Why We Play

During class, we had watched a TED talk by video game creator Jane McGonigal about how putting effort toward fixing real life problems would be easier if we had the same mentality as we did when we put effort towards video games. Americans currently invest 3 billion hours towards video games a week. To be able to fix all of the worlds problems, it would take 21 billion hours per week. This seems quite impossible, but the way McGonigal puts it, if we all work together instead of butting heads, it is possible.
In the outside of class reading, "Why We Play" by Rusel de Maria, we have learned that games, whether simple games or virtual video games, we are learning valuable life lessons and developing many valuable skills. Some examples of these are we are able to tackle obstacles to "achieve the epic win" as McGonigal had put it. De Maria says that video games present a difficult challenge that players must use strategy and critical thinking to achieve these goals or "epic wins". This also ties in with McGonigal's idea that gamers are extremely self motivated. De Maria says that games give us the unknown and we are motivated to discover the unknown. The last point that both McGonigal and de Maria point out is that we work harder when it appears to be a game. Some of the most successful people believe that if you have fun with whatever your career is, you will never work a day in your life.

Comments

  1. Katelyn MarieMarch 6, 2017 at 7:24 PM

    You make a good point when you said we are learning valuable skills. I believe that games help us in some ways but face-to-face communication is still something to work on.

    ReplyDelete

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