you fucking serious? Sitting on your ass not doing anything for 3-4 hours a day means you're less likely to get in trouble? Sitting on your ass for 3-4 hours a day means you're less likely to do anything, positive or negative!
There's a good reason why Jane creates games and doesn't practice in any human behavior specialties! You go back to playing and making games Jane and let the pros talk about human behavior! (You don't swim in my pool, I won't swim in yours!)
I have watched the TED talk, I think the point here is using game dynamics and apply them to work to make it more enjoyable and satisfying.
I had played WoW, I spent hours of my life in there doing things that are for most part can be considered a waste of time.
A good amount of it was mindless "work" which gave inconsequential rewards.
I began to wonder why I can't study with the same attitude.
If we designed education courses like we designed games, with proper difficultly curves, proper effort/reward tuning (remember WoW's rewards are effectively worthless and cost Blizzard next to nothing to implement /w things like achievements being even cheaper to create), studying will be so much fun, students so much more motivated.
The same can be said for tuning work processes in a job.
I've known a few people that have wasted part of their lives in WoW ( 2-6 years ) and I haven't seen 'improvements'. All I've seen is zombie-like behaviour, talking only about the game, grinding to death, spending endless hours waiting for the team to gather in instances, etc etc. And all this so you they say in the end "My armor/level/weapon/pet is bigger/better/cooler than yours - I'm awesome".
.. what? How does anyone benefit besides his ego ( and his pocket at times in tournaments, and game AI research if we want to push it more).
:-)
And regarding the virtuoso thing. Virtuosos in ART are a good thing. Why? Because the world benefits. Virtuosos in SCIENCE are a good thing. Why? Because the world benefits. Virtuosos in GAMES are a good thing??? WHY? Is there any benefit from that? A guy spends 10,000 hours in a game, becomes an expert on it and
I don't really care, but suggesting that becoming virtuoso in a game is a good thing, and having seen friends and relatives walking that path, I would say to Ms McGonigal that, if she has kids, she should give example to the world by introducing them to WoW and other online FPS asap, so we know that she means it, and the whole thing is not a marketing ploy for some weird, supposedly beneficial and ineffective bullshit that is Soon Coming To A Store Near You
Oh, and for a POV clarification, I've been a hardcore gamer for the past 20 years. MMOs for a while included.
Apparently.
With this approach you are traumatized later, when you receive your Diabetes II diagnosis.
Accompanying TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html
I wanted to like her, but I think she might actually be crazy.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html
I'm sure that if it wasn't for my gaming quite a few hours a day I would already have built a doomsday weapon to annihilate the human race, because you fuckers all deserve to die... oh wait Shogun 2 is coming out?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well, now that you mention it, ways of solving conflict other than having thousands of people splattering each other's guts all over the landscape, have existed for most of human history. E.g., deciding who's right by single combat is attested from primitive tribes to the late middle ages. And sometimes even there some kind of contest of ability could be substituted for actual combat.
E.g., probably the funniest such case was when, if I remember that legend right, a minor dispute between Moldavia and Wallachia was settled by having one champion of each meet on a bridge on a border and try to best each other in a... wine drinking contest. So after a no doubt epic and thrilling match, eventually one of them slumped under the table and the other's country claimed victory. IIRC the winner got knighted or some such for his victory.
I can't see why we can't do the same with video games :p
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
nor will any other touchy, feely crap. What will solve our problems is less people. Wars are fought so group A can take group B's stuff. People go to war to make money. Nobody goes to war if they have better options. Period. No other reason.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I don't understand why they call all of those things coping mechanisms if that's just what people do in their free time anyways. Reading, listening to music, working out, Facebook?
Anyone who's capable of working out 7 hours a day is probably to dumb to understand he should be traumatised by what he's seen or done.
Make your average person a soldier and put them in a combat situation and see how quickly the PTSD's go up. The video/speech/idea is 99% BS. Think of the video games they were playing: most likely first person shooters--games that desensitize people to killing and death... that's why they were less likely to go sour after seeing rotting corpses at their feet during the day and images of their allies' lives jumping out of their chests in their nightmares. I used to be addicted to Counter-Strike. I used to ponder that the military could strike deals with game devs to help them find their best soldiers through game statistics (see Last Starfighter). Perhaps if your XBox Live gamer score could give you an extra rank when joining the military. I think it's a great idea--IF you want to beef up your military but I don't think that is going to save the world.
