Jane McGonigal on how games can make the world a better place

Here's game-designer Jane McGonigal at her most incandescently inspiring, speaking at TED. Her hypothesis is that games allow us to experience epic wins, incentivizing us to give them millions of hours to them in order to feel the thrill of success. She proposes that we can harness all that energy -- and all the good feeling and camaraderie that emerges from all that play -- to solve the world's hardest problems.

And she makes a good case that we can do it. Key phrases: "blissful productivity" and "urgent optimism" and "the desire for epic meaning."

Games can make a better world

• [KWillets]

  So games are equivalent to the Democratic party?

• [Saskplanner]

  Poppycock.

  If the goal is to make the world a better place – If you took the COUNTLESS hours people wasted on gaming and and had them work around the planet fixing things and helping people it would make a much more pronounced difference than someone being slumped on the couch experiencing the ‘thrill of success’ or experiencing ‘epic wins.’ How about spending time and and energy for ‘epic wins’ in the real world?

  Generation Y gobbledygook.

• [rastronomicals]

  incentivizing!!!???

  I know that boingboing–in an era when technologizing and invents conspiratorial as rapidly adaptationiveness the writing languagenesses–is always efforting to practicalify and modernify its usaginization, but this has left me ridiculousizated, and frankliness, appallinated.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Complaining about the language choices of a best-selling author: priceless. Shakespeare’s full of newly minted words. Go pick on him while you’re at it.

  • [Yamara]

    incentivizing at Merriam-Webster.

    Google hits for incentivizing: 135,0000.

    Still redlines in the comment box.

    As does the word “redlines”.

    • [rastronomicals]

      incentivizing at Merriam-Webster.

      Google hits for incentivizing: 135,0000.[sic]

      Oh shit. This is horrible news . . . .

• [slgalt]

  If you’re skeptical, I recommend you go play games she had a hand in designing, or read up on them. This woman spends her life living her premise.

• [twiggy_trippit]

  I happen to be part of the funny breed of mutants who think play, games, and fun non-procreative sex are basic human needs. Considering that play and games are one of the most common and important human activities, it remains one of the most understudied fields – most universities don’t offer a degree in games (the history of games, game design, game psychology, etc.). Yet it’s proven and obvious that they play a major part in social cohesion and skill rehearsing.

  I hate it when people denounce “escaping” into games. I was a depressive teenager who was faced with horrible situations I could not resolve, because the situations far exceeded what my life skills could handle, and because the adults around me were unwilling to do anything to address these issues. Gaming became a safe haven where I could be happy for a while, experience success and being in the zone, and it also became the way I formed friendships during those (pre-Internet) years. I think gaming saved my life. It’s also how I learned English (I’m French).

  Jane McGonigal’s speech has the virtue of challenging the way we think about gaming and its impact on us as a society, and this comment thread is a great example of the sort of conversation it can prompt. The only real shortcoming I saw with what she said is that she sounds like she views the world’s problems as a PvE situation, when I think most of our problems are actually PvP: a bunch of power gamers who enjoy vast privileges, hog resources, and monopolize our decision-making institutions. And these power gamers are willing to make horrors happen to ensure they stay at the top forever.

• [Ubernostrom]

  I dare her to play MW2. If there was ever a /b/ of video games, that’s it.

• [Thac0]

  They posted this over at massively.com too and I’m amazed at the negative response to this, especially from gamers.

  I think her ideas of using collective intelligence via game form is a very interesting idea. Although i have to say she needs to develop better ARGs that are actually fun to get people to play and test this. World Without Oil was all about having people blog and so is Evoke. I dont enjoy blogging about homework assignments a game gives me; thats not fun game play like WoW.

  • [Cory Doctorow]

    I’m pretty sure that, like #2, they didn’t watch the video. It’s the definition of reactionaryism: reacting without thinking or investigating. It’s a pretty horrible disease, really.

