I really enjoyed watching Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on the impact of gaming on solving our world problems. One aspect that I caught from her talk was the study about how the average avid gamer will have played 10,000 hours of online gaming by the age of 21. I have also heard of the outlier theory by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he mentioned that attaining 10,000 effortful hours of any subject or topic would ensure our success at that particular craft. So by connecting the points from his study to the one about gamers achieving those 10,000 hours playing online, she is claiming that there are hundreds of millions of gamers becoming so-called masters at particular skills, such as “urgent optimism, weaving a tight social fabric, blissful productivity, and epic meaning”. By saying this, she believes that qualities such as teamwork, persistency, optimism, goal-oriented, and more are accomplished by playing such games, and that the mastery of these will help solve our world’s problems one day. However, I disagree with her claims because the difference between video games and real life is that games have something called a reset button, where if one fails completely or dies they can start over and continue as if that failure never occurred in the first place. Assuming that gamers constantly save their progresses often, they could even start over on where they had lost or died, meaning that failure doesn’t cause them significant losses at all. Unfortunately, that doesn’t quite transfer into the real world. Failure to accomplish something significant cannot be wiped out by resetting, and if you die in real life, you don’t come back. This is where I believe that these “skills” that video games aspire in gamers vanish upon transitioning into the real world. If video games were programmed to stop working after one dies, I believe that gamers wouldn’t be optimistic, as willing to work with others, so on and so forth. So I feel that the power of the reset button is the reason of the difference between the personalities of kids through the real and gaming world, and that increasing the amount of online gaming played won’t solve any more world problems than the ones we have already.
Hi, I also watched the Jane McGonigal’s video of game. Similar with you, I also doubt her argument but my reason is different with you. Your reason is a good reason that I did not noticed before. You said gamers can reset and start over in the game once they failed but people cannot start over in the real life so the cost of failure in the real life is much bigger than in the game world. Actually your reason is similar with mine because my reason also focus on the differences between real life and game. I think there are much differences between real world and virtual world so it is very difficult to imitate the real environment in the game. Therefore, I doubt the efficiency of resolving actual problems through playing games if the environment between game and actual world is different.