I didn't have too much money growing up, but I owned a C64 and an NES. I only owned about five NES games. I completed nearly every game I had and the one that I didn't (Battletoads), I was able to get farther than anybody else I've ever met and talked to about that ridiculously difficult game. My friends that had 30 some odd games never beat any of their games. I attribute my value in the small amount of games I had to the amount of return I got out of them. Instead my friends would always get the next best game and forget about the previous five games. This mentality still exists today, as a very small percentage of people complete the super budget video games made now. I didn't have money for Nintendo Power either, the then ultimate source for game cheats and hints. I played without cheats or help. That information is so prevalent today and game design has evolved to the point where sales and shelf life (making a game easier--see Pacman DX) is more important than the challenge. I suspect most perceived "epic wins" these days are false indicators--just as sitting on a couch and watching a football team win a game and then telling your friends that "we won". I have never gotten into a car accident or gotten a ticket. I attribute this to alot of things, but I ultimately think I am a better driver and that can easily translate to video game playing (training). But does this help save the world?
The games Jane proposes are not ones that would be fun and useful to find solutions as the premise would have to also include fantasy elements like aliens or ghosts, etc. People use games like that as an escape from reality. Spending more time playing video games is not what we need. Spending more quality time playing video games is what we need. Don't just increase the game dev's income by spending more time playing subscription based carrot chasers. To improve a person's out of game life while playing games would require an almost direct reward system. I realized real quickly that the time it took to teach my avatar a skill in an MMO, that if I spent perhaps 150% of the time actually trying to learn the skill myself out of game, I would probably have a real world achievement. When you can put you have a 20th level WOW Wizard on your resume and it would help you get a job and not get laughed at, come talk to me.
Consider this: once your character has achieved a significant level of say, Athletics, give the player a real world gift certificate to the gym. And better yet, set up a system where if the player uses the gift certificate and clocks so many hours on exercise machines, give their avatar a bonus in athletics as well. Set up systems where good grades in school in respective courses could define their avatar in game. Suddenly doing your homework never seemed so rewarding. This is the kind of idealistic thinking Jane needs to be talking about, not about how to get people to spend more and give her more of their money. Solve diabetes or literacy first... then we'll save the world.
"So don't get programmed by anybody but yourself" --Bill S. Preston, Esquire
I'm not sure you understand the army. Actually judging by half the answers in the thread, lots of people seem to think it's like in their games.
Some 3-4 hours a day are a lot when you spend 8 hour at your day job, 2 hours commuting so you can live in the right fashionable suburb, and have to balance everything from dealing with the kids to getting the roof fixed in the rest of the time. That's when 3-4 hours a day to spend on gaming starts to be more time than you actually have.
When you're on some military base at the end of nowhere, and you live right there too, all those factors just don't apply. It's not like those guys spend 16 hours a day shooting at the enemy or standing in guard towers, because even all out war doesn't actually work that way. And also because nobody can resist such a program in the long term. Working 16 hour days is fine for a couple of weeks tops, then you start getting tired and making mistakes.
Even when you pulled guard duty, actually it doesn't mean camping at that post all day, but pretty much time slicing if I'm allowed a computer metaphor. You spend your time slice at your post, then have the next two time slices free. Even between sleeping, eating, polishing your boots and whatnot, there's one hell of a lot of time free.
And you're not supposed to check the kids' homework and get the dishwasher fixed and whatnot in that time either.
Playing 3-4 hours a day isn't going to cut down on your time actually doing your duties.
Also not the least because, well, your commanding officer isn't like the kind of permissive mommy who's totally not bothered if you skipped tidying your room to play games and expects the politicians to police her kids. Those guys _are_ those policing you there and seeing to it that you obey your orders to the letter.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's an interesting attempt, but there are innumerable holes in this logic. Reality can be tough. Folks have tried asceticism to deal with it, as well as indulgence. I think, more than escaping reality, that simply helping someone in need solves a lot more problems than any camaraderie accomplished from games. In moderation gaming can build friendship. But overdo it, and the game becomes the only conduit for your relationships. I would suggest to game addicts to visit a nursing home or bring some food to a family in need. You can make reality much more gratifying without simply escaping it.
Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman, is, in part, about connecting people with an interface that could be like the gaming interface of the future. Forget about joy stick controllers, Wii tennis, and other mechanical apparatus. Why not just connect people directly through their nervous systems? If we all shared our thoughts this way, what would be the implications?
I remember watching North Korea take the field in this most recent World Cup. The crowd was cheering. North Korea, a great annoyance to the world, was being cheered on. The players were crying.
Why?
Because they have rarely, if ever, been out of their country. They could not have expected such love and acceptance from the world they have been taught to hate. And got this experience by playing a game.
I was so disappointed that they didn't move on past the first round. I was convinced that the longer they stayed in the tournament, the more likely that people in North Korea would be allowed to hear about the general acceptance of North Korea on the *people's* world stage.
