Online Gaming: Saving the World, One Click at a Time

Hi bloggers! I want to talk today about the future of gaming and what we could/should see in our gaming future. During a Ted Talk by Jane McGonigal, she talks about gaming becoming the savior for our world, as we know it. We spend 3 billion hours a week playing online games, but according to her research, in order to save our world in the future, we need to be putting in 21 billion hours of game play per-week. She claims that solving problems such as world hunger, disease, and other stressing matters, we must turn to gaming culture (McGonigal). In the real world, most do not give it the try-try-again mentality on a regular basis to achieve a goal, no matter how big or small. In gaming though, it is known to be a normal act for someone to put their all in something that matters, because let’s face it…everything matters in the gaming world. Any miss hit, or missing puzzle piece you overlooked could lead to an epic fail. So why can’t the real world be like this? Why can’t we use what we learn from the gaming world and enact it in our everyday lives. The drive and determination to win a match in a game can be easily applied to any real world circumstance. Looking again to Jane McGonigal’s Ted Talk, she says that when in game world, we are the most likely to become the best version of ourselves; the most likely to drop anything and help out to solve the problem, no matter how difficult the task. She says that the reason we are sucked into these games is it’s a complete mood changer when on the verge of an epic win all the time, due the MMO’s constant task fulfillment needs. It also creates a good social environment for expanding your social circle. Once gamers have played with someone it is known that they can generally trust them to play by the rules and help you out in order to achieve a common task. If we brought this mind set into the real world, we would drop predisposed impressions of our neighbors and play by the same rules to achieve our tasks (McGonigal). This could eliminate SO many problem the world faces right now with foreign policies and more. If we bring this mentality into the real world, serious problems would be solved quickly. So the theme of this post? Gamers, non-gamers, COME ONE, COME ALL, YOU CAN SAVE US ALL!

McGonigal, J. (December, 2010). Jane McGonigal: Gaming Can Make a Better World

Follow the link to view this Ted Talk in full: Jane McGonigal: Gaming Can Make a Better World