Thursday, June 3, 2010

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

Thomas Henry Culhane  

When I started my ARG (Alternate Reality Game) for involving community members through gaming to help urban planning for a sustainable Cairo (see my machinima at http://www.youtube.com/tculhane#p/search/1/HWRz7JfSeuw and http://www.youtube.com/tculhane#p/search/0/OPOJ4m9zpy8 and my description at http://solarcities.e...u/downloads.htm) I thought I was one of the only people out there arguing that gaming can make a better world. Now I find we have more and more allies out there! Thanks to Tali Krakowski for passing this important TED talk on!

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www.ted.com
TED Talks Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.
Tuesday at 5:25am · · · Share
 
I'm now using UNITY 3D, but will soon be working with the open source code of Ryzom to create my eutopian urban planning game. The keys, as McGonigal defines them:
Blissful Productivity
Urgent Optimism
Social Fabric
Epic Meaning.... See More
Who among you will join me in helping create the next generation of "real-world problem solving games" like "World Without Oil", Superstruct, the "Global Extinction Awareness System" and "Evoke" that Jane and the Institute for the Future have created? The logic of games that build on our collective-intelligence infrastructure suggests this is too important a task to be left to the professionals. As Jane says, "Instead of providing gamers with better and more immersive alternatives to reality, I want all of us to be become responsible for providing the world with a better and more immersive reality."
 
Nice video... you can do smilar things with Sketchup (but of course they don't do horses...)
Tuesday at 8:57am · 
Byron DeLear
Byron DeLear
game of eutopia
Tuesday at 7:46pm · 
Thomas Henry Culhane
Thomas Henry Culhane
Yes Byron, much like Bucky Fuller's World Game, but ever so much more powerful. I hope you will work on it with me! The first thing I need to build is a working 3D model of the nepalese biodigestor to share with my colleagues in Engineers without Borders in Bethlehem (the design plans are at http://www.bspnepal.org.np/biogas-design). Then I need some sketchup work done georeferenced to Bethlehem itself and then, using Blender and Ryzom we should be able to put it into a MMORPG. Want to help?
Tuesday at 8:26pm · 
Byron DeLear
Byron DeLear
Oh Yes!
Tuesday at 9:58pm · 
 
 

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