Gaming Will Help Save The World?
Jane McGonigal’s Ted Talk claims that gamers will save the world because of their drive, optimism, and collaboration. I’ve played many multiplayer games so the experience she speaks of, people across the world coming together passionately for one common goal, is not unfamiliar to me. There’s a fulfilling feeling to collaborate with your team and assign different tasks. Some gamers excel more at different tasks: supporting your teammates by giving them boosts or healing them, attacking from a distance without having to worry about attacks from enemies, being at the front of the assault to keep most of the damage off your teammates, and many more depending on the game you’re playing at the time. Usually, people think of games that involve fighting when it comes to collaboration, but there’s many games out there call for teamwork without violence while working towards a goal. For example, Nintendo’s new game SnipperClips forces players to work together to solve puzzles by changing their avatars’ shapes.
I can see McGonigal’s points, when all the components of gaming with others are laid out in front of me. If we can find a way to get people to work on tasks in the same way they work on problems in games, we’d have a whole lot less problems. I’m skeptical of achieving this goal though.
In class, we discussed how the medium of the message could be more powerful than the message itself. If it’s not delivered in a way that’s interesting or powerful, people won’t be receptive to it. I think the same applies to problems. When a person is presented with a problem in a video game, a place that can be filled with a person’s fantasies and is perceived as a fun task, compared to a problem in “real life”, which is often seen as work with no fun or value in it, this person is likely to respond differently. The issue here is to present problems to people in a way that make them respond more positively, with a gamer’s optimistic enthusiasm as McGonigal says.
I think a way to address this issue, is to have people play games that are more realistic to the world around them. For example, the farming games we played in class made us realize how much work is involved in running a farm- something most if not all of us have no experience in. If we are exposed to how aspects of the world works by giving the education through games, I think we’ll be more receptive to jumping on the problems in the real world when we recognize them.
Hopefully that problem won’t be the rise of the dead. If it is though, the gamers are prepared.
