Photo credit: Geoff Oliver Bugbee / www.geoffbugbee.com
Jane McGonigal says she's not interested in predicting the future, but in making it.
She want's a gamer, or perhaps a band of gamers, nominated for a Nobel Prize by 2032. She hopes by the end of the session the we might envision that possibility too.
Great quote: "Games are a vital material of the future."
Some quick stats:
- Sixty-five percent of households play video games. Eighty-eight percent of youth under 18 play games.
- Seventy percent of (what size?) companies use game to train employees.
- Average U.S. gamer is 35, which means that they're continuing to play games. It's not a fad. Forty percent of gamers are woman.
- $68b industry.
Displaying a sign in a window she passes everyday that says "I'm Not Good at Life," she begins by saying says "Reality is Broken."
It can be fixed by more and better games. Massively multi-player games provide instant feedback on performance. "Everything in this world is meant for me to do something with," which doesn't apply in the rest of life. World of Warcraft has 134,000 articles on the game and its world on the WoW Wiki. What other problems have that kind of brain power applied to them? People feel empowered in WoW.
And people are literally moving to these places, a fact which Edward Castronova, who is an economist, says is a very rational behavior based on the benefits received: This environment makes people happy.
"Games Work Better"
- Why? They come with instructions.
- They provide feedback. Importantly, negative feedback provides motivation, unlike so much of the negative feedback in a non-gaming environment. This positive effect has been physically documented by science.
- There is community.
- Finally, there are better emotions. "Fieoro," (sp.) an Italian word, is the thrill of unexpected success, of pride, of exaltation.
Future of Games
Games have something say about optimizing human experience, and can make a contribution to the rest of life. The industry, in fact, she says, has a responsibility to do that. Experience and community design can benefit.
Immersed in the experience, games and game playing can contribute to reality.
McGonigal has researched a history of games and shares an interesting story. Herodotus, the Greek Historian, tells a story about the invention of dice, made of sheep knuckles. The story is told that to survive a famine, people agreed to eat one day and to play games, to throw dices, the next. Eighteen years passed in this way, and that's how the community survived. While the literal history of the event is doubted, the mythology contains a truth.
Games can be "an active intervention into reality." They came bring happiness.
This is also reflected in some psychological literature that emphasizes a focus on success, on the positives, as opposed to failures, to make us healthier. She emphasizes that it's not a consumer approach to happiness. Game designers are not looking for a vague, fuzzy happy, ignore-the-reality approach. Designers know that people:
- Crave satisfying work.
- Want the experience of being good at something
- Want to spend time spent with people we like.
- Desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
These desires match up with what she's observed with the game dynamics she's observed. Her conclusion is that games can be tools to improve our lives and our reality.
As for creating the future she talked about at the beginning? In 5 years:
There will be "happiness games." Designers are working on this now, so she's pretty confident that this will occur.
- One game encourages loosely coordinated (and kind!) mobs to say positive things to unsuspecting passers-by
- "Chore Wars" is a game of hers that encourages a friendly competition between parents and children when doing housework.
- "Track stick" shares your travels with Google Earth, which can, and has, been used to create city-wide labyrinths for people to walk.
- How about, she asks, playing a game with your household plants? Connected to sensors, your potted plants might Twitter you when they need water.
- She says she's dying to create an alternative reality game for dogs whereby the dog shares its information with you - based on movement, algorithms detect in what emotional the dog is in - this can improve the owner's interaction with it, and perhaps with other dog owners.
- Wearable IT might text messages depending on your mood, which can be turned into a game. A relaxed mood, for example, might levitate a heavy object in this game. We can improve our cognitive state with this constant feedback and compete to relax.
- Another game incorporates a worldwide database with people's availability to commit not-so-random acts of kindness. By doing favors, one might build a trustworthiness level in this game.
She also talks about her Nike running shoe with sensors that send data to her iPod. This information can also be shared with other runners. It's inspired her to improve her times - it's an example of how games can be incorporated into reality.
It took 100 million mental hours to get Wikipedia where it is today, part of Clay Shirky's "social surplus" - the time left over after our basic needs are met.
Quoting Einstein: "games are the most elevated form of investigation."
In the future we'll harness this social surplus to contribute real benefits, via investigation, to humanity.
By 2013, she expects to games to be used to solve resource problems. "We can be our own superheroes."
She mentions her game, "World without Oil," which won an award for best ARG at SXSW, as well as Superstructgame.org, the first "world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game." It will begin on Oct. 6.
"Reality," she concludes, "is broken compared to our favorite games. Games work better. We can harness that power to make ourselves and our world happier."
Wayne
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