After watching the lecture on "Gaming Can Make a Better World" I could not help but think about how her argument had some serious flaws in it. She claimed that gamers have all these skills that non-gamers don't have. Sure she made some good points, that they have an incurable optimism about their game, they have a tightly woven social circle, excellent problem solving, and feel that they are doing something for the good of all, or are they? If feel that she is stretching the bounds of what gamers could do. I point to the gamers in my life. My brother is an avid World of Warcraft player. He capped out on the leveling up a long time ago, and yes he continues to play W.O.W. regardless. He does enjoy what he does, does do a lot of quests, so in that sense he is highly productive. However, he does, or should I say, doesn't ever do his homework. He cannot wrap his head around how his homework is as important to his life as the quest he is trying to complete is. Another example is my best friend's mother, another avid Halo and W.O.W. player. My friend's mother spends so much time playing her games, that my friend had to take up the task of taking care of her house herself. In addition, when my friend does play online games with her mother, her mother introduces my friend as her roommate, not her daughter. She believes that her online friends would not want to "hang out" if they knew she had a teenage daughter. I know that there is the possibility for gamers to band together and solve our global problems, but I'm still a little reserved. The point of a game is that it isn't real, that you can take the risks in W.O.W. that you would not in real life. I guess I am wondering why non-gamers do not have these skills McGonigal praises so highly. Are there not people who have these skills and also can enact them in real life, without the use of a game? What we should be doing is asking ourselves, where are they? So my question is, with the exception of gamers who else has the ability to solve our global problems? Or, how can we tap into the potential of gamers without a game to stimulate them?
Gaming for the World
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I found this lecture compelling but I also am not so sure about her arguments. I do think that gamers are very creative problem solvers but I'm not sure this extends to things other than gaming. I'm not convinced that because someone is a very proficient W.O.W. player that she is also a great problem solver in her real life. I agree that gaming is where you get to be someone you're not and take risks and go on adventures that you would never attempt in reality. I feel that many avid gamers (and by no means, all) even struggle in the real world socially, romantically, and maybe in other ways. This woman says that gamers' skills have not been harnessed in a productive way for the world. But, gamers are not this minority who have been given fewer opportunities than the rest of us. They span between people of all races and classes. It would be fair to say that there is more access to gaming to people of higher socioeconomic status and so they are most definitely given the same opportunities as others in life. And so, I just don't see how gamers, being people just like you and me who simply choose to play games, could have skills that others somehow don't have.
To answer some of your questions I’d like to first say that I interpreted McGonigal’s speech a little differently. I don’t think she was trying to say that playing contemporary computer/video games like W.O.W. was helping society solve global problems. Certainly the skill set involved in blasting monsters with spells is not very useful outside of the game. I think what she was trying to point out was that all these creative people were spending an immense amount of time on these games instead of the real world. But what if the game was designed around real world problems? What if this resource of creativity could be applied directly to real world problems while inside a game? For instance, with your brother, what if there were a game that had quests designed around the subjects in school. In order to win the quest your brother would need to learn the real world lesson and apply it creatively to accomplish an epic win. As a physics major I will apply this to physics. Imagine a game like W.O.W. where you get your guild and go battle a boss with some projectile weapons. Imagine that in order to aim your weapons at the boss you needed to calculate the exact trajectory of the projectile or else you would miss. You would learn kinematics through a very useful active learning process. Further, you would need to help your guildmates learn the same thing because you can’t beat the boss on your own. If your guildmates are your classmates from your physics class then this could have been a very productive lesson for everyone. I think that games could be an excellent way to stimulate creative problem solving skills and keep the gamers’ focus on reachable but difficult goals. Such skill sets would be useful if McGonigal can create such games and also keep them interesting.
I also agree with the comment above. Certainly, some games have an addictive quality, especially games like WoW that require constant attention to the game if you wish to keep up with the real-time happenings in Azeroth. While I do not find it difficult to manage my play time in WoW, I have known many people who are addicted, or who quit long ago because they had been addicted. However, rather than criticizing these people for their addiction, I believe we should be asking why it is that some people prefer to spend their time in a fantasy world instead of in the "real world." I think this is something that McGonigal addresses. She argues that the reason we get so much pleasure from games is because we feel so empowered by the game, and while playing we get a sense that we can overcome any obstacle, no matter how much the odds are stacked against us, and we are endowed with a feeling that we can change the (virtual) world. She also points out that we don't get that feeling in the "real" world, necessarily. It feels awesome cast spells, fly on giant skeletal dragons, and band together with other heroes to free the world from the grip of an evil tyrant with several million hit points. But I am fully aware that, in the "real" world, the heavily hit point-endowed "tyrants" like imperialism, capitalism, racism, sexism, global warming (etc) can't be solved by getting 25 people together, kicking down the door and raiding the ever-loving hell out of the place. This is a disheartening thought, and it's one that I think every gamer realizes. Some of us recognize that this is the way it is, and so we do what we can to make change in the "real" world, while enjoying our occasional escapes/excursions into the fantasy world. This is ultimately what McGonigal is arguing, I think: we need to take that energy, creativity, and capability for immense cooperation that gamers feel while gaming and bring it into the "real" world to conquer "real" problems. She doesn't propose we do this by having everyone play WoW. She is instead devoting her research to finding a way to make gamers feel empowered outside of games; to make gamers feel the same amazing things they feel when they finally down the final boss in a raid it took an entire week to finish in "real" life. People "escape" to games because they feel hopeless and powerless in the "real" world, so the question is how do we empower people to make "actual" change? McGonigal's proposition is to use games, not games like WoW, perchance, but games that tackle "real world" problems, and allow gamers to make connections between their gaming lives and their "real" lives, so they can feel empowered to make change and to save the "real" world the same way they save their virtual ones.