• [Anonymous]

  This reminds me a lot of gilded-age businessmen smoking a cigar after a monetary success. I don’t generally approve of what they accomplished, but it’s interesting that methods similar to their hacking of the dopamine system might have been re-discovered, with a more democratic flavor.

• [shibumi]

  Figures that there will be both extremes responding to this. it’s an interesting concept, just like SETI@home doesn’t promise you an Alien on the phone, it’s just a consolodation of *existing* cycles redirected.

  on the other hand, the first thing I thought of was Ender’s Game :) (Orson Scott Card). That too was a ‘use the gamers to some real end’ environment :)

• [Svenski]

  This is some seriously wishful thinking. Games will not make the world a better place. Games are a diversion from reality. People helping people will make the world a better place. Anything else is intellectual snobbery.

  • [Cory Doctorow]

    Did you watch the video? Because in your dismissive remark, you don’t make reference to any of the several compelling arguments — and real-world examples — that McGonigal cites.

    My guess is, like #2, you read a two-sentence summary of a 20-minute presentation, decided you didn’t like the summarized conclusion, didn’t bother to explore the arguments that led to the conclusions, and then pooh-poohed it.

    This has all the intellectual rigor of my daughter tossing her cereal on the floor before she’s tasted it.

• [floraldeoderant]

  Games are “just” education + external-to-knowledge mechanisms that make you want to learn (quotation marks because that’s actually an extremely impressive couple of attributes).

  Her research amounts to ‘what positive attributes certain games teach’ and ‘can we turn it to the world’, which is indeed cool. Admittedly, I think her games are clunky as games (and are much heavier on the Education side than the Fun-Mechanics side), but I hope she keeps making them both for people who enjoy them, and for people who learn from them.

  Games are art, and can teach us the same lessons (sometimes more acutely). I think it’s silly how many people seem to be against games as a positive influence in the world– I wonder if 50-100 years ago they would’ve been the same people complaining about everyone wasting their time reading books instead of doing something useful.

• [johanster]

  Jeez, people really need to watch the whole video before posting.

  Also, the games shown were visions, concepts. So what if you don’t like this and that. No game will ever appeal to everyone. If blogging was the appeal of these two samples, I’m sure someone can come up with ideas that appeal to the WoW crowd and do something good at the same time.

  • [Thac0]

    And I agree, thats all I was saying.

• [Anonymous]

  Try listening to her talk again, but when she says “gamers,” replace that word with “athletes,” and when she says “games,” replace that with “sports.” It makes for a very interesting twist on her intention.

• [CANTFIGHTTHEDITE]

  Bridging the gap between virtual gameplay and reality without losing any of the key game features that drive gamers to put in so much time will be the real trick. I would say that she provides a very compelling case for trying to do this, but turning that in itself into a game to achieve the goal is a real head-scratcher.

• [armahillo]

  Her idea (and past ideas) are interesting, but I can’t help but twitch a little whenever I see the word “game designer” next to her name. Most of her games tend to be more like simulations or interactive stories, such as in the case of the Oil crisis game (I forget the name) or the future-future one that Mathpunk mentioned.

  Perhaps I’m just being narrow-minded in my definition of what constitutes a “game” — what she does is certainly playful — but when I think of “game” I think of a somewhat more structured environment (Go, Chess, D&D, Magic, Settlers of Catan, video games). Then again, I tend to be more of a “roll-player” rather than “role-player” in D&D, so….

  Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe her as a “play designer”?

• [Powell]

  LOL @ Ubernostrom !
  Next time my wife yells at me for playing too much MW2, I can tell her that I am making the world a better place.
  I will be showing some noobs some “epic meaning” whilst I pwn them.

• [Anonymous]

  must have been some game those lydians were playing.

• [mwiik]

  I watched it. Further, I had been waiting for it since I heard she was at TED and read the previous BoingBoing article about her and her new game. But the immediate cue that the video had been posted I found on John Robb’s weblog, where he opined that:

  > While I give her props for thinking about ways to generate ideas on how to fix global problems, she entirely misses the big idea.

