In a TED Talk, Jane MacGonigal makes the argument that getting people to play more video games will help to save the world. In particular, she argues that the thousands of hours people invest in video games lead players to develop four impressive skills: urgent optimism, social fabric, blissful productivity, and a desire for epic meaning.
Urgent optimism is a sense that an epic win--a dramatic, challenging, and rewarding victory--is always within reach for every player. When players have internalized that belief, there is no reason to put off tacking important problems for the future or to leave them for someone more important or more qualified to address; anyone who sees the problem can do something about it now.
Games also promote a tightly-woven social fabric. In many games, the most dramatic achievements require players to collaborate, forcing them to trust each other to fulfill tasks crucial to the success of the quest or mission. This encourages people to build relationships with each other, bring a group of diverse strangers together towards a common goal.
When playing a game, players have a sense of blissful productivity. Players invest significant time and effort into developing their character or learning their way through a challenging dungeon in a way that very much resembles, but rarely feels like, work. People like a sense of progress and accomplishment for our efforts, and games readily deliver that.
Finally, games have a feeling of epic meaning. From the moment a player first enters a game, there are characters willing to trust them with important, but achievable, tasks. Everything a player does in the game has meaning to someone in the game's world and player's even have the opportunity affect great changes in the world of the game.
MacGonigal describes people who've mastered these skills as super-empowered hopeful individuals, people who have exactly the attitudes and abilities to effect incredible change. The problem, however, is most gamers only demonstrate these attributes in the virtual world. Most players use games as an escape from the real world and are able to become more engaged and more social when they enter a virtual setting. I've certainly seen this disconnect with people I've gamed with. Many players who are viewed as accomplished, well-respected leaders in the game, mastering the most challenging dungeons and defeating the fiercest enemies, may struggle to achieve on the job or at school.
One of the great challenges for our society is to find ways to make it possible for gamers to leverage the skills they develop in the virtual world to address problems that are just as important in the real world. MacGonigal and her company have developed some games that attempt to turn the might of the gaming world to solving major issues such as peak oil and a range of social problems.
As I look at my own classroom, the students who achieve the greatest successes are the ones who bring an urgent optimism, a willingness to weave a social fabric, a desire to embrace blissful productivity, and a longing for epic meaning, even if it is as simple as using physics to understand how the universe works. The students who are not currently successful almost certainly display these same traits in settings I simply don't see. Making games a part of the learning process, rather than treating them as a mere distraction, should open the door for more students to bring the skills that make them super-empowered hopeful individuals into the classroom and, perhaps, other areas of the real world. Letting gamers know the skills they have matter outside of the virtual world and giving them the opportunity to use those skills would have dramatic, positive effects on society.
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