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.)"

Comments

Might be the other way round...

[TheLink]

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 :).

Re:Well, now that you mention it...

[Moraelin]

Or to give another example of a conflict solved by, shall we say, less than martial means, take an insvasion of Russia by the Mongols, where the armies met on the opposite edges of a river, and with obviously neither having enough superiority to charge across the river. So after shouting various slurs and insults to the other for a couple of days, the Mongols, obviously having lost to the superior cussword vocabulary of the brave defenders from Muskowy, turned tail and went home.

Well, I guess the fact that the Russians had moved some kind of moving fort to threaten their flank may have also played a role, but that's not as funny ;)

Re:Correlation / Causation

[Onuma]

I've had PTSD (combat-related). Glad to say that I haven't had a real problem with it in about 5 years, but even to this day I hear the right kind of *BANG* and have momentary flashbacks of the sh!t I've been through. A door slamming with a loud thud can sound like a mortar exploding in the distance. Seeing a flaming car on the side of the road might remind me of a time when that was a blown-up Humvee.

You know why it didn't develop into a debilitating problem for me? Diversions, and talking with other soldiers/marines/airmen/sailors who've been in similar situations, if not the same time & place where I nearly got blown up on more than one occasion. No one who hasn't been in a combat zone can comprehend the reality of things; "99% boredom, 1% chaos" is the tip of the iceberg.

Gaming helped me to put those times in the back of my mind, rather than constantly having to deal with them in the foreground.
Are gamers more or less susceptible to PTSD? I don't believe so. I think it's just a coping mechanism which can prove to be quite useful in treatment. It's much better than trying to forget through drinking; the worst you'll get is atrophy, vs. a possibly life-threatening addiction and delirium tremens.

TLDR: Gaming is a good outlet, regardless of what kind of gaming it is. CoD, solitaire, or WoW can all be potentially therapeutic to individuals who may have otherwise developed PTSD.