Inspiration: Jane McGonigal
I found this video (embedded below) through Current last week. Nick and I both watched it all the way through and were totally inspired by what this lady had to say! The speaker is Jane McGonigal from the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, CA. Jane’s talk a the TED conference is about harnessing the skills of gamers to solve real world problems. She points out that many children have logged over 10,000 hours of gaming by the time they graduate high school, making them “masters” of gaming by author Malcolm Gladwell’s standards. She goes on to describe the four areas that gamers have become so skilled in and describes gamers as an untapped human resource. Her challenge is to find a way to make the real world more like the gaming world, where things like perseverance and problem-solving come naturally, where people are quick to collaborate and slow to give in to defeat. She has developed several “games” at the Institute for the Future, including one which challenges players to plan out the last 23 years of Earth’s existence facing imminent destruction, which try and fuse the gaming world with the real world to allow gamers to use their skills towards saving the world, for real.
I definitely recommend you watch the video. Jane is a truly inspiring lady, and her mission really appeals to people like me who love media like video games, but also want to make a difference in the world. (P.S. She also worked on I Love Bees with 42 Entertainment…this lady is basically my hero.)