It was as if the world was yelling, "It's alright, NK, come out and play!" but then they had to go inside for their tea. =\
It's an alright read. I feel like I might enjoy it more if it were written by someone with (not to disparage McGonigal's own track record) some bigger titles under their belt.
Excuse my unamericaness ( I am not from the US ), but I do not really see how curing PTSD will save anything. This is anesthesia, not a cure.
This worship of "war by necessity" is a US fad, in case you americans didn't notice.
http://michaelgr.com/2008/05/09/virtual-reality-could-explain-the-fermi-paradox/
...and I have this to say:
Oh, bullshit.
[with feeling]
So if we can just get all the Israelis and Palestinians to start fragging each other in WoW, they'll suddenly start getting along? Yeah, I've never seen ANYBODY get pissed off at someone else in a MMORPG!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I just cant believe how no one has yet commented on how HOT she is.
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I watched her video, because TED talks are often awesome.
However, her assertions are absurd.
She states (around 5:00) that when confronted with problems/obstacles in the real world, we often get anxious, depressed, cynical, etc. And that "this never happens in games".
First, that's simply wrong. Ever been ganked? Repeatedly? Ever raid for hours and some retard in your group just CAN'T stop 'standing in fire' and killing you all, giving up far too late into the night knowing you've just gifted yourself with a perma-headache all day tomorrow?
Second, what she seems not to recognize is the massive difference in loss-minimizing vs. gain-maximizing behavior. Generally, sane people in real life take loss-minimal choices: we only have one life to risk, one set of kids, one job, as well as fairly strict criteria requiring certain things to stay alive like food, water, and sleep. One of the reasons that games are fun is that we can entirely DISPENSE with this calculus, and the stress behind it.
In many games, there's a discussion of the 'death penalty' - what should it cost a player to lose his in-game character's life? The simple fact the question is asked at all shows how absurd it is to try to rationalize game behavior with real life behavior at such fundamental levels.
Let's imagine a game that gives us more choices like real life:
First, you decide what you want. You have a host of choices, but they generally revolve around happiness. You can sit on the couch, and gain +1 happiness an hour. Or, you could go skiing, and get +100 happiness per hour but with a small risk of injury (-1 to -100 happiness) that you can reduce by repeated performance.
Sounds like a game calculus so far.
But here's the kicker: skiing gives you lots of happines, but there is a >0 chance that you have a FATAL accident, which means that you lose, and the game destroys itself and you have to buy a new copy.
Would anyone play such a game? No, because to have such a "stringent" death penalty would stink. How about this? In WoW, if you die, you can't play for a month? Acceptable? No way. A week? An hour? Ten minutes?
On the other hand, think how much your life choices would change if you knew for certain that if you died, you could come back in, say, 50 years.
Games allow us to approach choices a certain way because they're free of consequence. To even suggest that sort of behavior is available in the real world, ever, is ludicrous.
-Styopa
When she was struggling to recover from a concussion, she invented a game and enlisted friends and family as characters with tasks to fulfill, like coming over to cheer her up or keeping her off caffeine.
Is she single? If yes I can't imagine why.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
I 've followed Jane McGonigal since I saw her TED talk and even participated for a short time in her online "MMORPG", Urgent EVOKE. It was very much an online course in Social Innovation styled like a game. You made blog posts, participated in activities, and developed solutions to solve "quests". I recall that the first quest dealt with food security. It was fun, and I truely regret was completing the game. Work and school interferred and EVOKE fell to the wayside.
I truely hope that the participants, especially those living in the countries suffering the same problems posed to the players, were inspired and moved on to work to remedy these problems.
Jane McGonigal may may not have a PhD in game design OR in Human Behavior. However, I think she has a brilliant idea and an amazing dream. It really saddens me to see so many people try to rip her to shreds. WTF have you done to try and make the world a better place? Where do you get a pass to criticize someone who has taken on changing the world for the better, despite the nearly impossible odds?
Can we stop this gaming saves the world stuff? It's getting old, way old.
Games that the author/TFA discuss are not tools, but forms of entertainment. Try entertaining a soldier (and even through interactive, entertaining means) and guess what, I bet you get 100%, the same result. Just that games are on computers which means cheaper and maybe faster than having a person do it.
It's about the entertainment value. The general public does the same everyday by escaping to a movie or something. Games = mind abstracts, not necessarily reality and definitely not saving the world.
Gaming is definetley a form of interactive entertainment - like reading - as opposed to passive entertainment like watching tv - Like playing sports Vs watching sports; playing sports through gaming for example is more interactive and productive, and benifecial to the mind and body than watching sports from an arm chair. No wonder these positive results for soldiers with stress disorders came through - gaming is highly interactive.