Out of all the video/readings that were assigned this week, the one that intrigued me most was Jane McGonigal’s “Gaming Can Make A Better World” video. First, let me say that the following statements are purely my own opinion and are to be taken with a grain of salt. My mother, who loves online games and the gaming world was all for Jane’s ideas. I, however, was not.  While I can appreciate where she’s coming from -that people spending 3 billion hours playing online games can somehow transfer their “epic wins” from the virtual world to the real world, and ultimately solve some of it’s more pressing problems-, I find it hard to believe that people, if faced with the same circumstances in real life as the games they are playing, would act the same. Gamers act the way that they do because it’s a virtual world. There are no consequences in a game, you can go balls-to-the-walls because the things that happen to you or the things you do in that game don’t (shouldn’t) effect your real life. You don’t like the results of the game? Start over. In real life, there is no do-over button. Oh, how I wish there was, but unfortunately there isn’t one. The one thing she did say that I believe to be true, and also sad, is that people play these games to escape reality. In a virtual world you can be whoever or whatever you want, you’re only limited by your imagination. How unbearable have our lives become that we feel like we have to escape? I don’t know a whole lot of gamers so my take on Jane McGonigal’s ideas are biased because of that but I don’t find it plausible that playing these games 21 billion hours a week will make the world better (Jane’s estimated amount of time we should be playing games).

TED video: http://youtu.be/dE1DuBesGYM