Art, Games, and Tech
After watching the TED talk by Jane Mcgonigal she makes the claim that there is a massive untapped resource in people who play a lot of a certain type of strategy games. On this point I agree with her, there is clearly a massive resource potential that has not existed before. However I am not as optimistic as her that this will work as well as she hopes. The real world is much more complicated than a game, and there are much more serious consequences and more importantly the real world is strange. She claimed to not want to predict the future, but she did exactly that with her “End of Oil” game. She predicted a peak oil situation that caused the collapse of society. However this situation is unlikely, if oil prices rise more innovation is incentivized and reliance on oil will drop. I also think she is not applying this idea in the right way, people will probably not switch from playing world of warcraft to one of her games. Instead of building her game around the problem she should really be trying to trick people into solving problems by playing games they like. So what would proper implementation of this look like?
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I completely agree with this. In her video, she talks about how she wants to implement these types of games in order to prepare people more on how to be resourceful and change a part of who they are to make the world a better place. But as you said, ” People will probably not switch from playing world of warcraft to one of her games.” I don’t believe that people would make this switch because it is not the same, it isn’t as fun. It would take a lot for kids to switch from a game where you fight and kill monsters to a game where you want to find the ideal lifestyle to live on managing your oil. Even if people did switch, it does not guarantee that it will happen in real life. Real life is much more complicated and things that happen in games aren’t necessarily things that would happen in the real world, so it would take a lot for people to take her games seriously.
There just aren’t as many people playing the game and talking about it as she would hope, which then would gather a lot more people to pay the game and be aware of the siutations going on. But even then, there is no certainty that they will carry this out in to the real world to be applied, but that’s just my opinion.
Your discussion about the TED talk and how the ‘real world’ is more complicated than a game is quite intriguing. You did a brief introduction of Jane Mcgonigal’s points and I think that your mentioning about ‘solving the problem’ is very interesting and practical. I think that there is no clear boundary between the reality and the virtual game. It is important to envision games as a part of real life solutions, however, it is also important to see that sometimes games are still within the virtual realm where everything is substantially different.