Jane Mcgonigal is a game designer and she believes that playing online games is helpful for us to solve real-world problems. In the video, Jane comes up with four things that what games are making us virtuosos at. The first thing is that gamers always have a hope of success and believes it is always worth trying. The second thing is that in the games people can build stronger social relationships and they can trust each other to cooperate. The third thing is that games can bring them pleasure and make them happier than anything they do like shopping or hanging out. They are willing to work hard in the game. The fourth thing is that “ Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions” (Jane).From these four things, we can find that online games are beneficial for people. She also mentions a economist whose name is Edward Castronova to states the reason why so many people love to play games. In games, gamers can achieve more. They can build stronger relationships with other gamers; they can get better feedback and feel more rewarded than they do in the real life. I agree with these views. There are a lot of my friends love playing online games. Most of them even spend all nights playing and have no rest because they believe games can help them have more achievements and they are more respected than they are in the real world. However, all these people I knew who are addicted to playing games don’t have any achievements and contributions in the real world. They cannot deal with their own problems and take good care of themselves, not mention to resolve real-world problems. I admit that people can learn more and get more from online games. But if a person devote himself completely into the world of games and use this way to get rid of problems from real world, how can he live better and use what he learned from games to solve real-world problems which he even doesn’t want to face? The conditions for every people is different. If people just treat games as a way which can help them get rid of troubles from reality, I don’t believe they will learn something from games and know how to solve real-world problems.
I somewhat agree with your statement “However, all these people I knew who are addicted to playing games don’t have any achievements and contributions in the real world. They cannot deal with their own problems and take good care of themselves, not mention to resolve real-world problems. I admit that people can learn more and get more from online games.” (Han 2014) Many of my friends who play games literally do not have any achievements and contributions in the real world. But I think it is a matter of the degree that they devote themselves in games. I think playing game will definitely help to solve problems in real life by playing games; however, people should manage their time spending in games and in real life rather than spending their whole time in playing game.
I am glad you brought up the question about how we would get that many hours of gaming to happen. Especially when there is a stigma surrounding the negativity of gaming currently in the media. I think agree with you also that Jane did a very good job by highlighting the uniqueness of gamers with positive language that inspires optimism. I would have never thought of gamers as “optimistic” people before listening to her Ted Talk because In my opinion I have seen gamers as more reclusive and passive about the world. Now I see the potential to use their experiences with success on line and creativity in the real world. It definitely makes sense to use technology creatively to solve problems that involve issues with technology currently.
I really like you analyze. However, when you said “all these people I knew who are addicted to playing games don’t have any achievements and contributions in the real world”(Han 2014), I have some disagreement. The reason is these people you know that are addicted to “games”,(in my opinion, I think it’s just one game in most of the case), they are not gamers. They are just a group of people who has no self-control and at the same time they like games. This “game habit” can be anything like something really simple: reading books. Does a person addict to read novels and at the same time he/she does not achieve anything in real life means he/she can’t take good care of themselves? I positively doubt it. And in Jane Mcgonigal’s TED talk, what she meant is gamers solve problems in game but they don’t notice that. Game designer like Jane provides a game with real life problem in it and gamers will solve these problems without even noticing. She wants to prove that gamers has a strong capability to solve the puzzles and the world needs to lead them and show them how to do it.
I can provide a definition of what is a game. A game is a number of players play a game under certain rules and get pay backs. This is even in Economics academic terms. Game is rational because it limits by rules and if you as a player don’t learn well in this game, you won’t success and you will quit. The easy way to understand is the whole world is fulfilled with games. At this moment, I am not talking about video games anymore, but more general, games in real life. Gamers, as definition, is a group of people who are good at solving puzzles base at some certain rules. It is not everyone can be a gamer. Most people are just addicted to games but they are not gamers because they don’t truly love games and yet they never truly understand games. So my conclusion is gamers have the capability to impact the world but they need someone to lead them. The people who can lead them is the group of people who can understand this theory first before everyone else like Jane Mcgonigal. If you have any further argument, please feel free to reply to this.
this was useless