In her TED talk, Jane
McGonigal proposed an idea that is to make the game as a way for people to save
the world. In addition to making a comparison between the different emotions of
people in the game world and in reality, she presented three game examples that
were aiming at solving the problems of the real world by letting people play the
game. By looking through all these
games, it’s not difficult to find a common mode – firstly set a virtual context (a
tragic situation), then build a bridge between the two worlds with the information
from the reality and finally to collect ideas and solutions raised by players.
World without oil – How to live without oil
Superstruct –
Humans only have 23 years to go
Evoke – If you have a
problem, and you can't solve it alone, evoke it.
“We are using games
to escape real-world suffering, we are using games to get away from everything
that’s broken, everything that’s not satisfying about the real life and we’re
getting what we need from games.” Jane McGonigal explained the reason why
people are easily addicted to video games in her speech. In the video game,
Time and Space are two things that can be stretched and squeezed arbitrarily.
For instance, an hour in the real world might be a day or even a month in the
game. Generally, a player can pick up a skill or realize a self-improvement
within a way short amount of time comparing with the reality. Things are
actually become easier in a game since the world-saving missions are also
perfectly matched with the current level of the player character. I think what
McGonigal wants to do is actually to evoke a sense of mission of the players;
to make people believe what they do can really make a difference in reality. Such call of heroism
might be the trigger for people to play these games. But I think the way she
adopted was too literal since the game play is just to ask players to come
up with solutions for specific problems (more like to assign an essay with a given topic to players).
For me, I do
believe that gaming can make a better world just like I believe games can
teach. However, comparing with these so-called “real functions”, I more appreciate
the emotional and spiritual function of the game in an abstract way. We always
say that music can heal heart and soul and even the world. Of course that music
cannot produce food and natural resources, but music can indeed touch and
inspire people which can be seen as a lighthouse guiding people to behave
correctly. And I believe what games can do are similar to music. After all, games can’t physically change the world, they can only change the way of people’s
thinking and behaving.
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