"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.
The Wired interview with Jane McGonigal
[I am sorry about the abundance of World of Warcraft-references here, but I use this game as an example since it is the most popular MMORPG around]
The game industry has spent the last 30 years optimizing two things: how to make people happy and how to inspire collaboration on really complex challenges…. We have all the problems surrounding hunger, poverty, climate change, energy and those are all such extreme-scale problems that require so many different actors to work together, so much concerted effort and so much creative thinking that they seem to be the kinds of problems that gamers have been trained to solve.
As an avid gamer, I have often wondered how come games have created such complex systems for tackling specific challenges (for instance it OS+3 during the first month of WOTLK in WoW) and yet when it comes to real-world problems, there is such an abundance of information, and yet, often, the ones who need the information have no way of finding it unless they have really good skills at googling.
I think Jane McGonical is on to something crucial here - it is evident that she also has made 'the click', seeing how online gaming has created a sub-culture of innovation which could be useful also in tackling 'real issues'.
In a game, the success criteria is absolute: Either you down the boss, or you don't. Either you break the speed-record of Naxx25, or you don't. In real life, money can be gathered (that is measurable), and some success criteria can be measured (did this village get a new well or not?) but many can not be measured. Especially when things go wrong, it is hard to figure out why, because so many different agents are at play, and the 'gameplay' is so much more complex.
In a game like WoW, you can often (using World of Logs or similar) figure out what went wrong. You can point at the exact point where the healers slacked, resulting in a wipe. You can point at a dps level which is too low during a certain phase of the encounter.
In real life, how do you measure performance? How can the public measure the reasons for why X amount of million $ can be spent on the challenge of giving mosquito nets to children all around Africa, and yet so (relatively speaking) few children are actually given the mosquito net?
Again: Unknown factors - there are simply too many agents in play.
Also: Reports are written, but those reports are shelved somewhere, and the people having written that report move on to their next deadline, their next task.
So games give us that sense of blissful productivity…. Neurochemically we’re kind of fired up … to take on challenges…. Games take us immediately out of a state of paralysis or alienation or depression and they switch on the positive ways of thinking. They trigger the brain to a state in which it’s possible to do good work. It’s possible to aspire to tough goals.
This is crucial insight, and if I could give Jane +100 for this alone, I would. The mixture of play and work is actually well-known in education. Even Alfred North Whitehead wrote about this in the 20s! The importance of the cycle between play and serious work. (I will post quotes from his book later - I have his book at home)
Three years ago, the World Bank Institute tried an online project that would teach social innovation to university students, and it was not overwhelmingly well-received. The students were not engaged. They didn’t believe that they could be the kind of person to do that work.
Actually, before I read this interview, I had no idea that it is WBI that is funding this site. That is very interesting, in a lot of ways. For instance, I wonder how the reception of the game would be changed if the World Bank logo would be very visible on the site. I think it would make a big difference, and as such it makes sense that the logo is Not there. But again, this is interesting, and will probably become a topic of it's own later on.
I’d like to see Blizzard take on a serious game. I’d like it to not to just be two separate tracks of game development. I think … the way the legal system has pro bono allocations for lawyers I think game developers should have some kind of pro bono allocation for games for good.
I think it would be very interesting if Blizzard took a shot at "serious games". I hope someone at Blizzard has read the Wired article, and if so, it would be interesting to see what response they or other big game-producers would have to Jane's challenge.
Views: 20
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Comment by Bruce Haynes on March 4, 2010 at 12:24pm
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Raymond I've given you a KNOWLEDGE SHARE as you give great context about the origins and ultimate objectives of what we are doing here
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Comment by Brian Ballsun-Stanton on March 6, 2010 at 11:55am
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How can we use this tool, EVOKE, to bootstrap a Darknet?
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