Save The World By Playing Video Games

[aquatsr]

Solving Real World Problems by Playing Games
by, aquatsr

Practicality
It's a concept recently spotlighted at the TED conference but one that has been floating around for quite some time: using video games, especially those exhibiting virtual worlds, to solve problems faced by people in real life.

Jane McGonigal, a game designer with Institute for the Future, said in Long Beach, California, U.S.A. that people worldwide spend 3 billion hours per week immersed in online gameplay. According to McGonigal, in order to solve the world's problems, that number must be upped to 21 billion hours, 7 times the current amount.

"My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games," she said. Gamers, according to her, are willing to put in hours if faced with the right sort of work incentive.



Implementation
To achieve tangible results, McGonigal takes a leaf out of Microsoft's Imagine Cup book. Imagine Cup is a competition held every year by the software giant based out of Redmond, WA in which software developers build applications, including sometimes games, which are geared towards solving real-life challenges people face across the globe.

One of McGonigal's projects, "called World Without Oil, put gamers in a scenario where they had to come up with inventive ways to exist on a planet that had run out of fossil fuels. Players had to make changes to their real lives and then post about them online to advance in the game. Most of the 1,700 people who participated in that game have kept up with the changes they've made to their lives since the game was launched in 2007."

Pop-culture
This concept of using games to drive real world changes or solving challenges was also demonstrated in the television show Stargate Universe, in which 28-year-old Eli Wallace (actor David Blue), a M.I.T. dropout mathematical computer genius solves a puzzle in the game Prometheus that turns out to be a previously unsolvable math proof embedded into the game, thus earning him a spot on the Stargate team.

Considerations
Obviously, participants in Imagine Cup and innovators such as McGonigal have similar visions of millions of potential workers whose primary motivations are to have fun. However, neither Microsoft nor Institute for the Future seem to have considered the side effects of Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) and the more subtle reasons individuals may be drawn to these games, such as trying to escape from their reality.

Nevertheless, the high volume of gamers and enormous potential for putting those hours and hours of gameplay to actual use making obscene amounts of cash for Blizzard make targeted online gaming especially appealing to developers like McGonigal.

Sources:
CNN
Imagine Cup
Slashdot

[F4thAcE]

huh never really thought of video games being able to do this but if you play a POSITIVE game enough you could start living by it i guess

[FreeK]

this seems really interesting. im looking towards more of this in "this next decade"