In her TED talk, Jane McGonigal hypothesizes that the pursuit of the “epic win” is one of the prime motivators for gamers who sink many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into their game of choice. She suggests that when we design games that are aimed at tackling a real world problem or achieving some real world goal we need to take advantage of the incentive to participation that the epic win represents. I think that it is particularly in the context of world-changing hard problems that this approach represents another tool in the arsenal.
There seem to be many people arguing against this approach however (commenters in this thread [boing boing] and this one [ massively ]), some taking the idealistic approach that gamers should just stop playing games and should get out into the world and solve those hard problems directly. The problem is that this has not, and probably will not, happen. Others take the approach that because “I Love Bees” or “World Without Oil” are not their kind of game and are less fun than say World of Warcraft, then the whole approach will come to nothing, not realising that what McGonigal has been doing over recent years is to peform the fundamental research and develop the theoretical basis that will underpin the dynamic for participatory games that affect the real world. Finally, others are not seeing that there is more to gaming than playing the latest console game. For some gaming is about rolling the dice and playing according to the rules, for others gaming is about playing with the rules themselves to see what unintended consequences stem from them, for others, gaming is about saying, “to hell with the rules lets just play”. It is this final sense of play, and to a lesser degree fun, as prime motivator, that set McGonigal’s conception of games apart from the others. It is less about the rules and more about the interaction. When you see this you then see that there is already an interplay between the real world and the game world, for example, we can take real world situations and model them formally using games ,as I do with my research into dialogue, or we can do as McGonigal has, take real world situations, such as a looming oil crisis, and associated problems, such as getting people both to care and to become involved, and build a game that raises participation, inspires dialogue, poses possible solutions, and ultimately attempts to the fix the problem. These two approaches are essentially sympathetic and could be unified;
- taking a problem,
- using a formal model to characterise the problem,
- playing with the formal model, assuming a linkage back from this to the real world, something that is rarely direct
- affecting the problem by manipulating the game model rather than working directly
It is steps 3 and 4 that McGonigal is really looking at here, using the game abstraction from the real world problem to inspire, structure, and scaffold involvement rather than as a way to withdraw from involvement. Once you see this you also see parallel approaches being carried out elsewhere, for example, the Play Decide dialogue card games which are being developed to support public engagement and understanding of real world issues like, climate change, nanotechnology, neonatal screening, stem cell research, and xenotransplantation, to name but a few.
To find out more about McGonigal's ideas you can follow her on twitter @avantgame or read her academic papers. A more accessible description of her ideas can be found in her recent book "Reality is Broken