  > Here’s the big idea. For active online gamers real life is broken. It doesn’t make any sense. Effort isn’t connected to reward. The path forward is confused, convoluted, and contradictory. Worse, there’s a growing sense that the entire game is being corrupted to ensure failure. So, why play it?

  > They don’t. They retreat to online games.

  – http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/03/online-games-superempowerment-and-reality.html

  After watching, I then read David Wong’s fascinating article on the future of gaming at http://www.cracked.com/article_15657_world-warcraft-world-10-ways-online-gaming-will-change-future.html

  from which my feeling is that Robb may well be correct, and that we are retreating from the world thru gaming, and that this will only continue. What is reality, after all, but 60 million polygons per second.

  So I’m thinking this is the answer to the Fermi paradox: all advanced technical species retreat into a world of their own making, especially as it’s far, far cheaper than actually building a galactic civilization.

• [Yamara]

  Cory @#8: This has all the intellectual rigor of my daughter tossing her cereal on the floor before she’s tasted it.

  The leprechaun stares at me so, daddy! Don’t make me eat what made him look that way!

  Svenski @#6Games will not make the world a better place.

  Exactly what flint-hearted grinch source did that come from? Certainly not sociological or educational research. Gaming may not be the highest human priority, but that doesn’t mean that socializing and entertainment should be just surrendered to passive “packaged media”.

  I haven’t seen the video yet either, as I’m still at work. But games channel our natural competitiveness into less harmful, and often more constructive outlets. When the competitiveness is intensified to vicousness (Monopoly, Roman Coliseum, IOC) games aren’t performing their function. But in the case of things like German-style boardgames, they can even help teach history while employing people and energizing the economy with socializing alternatives to “media entertainment”.

  I imagine the video has other ideas than just these known traits, and I look forward to watching it later.

• [Anonymous]

  What bothers me about these sorts of talks (and Jesse Schell’s recent talk at DICE is similar) is that they seem to believe that since game designers have figured out how to make games fun and compelling, they have somehow discovered all there is to know about human psychology. Now, they say, the only step remaining is to apply what game designers know (i.e. how the mind works) to the problems of the real world.
  These approaches would have made B.F. Skinner proud, in that they posit that we have relatively simple motivations, which are rewarded by relatively simple mechanisms of reward and punishment.
  I am not entirely negative towards this approach, and behaviorist interventions do work in some scenarios. But they are not the panacea that McGonigal presents. I’ll just cite one bit of research to introduce some complexity: Sometimes, by giving an external reward, one can reduce intrinsic motivation. Kids who were paid to draw pictures, wanted to do it less than the kids who were not. Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset, is a good introduction to this work.
  I also don’t find it all that convincing that people become totally different social creatures when they play online games. Yes, I would say that gamers cooperate, compete, do unselfish things, cheat, and act in other ways remarkably similarly as they do in real life. One doesn’t switch personalities just because you are typing instead of talking. Of course, pseudonymity does afford certain behaviors and expressions, but this is by no means all positive (or all negative).
  Anyways, as a psychologist myself, I welcome the application of psychological principles of human thoughts and motivations to solve real world problems. I am just a little wary of the oversimplification and the belief that somehow the game designers have human nature all figured out (by cherry picking a few second-hand sources like Gladwell and making up a few categories all on their own).
  But interesting project though. I hope it works.

• [Saskplanner]

  Sorry Cory;

  Watched it. “3 billion hours of game play is not enough to save the world – we need to spend more” Come on – Seriously. It’s all relativistic crap that smacks of people trying to rationalize their gaming addictions by trying to claim it will save the world.

  If all those people spent 3 billion hours a week actually fixing the world instead by getting degrees in renewable energy, or social work, or going out onto the streets to help the homeless, or flying building things with Jimmy Carter and collaborating in the real world. It’s relativistic claptrap.

  You can solve problems and get ‘epic wins’ in the real world and have a direct impact on the planet.

