How Gaming Can Make a Better World

I'll be the first one to admit that I play online games, specifically World of Warcraft (WoW), too much. However, I am far from alone. So far, gamers have spent 5.93 million years, collectively, playing WoW (remember, WoW has about 12 million players). And this isn't something unique to WoW players either. Currently, about 500 million people spend 3 billion hours a week playing online games. Sounds like a lot of wasted time on games, right? I would tend to agree, but what if we could somehow tap into this for the greater good of the world?

Enter Jane McGonigal, a game designer from the Institute for the Future. Jane has, what some would consider, a crazy idea. Her goal is to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games. And to fulfill that goal, her plan is to make the real world more like an online game (this isn't like the movie Tron or anything like that, so don't get the wrong idea). In order to do this though, gamers have to overcome their lack of self confidence in the real world. According to Jane, gamers feel that they are not as good in reality as they are in games (which is something I can totally relate to).

Here is a small excerpt from this video:

And when we're in game worlds I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves, the most likely to help at a moment's notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again. And in real life, when we face failure, when we confront obstacles, we often don't feel that way. We feel overcome. We feel overwhelmed. We feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical. We never have those feelings when we're playing games, they just don't exist in games.

So, you see, Jane wants gamers to feel like they can do anything in the real world, just like how they feel like they can do anything in virtual worlds. The reason we gamers spend so much time in virtual worlds, though, is because of all the constant positive feedback we receive. We are always on the verge of an "Epic Win." If you're not familiar with the term, it's that feeling you get when you've solved a difficult problem or task and accomplished your goals. Different gamers have different definitions of what they consider an "Epic Win," but in an online game like World of Warcraft, it usually involves other people. So, in an online environment like WoW, you can go online anytime and be given a task or problem to solve. Then, you find like-minded people to work with until that problem is solved. It might take you a while to solve that problem, but when you finally do, you get the positive feeling of an "Epic Win." And then, the very next day, you can go online and do the same thing! The real world doesn't have a system like that, where you can go anytime to work with people on a problem, and that is something Jane McGonigal hopes to remedy.

I could go on, but Jane is a lot better at explaining this than I ever could be. These are her ideas, after all. My understanding is very limited, but I am inspired by it all the same. I hope to one day make the world a better place, I just need to develop the self confidence and gain a direction. And it's reassuring to know that people, like Jane McGonigal, are working on ways that appeal to my generation to make the world a better place.

Jane McGonigal has many other fascinating points and observations, so please watch this video if you haven't already.