The Chronicals of McGonial

First of all, I really did enjoy this reading.

McGonial sees a future where games are explicitly designed to imporve quality of life, prevent suffering and create real wide spread happiness. She talks about reality being broken. What does that mean? She raises the question, what if we started to live our rea lives like gamers and lead our real business and communities like game designers and solve real world problems. This alone is an amazing thought. What if we did treat everything like a game?

97% of our yourth play computer and video games. We are collectively spending 3 billion hours a week gaming. Wow! We can interpret these two different facts in so many different ways.

The amount of facts and stories used really gives her credibility with the claims that she is trying to make.

McGonial she says "Games in the 21st century, will be a primary platform for enabling the future. She wants families, schools, companies, industries, to come together and play to tackle real world dilemmas and improve real lives. She says we need to develop our core game competencies so we can take an active role in changing our lives and enabling the future.

McGonial breaks down games to 4 defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. Goals are a sense of purpose. Rules unleash a creativity and foster stategic thinking. Feedback system is however you use it. "The game is over" Voluntary participation requres that everyone who is playing the game knowingsly and willingly accept the goal, rules, and feedback. The ability to win is not a necessary degfining trait of games. Ask Tetris. When I think about it, there are many games that we play with no intentions of winning. The games where you fling something on a slingshot and it just measures the distance. Has anyone ever beat a castle defense game? I really like this way of thinking of a game.

I found it interesting when she said that gamers would rather work hard than be entertained. Perhaps that is why gamers spend less time watching tv than any else on the planet. "We are much happier enlivening time rather than killing time."

The term happiness engineer is my new minor, as long as I can work at the microsoft testing labs. The ones that are like a psychological research institute than a game studio. I am going to close this blog so that I can submit my entry.