Who's Up for a Quick Game of Galaga?

I've finally found someone who understands me - the "thirty-years-ago"me.

If you have ever played video or computer games - especially if you are in your forties and spent a lot of time (and a significant part of your college fund) in video arcades - you really need to check out the work of Jane McGonigal.  She is currently the Director of Game Research & Development at the Institute for the Future. Her interest and area of study focuses on how online gaming - in great numbers - creates new collective intelligences. In short, she claims that gamers possess a unique set of abilities culled from their leisure activity.

I'll wait for a moment while you gasp loudly and regain your senses.

McGonigal has developed online games where players put the skills they've acquired while gaming to - wait for it - solve the problems that face our world. REAL problems, not the ones that we all faced while we searched fervently for the chainguns and rocket launchers in our DOOM-iverse. One such game is a simulation called "World Without Oil" in which you have a finite reserve of oil and you play using your own habits of consumption. The idea is to stretch that reserve as far as you can. I have yet to play, but rest assured I will soon.

Is there credibility in the idea of taking the collective wisdom of gamers who have spent a good deal of their lives saving imaginary worlds and applying it to saving the one in which they live? Critics say that the current reality is not shooting aliens, stealing cars, or rescuing princesses. Advocates say it's precisely that mindset and those strategic abilities that we need to substitute "saving humanity from The Covenant" with "saving humanity from its own missteps."

How do you feel about gaming and the potential possibilities of creating a generation of world-crisis problem solvers? Is this reaching out to the Millenials and addressing their needs, as Dr. Z Reflects asks in his current blog, or is it simply an elaborate argument to justify the hours of time spent in front of a game console? See what Ms. McGonigal has to say for herself in this 2010 TEDTalks.



By the way, about the time Jane McGonigal was born, I was likely hanging out in the now long-gone Silver Dollar Arcade in Fairmont, Minnesota, honing my X-Wing fighter skills and making my student loan burden that much bigger. Not that it makes any difference, but there's just something about a person who has made her life's work about my youthful indiscretions. More power to her.