Game designer and champion Jane McGonigal advocates games as a tool for making the world a better place. She has a book and a pile of research explaining all of the ways in which games can be beneficial for players’ physical and mental health as well as for the wider world.
Gamification is the act of applying video game-like rewards to non-gaming situations as a form of motivation. Imagine earning experience points for taking out the trash, or scoring well on a customer service survey, or learning how to create homemade explosives for use in terrorist acts.
Only video games can save the world, says Jane McGonigal, but only if we dedicate more time to playing them, some 21 billion hours of game time per week needed to survive the next century.
Yesterday we reported that Ray Kurzweil had launched a futurism-themed MMO – Superstruct.