Video Games: Epic Mission
I think the Ted Talk about video games and its players brings up several good points and ideas. Some of the points that are presented I agree with and some that I do not. I don’t agree with the statement about the World of Warcraft lifestyle or sense of community, “Tons of collaborators, everywhere you go, almost one hundred thousand people that are ready to work with you, to achieve your epic mission.” The speaker, Jane McGonigal believes that this is the main difference between the real world and the World of Warcraft. I do not think this is the case. There are plenty of places where you can collaborate with your peers to achieve a goal. One example would be at college or a university. There is a large student body and people that are willing to listen to new ideas, solve problems, and collaborate to achieve this so-called “epic mission”.
February 27th, 2015 at 1:25 pm
Interesting take on the “Epic Mission” concept. I have never played WoW, but I did used to play Runescape back in middle school (who didn’t at one point in their lives?). I agree with her statement that there can be “Tons of collaborators, everywhere you go, almost one hundred thousand people that are ready to work with you, to achieve your epic mission”. The reason being is that you can complete missions together and exchange items to be the very best you can be. I also agree with you that this happens in real life as well. Your example of university really hit home for me. I would like to all think we are on a mission to get our degree in our respective field. I have had many peers and staff members help me get to where I am to today. I enjoyed your analysis of the Ted Talk.
February 27th, 2015 at 6:56 pm
Hi Adam, I think that you brought a good point up about the collaboration as the major difference between the actual world and the real world pointed out by Jane McGonigal. As I also do belief that there are many other places that we collaborate and also achieve great things as universities, offices and research centers. However, I don’t think that this was the main point of her argument. I basically think her point was to throw light on the amount of time we actually spend in gaming and how can we use this time to actually solve real world problems by making them productive. As she states that “there are 500 million plus gamers in the world” and “this number is increasing with advance gaming councils that can work in developing countries”. Her idea basically is that if these gamers were actually concentrating on real world problems we could be more productive in solving these problems considering the billion of hours that are spend by gamers in game world. However, in this view I think a point that is still confusing to me is how can we really achieve this because even the games that were already developed by her was not even close to what councils now are able to do.
March 1st, 2015 at 8:38 pm
Hi. I agree with your idea that at a university there are many times students must come together for a group project to collaborate and achieve a goal, or a grade, because there are many real world instances of collaborations between people. There’s also community service, runs for charity, marches to stand up for something important, people in a work setting collaborating to finish an advertisement by a deadline, etc. So there are a lot of instances of real world examples. But when the speaker talked about “achieving an epic mission” I feel like she meant more of an extreme adventure or challenge, or dangerous but exciting and worthwhile task. Whereas a school project or deadline for something for an office job or community service isn’t as “epic” as in the sense the speaker meant it.
March 1st, 2015 at 9:18 pm
You made a good point about the idea of a college being an excellent place to find “collaborators”. I have to say that the entire idea being presented in the video does not seem to be applicable to the global population as a whole. Plenty of people are capable of problem solving and teamwork in the real world. Look at a sports team for example. On the other hand there are plenty of members of society who contribute very little, so maybe those types of people have something to gain from video games.