Yeah, that title is not just a typo. As crazy as it sounds there may be evidence to claim that online gaming and individuals involved in it may be the key to solving many of the world's most pending issues: world hunger, global warming, cancer and aids, and the dependency on fossil fuels.
Author and game designer, Jane McGonigal (reminds me of a set with a particular under-age wizard), has done years of research on online gaming around the world. Her newly published book, The truth is Broken, explores the reasons why our generation likes to play games more than ever before. cube blog station In conclusion portions of her book: there are certainly a lot of men and women playing video gaming and online games (yes, it's quite a shocker isn't it?)! So just how many individuals are we speaing frankly about? Well, they estimate more than half a million people play at the least 1 hour daily and that roughly 95% of boys and girls under 18 play video gaming regularly. In all honesty, I was pretty surprised that 94% of the girls surveyed played online games regularly.
Based by myself personal experience, finding a female player on many of the MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) that I go on is similar to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack (or perhaps a Fandral's Flamescythe or perhaps a 20/20 Paladin Hellfire Charm). But I think it probably has regarding the games that I play and the games that a lot of females for the reason that age group would play. Please comment and share which games you ladies play the most. I personally feel that it's a secret many guys would really like demystified.
Anyhow, I must digress. My teenage years were full of memories of my mother pleading with me to avoid playing games on the computer. “Stop playing games. Why have you been wasting your time? What have you been going to understand from shooting zombies, or building armies to destroy another civilization? Get to sleep!” And to these statements I made my rebuttals: Left4dead teaches me co-operative, tactical, communication skills and the capability to react quickly to unexpected problems and situations; Age of Empires teaches me strategic planning, how to many efficiently manage my limited resources, and the delicate art of timing and patience. Now this ties in quite nicely with the most controversial statement that Ms. McGonigal made facing an audience of several thousands at a current TED conference: “Currently, we as humans spend 9 billion hours playing online games every week. That's not enough. In order to create change on the planet, we must dramatically increase that rate. We need to play 21 billion hours of online games each week!”
Upon hearing that statement, I reacted much like everyone else for the reason that audience and let out a hearty “ahh… I see that which you did there. Haha.”-chuckle. Ends up the lady wasn't joking. She is 100% serious that she wants 21 billion hours of online gaming to be achieved weekly over the following decade. That means we truly need about 3 billion individuals to play at the least 1 hour of games per day. For reasons uknown, all I will consider may be the lag I receive when my server reaches 10,000 players.
Jokes aside, gamers do have certain qualities that set them aside from non-gamers. Jane tries to qualify these into 4 main traits:
Gamers have urgent optimism. They are extremely self-motivated and will hardly ever delay or procrastinate in an activity that they may perform immediately – at the least in the virtual world; try getting them to wash their rooms or take the garbage- that's a complete other issue). This really is quite rare to see in many human beings as I believe we've a predisposition towards procrastination and are rarely ever extremely self-motivated. Gamers are also in a position to weave a limited social fabric and are able and more willing to produce and develop communities, share ideas and resources, and to work co-operatively towards a typical task or goal. This application towards real-world problems would have tremendous potential. Another interesting trait is that gamers have blissful productivity. They are able to stay on a job (productive in the virtual world) all day on end (sometimes days) with full energy. After working an 8 or 9 hour shift I'd sometimes come home and spend easily another 5-6 hours on Diablo 2, trying to perform that runeword for Enigma. Finally, this brings us to epic meaning. Gamers like to be mounted on these awe-inspiring, end-of-life-as-we-know-it predicaments, and missions that rest in hands of 1 person. Know everyone knows about wikipedia (if you don't, you ought to wiki it). It's the largest free-form collection of information about the world. The second largest wiki in the whole world may be the World of Warcraft wiki which contains over 80,000 articles about anything and everything WOW related. This really is an epic collection of information about a virtual world and if this is harnessed towards developing a wiki with this magnitude for say – cancer, then the options are limitless.
