Now that I look Back I Realise.....

Game playing according to Jane McGonical is the way we are going to save the world (McGonical, 2010). Her “Epic Win” in gaming is the point at which positive human agency reaches its paramount. We are our best person, our most heroic, altruistic and effective selves when we reach this epic win realization. She argues that the gaming platform offers an uninhibited strategic experiment that generates more problem solving potential than that of the real world. In order for the problems of the world to be solved this experience needs to be transferred into temporal reality.

So for McGonical it is not the game, but the optimism that is generated through game playing that supports the potential for positive change. Gamers are happy to work hard, to pool extensive intellectual resources so as to develop sustainable worlds. The way to survive the next century will be to adopt the strategies used by gamers to solve pressing contemporary issues.

The structural blocks of reality work against this collaborative effort, so much so that we are killing ourselves with disagreement and political red tape. No wonder people are escaping to online gaming worlds! These structural blocks are eliminating the potential for many of the theories that we have discussed to come together to solve problems. From the commons, to more dynamic ecologies, potential transversals of collective and effective pools of thought, the solution is there, but is inhibited by a history of failure fatigue.

I have often marveled at my fathers genius. He can make any farming machinery that he needs with extremely limited resources. This is his gaming world and his creations are his "epic win". He is fortunate enough to be able to bring together a vast knowledge and the know-how of his like-minded and not so like-minded friends, to generate an almost limitless pool of engineering expertise and he is just one person. He is not university educated, but instead has leveraged his relationships with others to learn the intricacies of hydraulics, structural engineering, metal forging and load bearing simply by asking “How can I achieve this objective?”

Creating a community of communication and knowledge sharing, and using the ideas of the past to solve the problems of the future…….could it be this simple?

Bibliography:

McGonical, Jane (2010), "Jane McGonical: Gaming Can Make A Better World" at TED2010 Conference, 20 Feb 2010, Monterey California, <http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html> , accessed 16/05/11