Games and the real world

Jane McGonigal is Lead Games Designer at the Institute for the Future (cool!)
and talked about games will connect better with reality. She suggested that networked games work better than reality in three areas:

- They come with better instructions (though, I can't remember when I last saw a young gamer read the manual).

- You get scores, energy tables and get a sense of how you are performing within that world - the kind of feedback you don't get in the real world.

- You also get better community in a virtual world - everyone shares the same sense of purpose.

Average gamer in a MMO spends 16+ hours a week in the game and about 10+ thinking about it. For Jane, this is rational behaviour.

So for many games, virtual reality is beating reality.

A rather radical approach to bringing kids back to the real world is something like Chore Wars - which appears to be quite popular, if a tad ironic. Or a game Jane designed called Cruel 2 B Kind - where you attack people with kindness, instead of AK47s.

Finally, she mentioned a game called World without Oil, a learning tool creating a virtual world around a fictional scenario without oil.

A forecast from Jane is that there will be attempts to embed the dynamic of virtual gameplay into ordinary life. Meanwhile new, 'non-gamers' will get into this space. Result? A new wave of immersive, life-changing games which move into the mainstream.

Keep an eye on Jane's thinking and research on her blog.