Game designer Jane McGonigal thinks games have great power. And not just the power to entertain. Yesterday at the TED 2010 (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Long Beach, Calif., she talked about how gaming can help us figure out real-world problems.
“Reality is broken,” McGonigal says. “And we all need to tap into a collective sense of urgent optimism — as well as the ability and capacity to act now — to make the future.”
As director of game research and development for the Institute for the Future, McGonigal designs massive, multi-player games that tap into people’s creativity to find the best path toward a positive tomorrow.
One great example of how this works is a game called “World Without Oil,” which McGonigal and Ken Eklund created in 2007 to investigate how we might adapt to such a scenario. An amazing 1,800 players in 12 countries had to imagine how to survive and succeed in an atmosphere where the engine of our modern lives has ground to a halt.
The long-term project involves following the players over the course of years and observing how they change in response to the experience, McGonigal said in an interview with Wired magazine. The players report “having not only changed their own daily habits, but [they are] teaching friends, coworkers, family members, neighbors to adopt these habits as well.”
Tapping into large groups of people in a way only possible through digital media means the possibility of combining a lot of small efforts into bigger change. “We’re inventing all the time the new ways to make a difference at a micro scale,” says McGonigal.
“When you add up [small] contributions, they make something bigger, like Wikipedia, like micro-financing. There are scalable actions that when you add them all up you do make something bigger.” They amount to actions that can change the world.
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