When watching the Jane McGonagall Ted Talk it was interesting to hear about her idea of game play with the idea of playing more games to solve more problems. I thought it was an interesting outlook to say that, “gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real world work”. The fact that we spend over “3 billion hours a week” cooperating, interacting, and fighting with each other shows that there is potential for solving real world problems using this time. I thought it was interesting to learn that we achieve more and are motivated to do more in games than in real life. We feel that we have to keep working harder to complete the level and we can’t give up. I thought her question to why do we feel overwhelmed, want to give up or something is too hard in real life but not in game life? I question how if we feel we can change the world in game life, what is going to involve in the real world? Are we making games too challenging where our audience is so focused on beating the level to where they are not focused on real life? Or do our games not motivate people to work as hard in real life as they do in game life? It is sad to hear about how much effort our society puts into gamer life than into real life. I imagine and question what our world would look like if we put the same amount of effort into life as we did in gamer life?
Hi Janie,
I loved your insight on how we spend over 3 billion hours a week cooperating, interacting and fighting with each other. Some time could absolutely be spent more wisely in order to solve the world’s every day problems. To attempt to try and answer your question as to why we feel overwhelmed, I think that technology has truly taken over some people’s lives and they do not interact with people face to face in the way that many used to.
I similarly found McGonigal’s idea interesting but very far-fetched. I think her idea works in theory but in reality it would be very difficult to get enough gamers to switch over to a game such as, “world without oil.” The part that I found fascinating was when she mentioned how gamers confront obstacles extraordinarily well when compared to real life. She says in real life, “we feel overcome, we feel overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, or cynical. We never have those feelings when we are playing games.” I found this to be just as thought provoking as the idea of a video game that could solve the oil crisis. All in all, interesting points were made in her talk and I enjoyed thinking about her notions.