  She says that in games people ‘work’ together. Sure, but work? No, it’s gaming.

  • [johanster]

    What I got from the presentation is that exactly what she was aiming at. The opportunities to build homes with Jimmy Carter is there now, but how do we get the generation that play online games to get out in the real world? They seek epic moments so let’s give it to them by making saving oil a game!

• [Christovir]

  Very interesting ideas, but I would like to see some more empirical tests to support her ideas. We know through controlled experiments that games can lead to better reaction times and problem solving, but I don’t know if there is much about persistence, optimism, and social navigation as she suggests.

  Although she mainly focuses on using games to produce effects that last into the real-world time, another alternative (which she touches on a little) is to make the real-world more like a game: provide consistent feedback, allow plenty of nominal achievements, create the possibility of social comparisons/competition, and create a system that encourages persistence more than it penalizes failure. That approach wouldn’t work for everything, but it could work in a lot of things.

  If games are how people want to spend their time in an ideal world, why not make parts of the world more like a game, so far as it is possible?

• [Anonymous]

  Kinda cool that Global Extincion Awareness System’s initials are geas, just goes to show why gamers are so much better then everyone else :P

• [gmoke]

  I played SuperStruct and didn’t like it. No real way to collaborate. I’m playing Evoke and like it better but, again, it hasn’t reached it’s full potential yet.

  I’m also talking to a few people within my own circle about the possibility of an online World Game, an idea of Buckminster Fuller’s that will be 50 years old next year. That idea was to imagine implementable solutions for world problems using real data. An organization called World Resources Simulation Center (http://wrsc.org/) is starting “a non-profit visualization facility where you can literally ‘see’ the critical trends of global and regional issues, the relationships between issues, and the consequences of different strategies.” This is an analogue to Fuller’s Geo-Scope and the information resource that will make a true World Game possible.

  In the reaction to the January 2010 Haitian earthquake, I see a kind of ad hoc real world problem-solving network developing. The Crisis Camps that helped keep Haiti connected occurred in NYC, Boston, and other cities around the world. I participated in the international day of Pecha-Kucha for Haiti that took place in 130 cities on the same night. This outpouring of effort and the fact that organizations like Architecture for Humanity have been climbing a learning curve in disaster response from the 2004 tsunami to New Orleans through the Pakistani earthquake and now the Haitian earthquake give me hope that we are already playing an online and real world, real time, nascent version of the World Game. We just haven’t realized it yet.

  Other examples include the international Ignite event that happened a few weeks ago and the use of home computer time for such things as the SETI Project or solving protein folding sequences that have been going on for years. I am trying to get Bill McKibben of 350.org to utilize some of these networking and gaming techniques for his next event, an international work day on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. How about an online, global session on solving climate change from the grassroots on up?

  John Robb has posted another vision of the gaming future, Jesse Schell at DICE on a networked gaming world beyond Facebook
  (http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/). He presents a world where online gaming inhabits the real-world space through augmented reality and inexpensive, ubiquitous ICT networking. There are some aspects which are useful but it reads to me as a completely commoditized existence under continuous and continual surveillance by corporations and government “for our own good.”

  This morning I repaired a small PV panel that attaches to my backpack to power my bike lights and got major help from a friend who modified a battery and AC power supply for a cheap ($9.99 before Christmas, $4.98 after) 20 LED light so that it can work with another solar panel I bought five years ago with a smaller, 7 LED light. A few months ago, I helped fund an engineering student in Nairobi, Kenya who is building a business making bicycle chargers for cell phones. He made the first one out of scrap parts for about $4.50. This is how I’m playing out my life. I wonder how much such activity could be amplified if more people started playing such games consciously.

• [civver]

  A 20 minute talk that should have really been five minutes. And also espousing an idea that I did not see much evidence for. She didn’t exactly talk about the real-world saving that that was supposed to have occurred because of the three games she mentioned.

