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."
Blizzard:
"A severe snowstorm with high winds and low visibility."
It is hard to "tag" in those conditions...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
While there are some similarities between games and work, there are also marked differences. Though the concept of "fun" is nebulous, the fact is, you can't fool a gamer into thinking he is having fun while he is actually doing work. And, inserting work into games will harm their bottom line.
The most that will come out of this is a few work-games that a very small community of players engage in mostly out of altruism, rather than recreation.
How are gamer hours going to translate/transform into real world physical effort?
I think the vast majority of those 21 billion hours per week would be much better spent getting up off of arses and actually doing something.
Blizzard's main priority with World of Warcraft is getting people to keep paying their subs, and to do this they make the game as engaging as possible. This goes against that by both managing to destroy the sense of immersion by dragging gamers out of their game world, and also by forming a link in the player's mind between Warcraft and real-world scenes of suffering. Not a connection that most players will want in their recreation time.
Where things may work better is where it's possible to both turn the work itself into a game, and also to wrap it in an appealing layer to stop it having too strong a connection in the player's mind with the reality behind it. An example of this would be the recent Facebook game developed to help identify some genetic factors in Ash tree dieback, as detailed in this BBC News story. Here the presentation is cute, and the focus is on making it a game. The only problem I could see here is that I can't see how it's cheaper/more efficient to develop and serve the entire content for even a simple game compared to just doing the pattern matching in a more traditional manner, but for other tasks I could see it working.
The basic idea is there though, make the work part of the game rather than making it a task which detracts from the game. Something which this story doesn't seem to recognise.
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"Hey, there's a big disaster happening. Meh."
"Dude, sent the paramedics to Canada. For the lulz."
"The graphics suck. Everything sucks."
To advance to the next level, match the following corporate logo to its motto...
Well, it can't be much worse than it is now with DLC and in-game tutorials. Gone are the days of Doom when the instruction manual was 'New Game' and you dropped into E1M1 and either figured it out in short order, or died repeatedly until you did. Or like some of the old-school Nintendo games. You couldn't beat them, but they were fun anyway. Now everyone's a precious snowflake and games have different options in case you happen to suck at, say, using a mouse. I'm looking at you, Mass Effect 3.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.
To be fair, it was basically the premise of "The Last Starfighter" first.
Alex Rogan is a teenager living in a trailer park with his mother and little brother, Louis Rogan. While working as the park's handyman and dreaming of going to college, Alex's sole activity is playing Starfighter, an arcade game where the player defends "the Frontier" from "Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada" in a space battle. Eventually he becomes the game's highest-scoring player. A short time later, he is approached by the game's inventor, Centauri who invites him to take a ride. Alex does so, discovering the car is actually a spaceship. It turns out Centauri is a disguised alien who takes him to the faraway planet Rylos.
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
Why must Gamification die? It's a very potent concept. It's like saying "Placebos" must die. You might have some intellectual qualms about it "working for the wrong reasons" but it works really well. While we live in an age of explicit gamificiation including reality TV, which gamifies human interaction, basically people have always done things that make their work more than just work. We foster freindly competitions between work teams, we offer prizes for company groups that raise the most donations for charity, etc... You could easily say that the satisfaction of the work or the donations to charity, being incentive enough and we dont' actually need to add external conditions different from the the actual objectives. But that's not how humans work. We like taking long term goals and adding in extraneous rules that divide the long term goal into short term quick rewards--even if they are artificial. The couch potatoe's willingness to lie there perfroming pointless game playing is evidence that humans are sometimes powerless against this rapid reward system, so why not turn that to doing good things.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Agreed but if I understand correctly this is workification of games.
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