Games Can Make A Better World

TED Talk Video Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world 

This video was presented by Jane McGonigal, a game designer for 10 years. McGonigal stated that gamers feel empowered, confident and eager to conquer challenging situations when playing games. However, in real life, gamers don't feel this way. We are often faced with anxiety and fear when presented with a challenge in reality. A funny, yet interesting fact that McGonigal presented was, "that if we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict and obesity...she feels that we need to play online games for at least 21 billion hours a week by the end of the next decade!"

McGonigal went on to state the following four things that games do to make us "virtuosos".

These four things are:

Urgent Optimism - a desire to act immediately, to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.

Social Fabric - McGonigal stated how there is research showing that we like people after we play a game with them. Trust is a big factor when playing a game with someone. If we trust that someone will take the time to play with us, follow rules and value a goal, we will trust this person until the game is over.

Blissful Productivity - Social fabric can become blissful productivity. Playing a game with someone builds up a bond, trust and cooperation.

Epic Meaning - Gamers like to be a part of a huge mission. McGonigal stated that World of Warcraft wiki has nearly 80,000 articles with five million people who use the website every month! Gamers are building an epic story based on the knowledge and resource about the World of Warcraft.

My inital thoughts of this video is this:

The gaming world is an odd obscure world to me. I have never been interested in it because I choose to live in reality instead of getting sucked into a game. However, the more I watch and learn about games throughout this course, I do see the many benefits of gaming. Gaming is a huge hobby among young people today, and if we can intertwine gaming with a positive activity, there could be endless opportunities to help certain aspects of the world. I'm not sure what these opportunities could be, but I do think this is an interesting factor to explore. McGonigal said something that I really liked, "Gamers are super-empowered hopeful individuals. They believe they can empower virtual worlds versus the real world."I would like to see more games created to help gamers feel that same empowerment in the real world.