• [imag]

  Cory, your response was, to me, an outside observer reading it, appalling. You seemed to be suffering from the “disease” you created to pin on someone else.

  It is entirely possible to watch this whole video and believe her to be engaged in wishful thinking. Heck, she even admits as much.

  I don’t think she adequately addresses the fact that games gain their power by being different from reality. They have no real-world consequences, which means:

  - People can get “killed” without actually being harmed
  - People can “kill” without harming
  - People can leave at any time, with no connection to the folks with whom they were collaborating
  - People can try the same challenge over and over, without ever fundamentally changing things. They do not have to deal with making permanently binding choices

  The issues in a game world are, by design, different from the ones in the real world. When she pulled up her game about peak oil, I immediately started to get stressed out. That doesn’t happen when someone pulls up a game about the legendary realm of Lorath.

  Put differently, many of the benefits she ascribes many things to gaming might better be ascribed to fantasizing. Fantasizing, both in games and in the real world, may be usefully engaged in, but certain aspects of fantasy function specifically because they are different from current reality. I feel that she ignored this issue completely.

  Not every comment can be a treatise. That doesn’t mean a pithy comment lacks thought or investigation.

  • [TimDrew]

    Indeed- however, in the case of mental / physical preparation for complex tasks in the real world, consequence free “games” (the quotes are there to differentiate simulation from escapism/fantasy) can be immensely useful. It’s handy to be able to make multiple instrument approaches to unfamiliar airports as a pilot in training, without having to worry about trashing real aircraft and lives.

    Trouble is where the results of such role play are typically channelled. They can potentially lead to socially useful skills and better decision making ability- or they can encourage psychopathologies, particularly when real life and real lives are seen as wanting.

• [imag]

  I was thinking:

  I think people actually are very good at dealing with reality. Witness hunter gatherers, who have all the positive attributes that Jane ascribes to gamers. They don’t have stress; they work together; they believe in (and have) epic quests.

  The problem, put another way, is that the world we live in now is too much of a game. Money is a game we all participate in. The game is rigged by large organizations, self-interested individuals, and the psychological warfare of marketing, where human emotional triggers are used against our own self interest and/or better judgment.

  We live in a game where “winning” means destroying the outer world at the expense of what is in our home. It means overlooking acres of ugliness – parking lots, traffic jams, power lines, and billboards – in order to have a few (albeit amazing) trinkets, like music players and televisions and coffee makers in our houses.

  It’s a bizarre game that we play in the “developed” world, and the fact that many people can no longer relate to it is perhaps what’s driving them off into a virtual game, with its simplicity and soothing rewards. Our game’s rules are so complicated that we have accountants and lawyers to parse them, but also to add to them and make them even more complicated. Our reward structures are far removed from our value structures. Our goals (create peace, prosperity, and happiness for all) are not met by the game goals (amass as much money as possible).

  Anyway, that’s my idle thought for the day.

• [max]

  #14 that comment about the fermi paradox really inspired me. i have a sort of obsession with the idea of technological singularity, i think that we are quickly approaching a point where out technology outpaces and marginalizes us. but i wonder if this is the conclusion of it. in 2001 a space odyssey the final manifestation of humanity was a sort of star child state where everyone became one with the universe. i think that our nirvana instead lies in virtual reality. we’re going to take all this information and bury ourselves in it. a sarcophagus of data. my mind, blown.

• [Anonymous]

  Saw the video, played the game, loved it. It’s giving people credit for innovative ideas and learning about sustainability.

  @#45, There was nothing ‘similar to hacking the dopamine system’ in that game. It gives players ‘points’ for proving they’ve done some good in the world. I can’t imagine a better idea for a game! Also, no matter how hard I try, I don’t see why anyone could ever disapprove of that.

• [Mark Dow]

  Every one of the kids racking up hours gaming has the ability and many of the skills and resources needed to make the games Jane talks about. There are epic wins on the programming and design side too.

