In Jane McGonigal's TED Talk, she shares her firm belief that games can save the world. Currently, gamers spend 3 billions hours per week. This seems like an incredible amount of time, yet Jane believes that gamers should spend even more time than that! She says that solving games in a virtual world can actually help solve real world problems.
Games create urgency and optimism for an epic win. Every gamer is playing for that high of success. An epic win is an almost unimaginable outcome that is so surprising that you can not believe you actually accomplished what you did. What would it be like to experience epic wins in real life? If people truly believed that they could be as successful in real life as they are in dreams, unthinkable solutions would be created to many of the world's problems. When playing a game, it is almost impossible to feel like a failure. Gamers always feel important, like their quest is valiant and worthy, and like they are always on the verge of an epic win. If people can feel this type of importance in success in real life, they can change the world.
Jane mentions a shocking statistic: Gamers spend about 10,000 hours playing games by the time they are 21. By spending 10,000 hours at anything, a person becomes as good as some of the greatest in the world at that task. Essentially, these gamers are virtuosos at what they do! So what then, are gamers so good at?
- Games produce an urgent optimisms, the belief that an epic win is possible and on the verge.
- Games create a social fabric. Trust is created among people playing together and causes people to like the people they play with more. The collaboration in gameplay is also completely transferable to real life.
- Games involve blissful productivity. Gamers choose to spend their free time working hard to solve the problems in their games.
- Games have epic meaning. These missions are awe-inspiring and motivate gamers to continue playing in order to accomplish even more epic things!
Before watching this TED Talk, I can not say that I found much value in games. Watching my brother play hours upon hours of video games and ignoring our family because of his time playing games only made me more bitter towards games. This video showed me some of the positives about games, and how they really can change mindsets to hopefully someday create solutions to real world problems. If games can truly empower people to make the best outcomes possible for the future, then games will have one more supporter in me!
- Games produce an urgent optimisms, the belief that an epic win is possible and on the verge.
- Games create a social fabric. Trust is created among people playing together and causes people to like the people they play with more. The collaboration in gameplay is also completely transferable to real life.
- Games involve blissful productivity. Gamers choose to spend their free time working hard to solve the problems in their games.
- Games have epic meaning. These missions are awe-inspiring and motivate gamers to continue playing in order to accomplish even more epic things!
Before watching this TED Talk, I can not say that I found much value in games. Watching my brother play hours upon hours of video games and ignoring our family because of his time playing games only made me more bitter towards games. This video showed me some of the positives about games, and how they really can change mindsets to hopefully someday create solutions to real world problems. If games can truly empower people to make the best outcomes possible for the future, then games will have one more supporter in me!
Very good.
ReplyDeleteThe example in this talk that stood out to me was the Lydians who used games to combat hunger and ultimately to divide their population to generate a settlement group to go to another area in time of famine.
Thanks!
Oops, forgot your XP count.
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