Game Over: It’s Time to Live It

I knew my mom should have let me own an Atari. She never budged. I had to do my best mastering Asteroids and Ms. Pac-Man at the bars with dad instead. We were poor, but quarters were one thing I could get in abundance from him when there was no money for anything else. Maybe it was his subversive way of investing in me – helping his boy gain real life skills that might, you know, some day save the world.

Or maybe he was just keeping me happy and out of his hair.

Either way, I have fond memories of those early days gaming. Shooting descending centipedes, saving a girl from a computerized ape, hopping across the road to safety before being flattened by cars and trucks, all while moderately sloshed patrons cheered me on from their nearby stools. Quarter by quarter, I got lost in these virtual worlds despite the clunky, pixilated graphics and limited adventure space of arcade games.

Fast forward 30 years to last week, and I’m now wondering if I should have stuck with those playful quests. If it were up to Jane McGonigal, that’s exactly what would have happened.

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Jane McGonigal is a game designer with a PhD in “why we’re better in games than we are in real life.” She believes (with a mix of cheeky humor and eerie seriousness) that if only more of us played more online games – say, in the neighborhood of 21 billion hours per week as compared to the current 3 billion – we could solve the world’s problems.

You’re leaning toward the cheeky humor, I can tell. But here is a woman who believes, “Gamers are Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals. These are people who believe they are individually capable of changing the world, and the only problem is, they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world. That’s a problem that I’m trying to solve.”

I got this quote and an explanation of McGonigal’s proposal by watching her fascinating TED talk. It elicited many thoughts, starting with the fact that I don’t typically see gamers in this positive light. I know they’re committed to winning, but aren’t they simply addicts sitting in the dark while losing sleep, GPA points and social skills? Pardon the lack of subtlety here, but despite having respectable gamer friends, I can’t shake this image.

McGonigal plans to change that.

She says, “[W]hen we’re in game worlds, I believe that many of us become the best versions of ourselves – the most likely to help at a moment’s notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long as it takes, to get up after failure and try again.” Sounds like attributes of committed followers of Jesus. McGonigal knows, however, that we aren’t like this enough in real life. Her goal? Convert virtual behaviors into actual behaviors.

According to her website,

“She has created and deployed award-winning games…in more than 30 countries on six continents, for partners such as the American Heart Association, the International Olympics Committee, the World Bank Institute, and the New York Public Library. She specializes in games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, such as poverty, hunger and climate change, through planetary-scale collaboration.”

She's connecting the two worlds. Consider the example of her award-winning game, World Without Oil. Players must respond to actual lifestyle challenges based on an oil shortage, where “you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true.” McGonigal reports that for the 1700 players invited to pilot this game in 2007, it has been a “transformative experience…. Most of our players have kept up the habits they learned in this game.”

I find myself asking:

• Can faithfulness and redemption rise out of the digital landscape in praise to God?
• Do gamers possess the keys (she names four) to change the real world as stewards of talents, resources and missions - just like they do in the virtual one?
• Where does engagement end and addiction begin? (And vice-versa.)

I never thought employing my dot-eating, ghost-dodging abilities would make a difference in the world, but maybe Ms. Pac-Man teased out that very dream. I should read McGonigal’s book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, which just came out last week. And then ask my wife for an Xbox.

Photo by Iris Jones, with permission via Flickr. Post written by Sam Van Eman.