• [MollyMaguire]

  I was skeptical before I watched, but she makes some very good points and, I think, has good reason to be optimistic. Gaming in the 21st century is like the biggest, fastest brainstorming session ever. Like she says, it’s the transitioning of all those ideas to the real world that’s the hard part. I guess I remain unconvinced that all it will take is the right game. Also, I spend all goddamn day in front of a computer at work. It’s the last thing I want to look at when I have free time.

  BTW, “blissful productivity” = Flow.

• [LennStar]

  If you want to have a look on a game that could now help people, there is fold.it
  http://fold.it/portal/
  The Foldit players will send in own predictions for proteins in the upcoming CASP 9 (THE protein biochemist’s competition) – and maybe beating all the Pro’s from the Biolabs. (And that is not wishful thinking, 2 years ago just after starting, the Foldit community reached Top 3 in half of the puzzles they submitted)

  • [magicbean]

    I’ve actually seen and played Foldit. Very cool, and shows how small my brain is since I didn’t get very far. There’s a huge difference, I think, between Foldit, and an escapist game that aspires to supplant one reality with another.

    Foldit’s got a focus, a stated intention, a goal. And a practical, real-world application that exists. Foldit’s like a dog that wants to go for a walk. It just wants to do its task, and doesn’t pretend to be your entire worldview and new best friend. And while I don’t have the measurements, I would bet my last wrinkly $10 that nowhere near the hours have been put in playing Foldit that McGonigal would like to see put into games. So to solve real problems, we don’t *need* eleventy billion hours of gaming. We need focused brainpower on focused tasks – which is perhaps where gaming could be extremely valuable.

    Again, what I am uncomfortable with in channelling the imagination of a billion gamers are the very limits of imagination and experience that McGonigal points out in her talk – emotions that don’t exist, experiences that don’t exist – because of inherent limits in the games themselves. It doesn’t seem wise to have people directing the future who can’t handle or even choose to handle things that exist in the real world for many real people. It’s a powerful intellectual gap. Just think of all the things gamers aren’t capable of imagining because there’s no connection to the unwired world, the very world we all rely on for air, food, water.

    What it sounds like she’s relying on is the addictive, compulsive, escapist quality of games, and hoping that there’s a channel for that quality. Which strikes me as…kind of creepy.

• [anansi133]

  Her enthusiasm is infectious- I can’t disagree with any of her opinions about the epic win. I have the same kinds of idea about it.

  But I did cringe a bit when she compared the millions of person-years of online RPGs, with millions of physical evolution years of the planet going around the sun. A better comparison would have been, how many person years of programming have gone into these games, rather than person years of playing.

  These ideas will begin to have serious traction when wealth created by players in-game can be spent in the outside world. There’s no physical laws against that sort of thing, just look at the stock market as a MMORPG.

  But there’s a distinction between redistributing wealth and creating wealth. You could solve any number of architecture and design problems in-game, and then implement them in the real world, then reward designer-players according to how well their solutions performed.

  OK, I seem to have drunk the Kool Aid here. We could be wrong, maybe games are only as significant as TV watching. But blogging is just another form of game too.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  Saskplanner,

  Read the Moderation Policy.

• [codesuidae]

  I really like the idea of using games to solve real-world problems. I think it’s important to remember that including this as a goal of game design doesn’t mean that the entire game has to be about solving real-world problems.

  For example, assuming some wearable bio-aware augmented reality hardware (which is getting closer every year), I can imagine that an element to a game could involve real-world activities that cause you to exercise at intensities designed to increase fitness and invigorate oneself, perhaps while also integrating with the game story in such a way as to heighten immediate and subsequent game-world activities.

  Keeping people fit and feeling good in a way that they enjoy would be a great game. It could also help to prepare them for later levels that require more physical challenge.

  Clearly not all tasks are currently suitable for being gameified. Some simple repetitive things might be candidates. Could you turn working an assembly line into a game? Maybe add AR in-game socialization and stats tracking? Game-assisted task optimization? Don’t do that part of the task too fast, it’s wasted effort; don’t do the same tasks for too long, the reward rate drops (and risk of RSI goes up). Switch to another task and the game trains you, providing level-up rewards as you increase your skill level at that task.

