The world is facing some pretty big problems: climate change, famine, war, terrorism, poverty… and little old you are just one person. For many people, the immensity of these problems only highlights for them a single person’s impotence against global scale issues.
Video games, however, are different. If you try hard enough, you WILL prevail. You can save the world/princess/lemmings through a series of levels of gradually increasing difficulty. In video games, you can be a winner, with wealth, power, prestige and (virtual) babes, even if, in life, you work at Blockbuster part time and crash on your buddy Steve’s futon. No wonder you would prefer to spend more time online than stocking copies of Twilight.
Extreme cases of this escapism has been in the news, with (usually Asian) gamers dying of dehydration/exhaustion after too much time online. One Korean couple recently let their real life baby starve while they cared for a virtual child online!
These stories are alarming, but it doesn’t end there. It may amaze you to know that we invest 3 billion hours a week playing games! It may alarm you even more to hear a video game expert assert that we need to spend MORE time gaming: she estimates that we should shoot for 21 billion hours a week.
This talk raises some very interesting points regarding the “virtuosity” that is attained by serious gamers. The skills they become virtuosic at are: Urgent Optimism (desire to act immediately combined with reasonable expectation of success), Weaving Social Fabric, Blissful Productivity (recognizing that we are happiest when engaged rather than “relaxing”), and Epic Meaning (attaching themselves to large scale causes and goals).
Great, those sound like fine qualities to have, but they only apply to World of Warcraft, right? You’d be surprised. Jane demos some games that she has developed that try to harness the power of gaming and story for real world application. After hearing her parable about the ancient Libian king’s nationwide gaming policy, it’s very interesting to think of the role games could play in shaping our current world.
Channeling what we used to think of as unproductive recreation into meaningful collaboration could be the next big thing. Games can also be useful teaching and visualization tools. Sure, TyperShark helped us learn how to type, and Oregon Trail helped us empathize with the hardships of early settlers, but what if there were a game that could demonstrate evolution, societal intricacies, and the scale of time and space at the Universal level? This demo below is of one game I’m incredibly interested to try out!
So next time you tell little Timmy to put down the controller and he complains, “But Mom!!! I’m trying to save the Wooooooorld!!! He just might be right.
