How Games Makes a Better World

How games can make a better innovation A few months ago I saw a talk by Jane McGonigal on TED. com. She has been a game designer for about 10 years flat and she had some sincerely interesting ideas about how we spend way to subaltern time playing videogames. We are currently spending 3 zillion hours a week playing online games. That might sound like an awful dish out of playing games and not so much solving problems like hunger, poverty and climate change. But according to her research, we have to increase that playtime to 21 billion hours a week to survive the next century. Have you ever heard about an large win?Thats when you succeed with something and the outcome is so highly positive that you didnt even know that it was possible. What we need is to transfer epic poem wins into the tangible world. But thats not an easy task. In game we get under ones skin the best version of our self. When we are playing games we get much better confidence and we are much more likely to stand up and crusade again after failure, as opposed to when we try to tackle real life problems. In game the missions and problems that you have to solve are always fit in to the level youre currently at. That means that before you even start, you know its possible.You have to work hard to succeed, but you know its possible. When we human face a problem in real life we often dont feel the same way. We often feel overvalued by the problem, depressed or frustrated. In game you rarely feel that way. So what is it in games that make us feel like we can achieve everything? What is it that games have that the real world doesnt? When youre first showing up in a cooperative online game, like Guild Wars, World of Worldcraft or Little Big Planet, at that place are people that are willing to support you with a world saving mission right away.All these collaborators that are willing to help you achieve your epic mission is nothing that exist in real world situations. Theres also a lot more positive feedback in games than it is in the real world. Games like Guitar Hero always boost your confidence by giving bonus point when you for instance managing to play all the notes right at a really difficult part of a song. Or when you make an awesome slide in the middle of the solo. You dont get that figure of positive feedback in real life. When Im done cleaning my room, I wont get +1 cleaning. Or when Ive accurate this homework I wont get +25 school.The problem is that its so rewarding to play computer games that many people ascertain to spend almost all of their time in this virtual world. Just because they think the virtual world is better than the real one. So far, gamers have played out 5,93 million years solving the problems in World of Worldcraft. Imagine if we somehow could transfer all that problem solving in to the real world How we could do this has been a mystery for me ever since I heard her speech. Until now that is. Just a few days ago I read a really intere sting article in the news magazine Ny Teknik.The article was written by Helen Ahlbom and she gave some very good examples on how we are already fashioning the world better with games. Nissan and Fiat has developed new cars models that save your fuel efficiency in an onboard computer. You later upload your statistics to their website and compete with each other on who can drive most eco friendly. I got so interested by these new ideas that I just had to visit Fiats website to see it for myself. It appeared that the transferring of all the good parry from games to the reality had already begun.The game gives you a lot of positive feedback on your driving, much like the feedback I earlier said you didnt get for real world accomplishments. Ive already started making my own computer games. I always thought that computer games was just something silly you played when you where bored. But now I see how games can make the real world a better place. These new ideas has really got me thinki ng and I think that this is something that I genuinely would like to have as a job in the future. A portrait taken by the photographer Phil Toledano of a gamer on the verge of an epic win This is a screenshot from Fiats website