  Could social engagement with one’s community be increased with such a system? If one is having a great time doing various tasks, and is able to engage with coworkers via AR, block out annoying coworkers the same way, and also play interesting games in off-hours (or maybe the line between on- and off-hours eventually goes away?) would one really need to make as much money (particularly if it’s cheaper to buy AR skins for one’s living quarters).

  I was thinking about this the other day while I was playing WoW. It irks me that feeding my character is such an arbitrary thing. Couldn’t they incorporate a fancier food system such that various aspects of my characters abilities can be optimized through particular diets? Maybe this would make learning about how I should go about feeding myself at little more fun?

  Here’s an idea. We’ve noticed that sometimes very different things are modeled in very similar ways, for example, the math describing axions and topological insulators is practically the same. Perhaps as we advance computer cognition we can take advantage of this to represent difficult problems in a different idiom, presenting them somehow as a puzzle in a game world. Human creativity might then be utilized to produce a solution, which is then applied to the original problem by the computer via a reverse transformation back into the original problem domain. Computer systems could then do boring grunt work while we get the fun of solving the problems in a clean virtual world. (Ok, ok, I’m brainstorming a little for a sci-fi short, but what the heck).

• [magicbean]

  “We make the future”

  The thought of a bunch of people sitting at screens imagining what my cultural and social “epic win” should be, and helping me “make the future” sounds creepy and mildly paternalistic, even if her ideas on what makes up a beautiful future might be completely terrific. Perhaps she wasn’t clearing explaining what she meant, but that’s the picture I got.

  “We aren’t getting what we need from the real world, so we get it in games”
  “Emotions like X don’t exist in game world”

  Whoa. These two statements also struck me in a kind of creepy way. Just because you don’t enjoy real life 100 percent of the time doesn’t mean it isn’t what you need. I think she might entertain the thought that what has caused a great deal of human suffering (in fact, all human suffering, if you’re a Buddhist) is craving and aversion – wanting this, not wanting that. Humans learn painful and yet remarkably useful lessons all the time in the real world. Walking around with this demand that you be in a constant state of virtually-on-the-orgasmic-epic-win…seems rather flat and static. She addressed escapism very mildly, but she failed to substantially critique the power of avoidance. What I heard in her talk is a serious underestimation of the power of escapism and craving for a particular emotional state to cause people to avoid doing what doesn’t feed that need (where’s that recent link to the couple who let their real baby die while caring for an online baby?)

  Gaming is also a controlled environment in that the game can only do what the designers allow it to do (like McGonigal’s comment about emotions that don’t exist in gameworld). The real world is much more unpredictable, unstable, and vibrant. There are types of learning and understanding that simply cannot, cannot occur on a screen. You can read all you want about a sunflower, but it’s not the same as touching it, smelling it, watching it grow. It’s the difference between “knowing something” and “knowing about something”…and gamers seem know about a lot about things, but don’t know them. Playing a game about farming is not the same as farming.

  What it came down to for me is this thought experiment: I can change the gamers world a lot – I can stop growing their food, cease fixing their power grid, fail to heat their homes, What can a gamer do for me that would really change my world? And I couldn’t get to an answer through McGonigal’s talk. I still don’t see what they are going to accomplish. Creative ideas? Imagination? Education? Doesn’t that already exist? I’m already doing that myself, thanks, and I don’t see how gamers are going to do it better, faster, or with any more skill than people who don’t play games, four characteristics notwithstanding.

  While McGonigal is enthusiastic, kind, thoughtful, and bright, and that combination is priceless in my book, I don’t buy her argument from any angle. Maybe she just needs a better pitch for her research, but it smells to me like a slacktivism apology.

• [dculberson]

  Is saying the same thing four different ways supposed to help get your point across?