Jane McGonigal on how gamers can save the world

Les traigo una charla de TED que de alguna forma tiene un punto de contacto con la idea que venimos manejando. La idea de usar los juegos como un agente de cambio y generar valor real a partir de las millones de horas invertidas por los usuarios. Les dejo la fuente.

Humans spend 3 billion hours per week playing online games. That's lot of brainpower. In her talk, game designer Jane McGonigal explains that this time could be parlayed into a massive cooperative research project. In fact, she wants us to connect up even more, to the point where we spend up to 21 billion hours per week playing problem-solving games.

She points out some interesting numbers in her talk: Recent Carnegie Mellon research that says that young people in countries with strong gaming cultures play games for an average of 10,000 hours before they're 21. Coincidentally, Malcolm Gladwell posits in his book Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours to become really good any anything. That means today's gamers are virtuosos.

Now imagine what would happen if these gamers spent millions of hours applying their gaming expertise to collectively solving problems such as world poverty, the economic crisis or our dependence on oil.

McGonigal's talk is rapid-fire and convincing as she moves quickly from the basic tenets into three examples of games she has created at the Institute for the Future. Her latest game, called Evoke, is designed to help gamers solve an economic crisis as they complete 10 quests. The idea is that gamers develop their own unique ideas for, say, bringing clean water to people in isolated areas or developing a new mass transit system.

Reality check: The problem with McGonigal's theory, says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, is that the incentive to play games is often not the reward or the outcome, but the entertainment value. People do not play Call of Duty to get the badge of honor at the end, but mainly because it's fun to shoot a high-powered rifle. To make gaming-for-the-world work, he says, the games need to be more engaging and just plain fun.