Blog Post 5: So What? Who Cares?

In Jane McGonigal’s TedTalk “Gaming can make a better world”, she claims that people need to spend more time playing online games, and in turn that will improve and solve our current world’s problems. I think she does answer the questions of “so what” and “who cares”. She does this by starting out with suggesting people should play more video games, which I think these days people think of as a joke and just for entertainment, and she relates current real world problems to challenges placed within video games. Her argument is quite interesting because obviously everyone cares about real world problems, but how would technologies we view as entertainment solve that? She uses the strategy of appealing to issues that hopefully everyone around the world cares about. She uses other works like famous books, and even popular movies. She breaks down the key skills people can learn from games, and applies them to real life issues that many people can relate to: starting with individual problems in life all the way to world scale problems. She takes a seemingly unimportant technology and suggestion of playing more video games, and connects it to problems people face every day and problems they do care about.