Recruiting all gamers for the dream team

A guest speaker in last week’s class, Dr. Lindsay Grace, Armstrong Professor of Creative Arts, Director of the Persuasive Play Laboratory Miami University, introduced to me an area of digital media that I had an immense amount of experience in (playing), but never from an advertiser’s perspective.

I have spent countless hours playing video games trying to get a high score, to get to the next level, to achieve the next objective, etc. In the end, I may have fulfilled all the objectives and saved the world from ending, but not in real life.

“Games don’t just sell products…they sell ideas,” said Grace. “But playing a game by yourself doesn’t help you spread the word…the new goal is to turn each player into a message promoter.” Darfur is Dying is a great example of a social impact game, that I had never heard of until Grace mentioned it.

Grace’s presentation got me thinking, we have so many problems in the real world that are still waiting to be solved…yet how many hours are we putting in to solving them?

I decided to explore a name that Grace mentioned, Jane McGonigal. Her TEDtalk on how ‘Gaming can make a better world,’ is a compelling argument that is on the verge of genius! "My goal for the next decade is to try to make it easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games," says McGonigal ("Tedtalks jane mcgonigal:," 2010).

Games make us virtuosos at urgent optimism, weaving a tight social fabric, blissful productivity, and epic meaning, McGonigal explains, making gamers super-empowered hopeful individuals ("Tedtalks jane mcgonigal:," 2010).

These are exactly the kind of people we need on the team to solve ‘real’ world problems. Why not use the super powers of gamers? Brilliant. We can build an army of gamers, a real dream team! 

Not only can we sell ideas through games, but through social impact games, gamers can generate ideas to give to us; discovering possible solutions to world problems that we can only begin to imagine.

Tedtalks jane mcgonigal: Gaming can make a better world [Web]. (2010). Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html