Slashdot Mirror
How Gamers Could Save the (Real) World
Nerval's Lobster writes "Three years ago, game designer and author Jane McGonigal argued that saving the human race is going to require a major time investment—in playing video games. 'If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week [up from 3 billion today], by the end of the next decade,' she said in a TED talk. Her message was not ignored—and it has indirectly contributed to the formation of something called the Internet Response League (IRL). The small group has a big goal: to harness gamers' time and use it to save lives after disasters, natural or otherwise. The idea is to insert micro-tasks into games, specifically asking gamers to tag photos of disaster areas. With the IRL plugin, each image would be shown to at least three people, who tag the photo as showing no damage, mild damage, or severe damage. The Internet Response League has been in talks with a couple of indie developers, including one that's developing a new MMO. Mosur said they've tried to get in touch with World of Warcraft maker Blizzard, but haven't had any luck yet. Blizzard did not return a request for comment from Slashdot."
Gamers stay out of the streets, which conserves precious gasoline that is in short supply.
Gamers like stoners, have a tendency to actually enjoy their life, so they're not as likely to go screw around and hurt other people's lives.
But on the flip side:
Gamers are satisfied with their life of gaming and don't care what goes on in the world around them as much. This generation has its bread and circuses and isn't likely to revolt. But why should we get upset with government anyway? It is always screwing people over so it isn't like there is anything new there. Best is to live in your gaming community and have fun while the rest of the world is busy trying to screw each other over.
If gamers really wanted to save the world, this is all they'd have to do:
Play the latest and greatest MMO where you can sell lewt and make real money. Then donate a portion of the money you make playing video games to the poor. I'm sure a lot of them do this now.
The only thing I really worry about is if gaming communities start getting like what happened to League of Legends. You can get cursed out just by joining games and choosing your character. People have such a short fuse there. And people who are jerks to others triggers other people to backlash and become jerks in a way too. LOL is pretty fun and kinda easy compared to Starcraft, but the toxic community means it is unplayable for pubbies.
Coming from the arcade generation where everyone was pretty cool in person. Except from the rare time when someone doesn't pay up on a gambling wager and gets throttled, I never saw anyone rage on someone else. The worst I saw apart from that in 20 odd years in arcades is people calling other people cheesers for doing the same move over and over in fighting games. The best was when I was under 10 and a highschool kid used to give me quarters to play asteroids, or other forging of friendships.
To me, the gaming communities can forge the general population's personalities. And today you had people like Idra and other streamers making it seem cool to rage on other players because they get more views. That stuff isn't cool, it is childish. I wonder how much rubs off on League of Legends players thinking it is okay to rage on strangers as a result. Probably not at all, it is probably just the fact that 5 strangers are being forced to play as a disciplined team. I guess this is the same premise that gets ratings on Survivor, but people have a reason to at least appear to be nice to each other there.
Anyway, these are just some observations. For the most part, I think gamers help society by sponsoring tech. Would we have as cool as computers today if there weren't people churning quarters into pong and pacman back in the day? I'm happy with my fellow man being satisfied with life. Gaming really ups the quality of my life as it gives an outlet for my desire to do problem solving and combat related thinking. I'd say in general that gamers aren't really a problem for society even though Congress always wants to paint them as a scapegoat for problems that have been around as long as man has existed. Are we going to unite like they did back to protest Vietnam, no, we won't... Probably not unless they go and shut off the Internet.
God spoke to me
And not just MMOs or even RPGs. "Grinding" exists in a lot of games.
The trick though is to actually map the data to be analyzed as well as the gamer response to purposeful in-game actions. For example, in REAMDE (by Neal Stephenson) gamers in a MMO monitor in-game security checkpoints (e.g. as part of clan duties or in return for gold) which model actual security checkpoints at airports.
.: Semper Absurda
It's a kind of zombie that never dies. Charles Fourier, utopian socialist, proposed in the 1850s that in the future, productive play could replace work. Vladimir Lenin, glorious leader of the revolution, thought in the 1920s that internal competitions were a good way of motivating production. Since then a dozen hack management consultants have been reinventing the ideas of work-as-play, productive play, etc every 10 years or so. Someone coined the word "playbour", if "gamification" wasn't obscene enough for you.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Perhaps the coolest development in Gamification is Fold-it, the protein folding game. This game recently went from being just about predicting the structure of proteins to designing new unnatural protein structures. What's cool about it is that it's naturally developed a community where large teams band together to cooperatively work on the same protein, sharing their incremental or large advances. Some people are specialists in certain aspects of the structure optimization. teams have even been cited on the author list of research publications. The cool thing is that the are not hobbist biologists doing this but completely untrained people who become fascinated with the science challenge as well as the fun. The game aspect of it means that even if you don't solve the structure correctly, for a time your guess may be better (score wise) than anyone elses. So there's lots of incremental fun exploring the dead ends of the search space, not just the final pay off. Fold-it uses the Rosetta Structure Scoring model underneath the hood, and that's the absolute best in the state of the art and no different than what the scientists use in big cluster computing, so anything that rolls out of fold-it is a full finished product not some dumbed down sub problem.