"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
Social innovation and cultural penetration
"Don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)"
The reason I signed up for this game was Jane McGonigal's equal parts inspiring and naive talk about online gaming as a way to resolve the world's problems. For all her unbridled optimism and good points about the virtues of online games, she also neglects to acknowledge all their problems: PK'ers, clan wars, market scammers, zone monopolization, reality detachment, etc. The more I watch her talk at TED, the more I cannot help but think she has spent more time studying online games than actively participating in them.
The same evils found on the real world, can be found in online worlds. Not because they are there by design, but because the players themselves placed them there. This does speak volumes about human nature and our innate bad habits. If anyone is to change the world in any significant way, the first step is to do it through society, and the only way to do that is in a way that society will embrace, by providing also a construct for those BAD things society enjoys.
We are much more complex than good and bad or moral and immoral. As much as it bothers people to admit it, they do enjoy watching trains crash as much as they love to see puppies play.
There is a reason educational games have only had a mild appeal – and only with parents, not with the final gamer. The reason is, we will only feel engaged by media that appeals to some of our most primitive needs, while those who focus on education normally come out as preachy and boring. Hence why TV dramas and Fox news enjoy a much larger audience than educational programming.
Fighting society to change society is only a red herring, the real success will be to give society something that will create change without fighting or opposing them, with media that will keep them interested and engaged without making them feel put down or lectured. It is a balancing act and many things will get indeed lost in the translation, but it can be done. And the perfect medium to make society innovate and reinvent itself is, in agreement with McGonigal, online gaming. No other media has the power to actually immerse the spectator in the experience to the point of being a participant, it just needs to be tailored VERY carefully, lest the message get lost or the audience driven away.
And again, the only way to change the world is to change society and the way we interact with others.
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Comment by Sarah Hickox on April 3, 2010 at 5:51am
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I'm very interested in how this games plays out. You bring up some very good points. I have a feeling that Jane is more than aware of them...they just weren't the best thing to attract interest in her TED speech.
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Comment by Julio Cesar Corona Ortega on April 4, 2010 at 7:10am
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Yes, I agree she may have neglected to mention them on purpose, but I don't believe she should have. There are certain things that even non-gamers understand, and neglecting those points only helped diminish her own presentation.
I know gamers I showed the video to that stopped watching mid way because they disagreed with her on key points of her speech, felt misrepresented and/or believed she was WAY off on her arguments.
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