Jane McGonigal is speaking in the same space that the Louisville Competitive Game Conference was held just one week ago. She is the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future.
Games use a tremendous amount of intellectual energy by the people playing them. World of Warcraft has more articles written about it than any other subject or area, including Wikipedia.
Economist Edward Castranova says we are witnessing a global mass exodus to an online environment. This is rational, according to Jane. Games are making us happier than real life. Games work better than reality for four reasons: better instructions, feedback, community, and emotions.
Gamers feel strong emotions while playing, staying on the threshold of a breakthrough all the time, and studies show a strong connection there. And they feel extreme elation when they have a breakthrough or win an objective. Since there is no word for this feeling in English, Jane likes to use the Italian word Fiero. Fiero is the thrill of succeeding when something is really hard. She imitates the Fiero face, mouth open, arms in the air, eyes wide open, and gives out a little yell. Imagine a soccer player scoring a goal.
She says that the "Future of Games and Reality" is her topic today. She wants to leverage what is successful about games to make us smarter and more successful in real life.
Can games make us happier and help us change the world? The first of two challenges is to “Bridge the Happiness Gap” between games and reality. When doing this kind of thinking, it is good to look back twice as far as looking forward. She went back to the first written history of games. There is an article by Herodotus, the Greek historian, about the first documented invention of games. Sheep knuckles were made into dice and created in Lydia. Citizens would eat on one day, play games on the next day, and they would forget they were hungry during the famine. Eighteen years passing days this way, helping the citizens survive the famine. Gamers today know this experience of skipping food during the excitement of playing a game.
She shows a statue of the King of Lydia. It’s interesting because the statue has one foot moving forward, and this was a huge innovation in the history of ancient artwork.
The "Science of Happiness" is a new category of research in media, which looks at quantitative measures of happiness. Some of the highest levels of happiness have been measured while people are playing games.
There are four things we love as human beings, that lead to happiness: 1) satisfying work to do, 2) the experience of being good at something, 3) time spent with people we like, 4) the chance to be part of something bigger.
These four things we love match very well with the four reasons games work better than reality. Gaming needs to break out of the narrow mold it is currently in, and become part of our everyday lives instead of confined to a small screen in a secluded place.
So here is her Future Forcast #1 for 5 years in the future: there will be a rise of happiness games, or alternate reality gaming.
There are many current examples of this. The Prius hybrid car is a video game of sorts, showing fuel consumption in real time. Nike+ipod, where running becomes a game. Zyked alpha is example of a company making real world games. Cruel 2 Be Kind was made by Jane, is a mobile social game, and someone in Louisville started the first pilot program. Chore Wars
is a great online game that affects your home or work environment in
the real world. +Me is a real world leveling up site where you can
‘upgrade’ people’s skills based on how they do in reality. Shark Runners by area.code
in NYC, allows you to play a game with actual sharks tagged in the real
world. There is a plant game that sends you text messages or Twitter
notices when your plant needs light or water. A social network for
dogs measures speed, social interaction, type of tasks, and walking
time, all on the pet’s collar. A game with temple sensors where you
experience an emotion to lift objects and smash other player without
getting excited. And there is Madden Football on consoles that changes
the weather of the stadium you are playing in based on the location and
weather in the real world at that moment. Citizen Logistics
is a site where you sign up to be an agent, and give people missions
that will improve someone’s life. The more favors you do, the more
significant you are, and the more personal tasks you do.
Challenge 2, use online games to invent the future and change the real
world. There is an innate desire to contribute and collaborate. We
will harness our social surplus, says Clay Shirky. 100 million mental
hours where spent to create Wikipedia across all languages, and that is
impressive. But, that equals just 5 days of World of Warcraft, or 4
episodes of American Idol, or one season of American Idol’s one minute
voting phone calls. Einstein said “games are the most elevated form of
investigation,” since games get you intimately into a game’s
universe.
Jane’s Future Forcast 2: band together in MMO games to save the real world. An example game is her World Without Oil. You play your real life as gas prices increase, to prepare for the current energy crisis. The site compiles best practices and stories of people that were successful in the real world, and breaks down suggestions by categories.
Superstructgame.org asks you to play the game and invent the future. It shows worst case scenario videos for the future, and starts a game with people trying to solve the issues for the real world. It’s an example of CATCH games – Communicate expert research, Activate the crowds, Talk about it together, Collaborate on solutions, and Harvest the mind.
Jane’s key points are: Reality is broken, games work better, and harness power of games to make ourselves happier. Followups for those wanting more information, check out The Ecology of Games book of essays, and play superstruckgame.org for at least an hour.
Question and Answer time now.
Don’t games suffer from too much shooting and violence? Yes, and it shares this problem with other media, like music, books, movies, TV. But there are lots of games that are non violent and popular, like Rock Band, Wii Games, Spore, etc.
Gaming is a safe environment for Risk Taking.
Is there a worry of compressed time frame in games creating unrealistic expectations in reality? Jane says lots of games have a long time frame for success, measured in years and months, which could relate to real world successes. She doesn’t mention the recent trend in casual games, where games are meant to be played quickly and at any time.
That’s the end, after just 50 minutes. Great talk and some terrific ideas for the benefits of the emergent field of video games.
Michael Schnuerle, www.metromapper.org
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