Making the future, one video-gamer at a time.

"I have seen am making the future." - Jane McGonical and the Institute for the Future.

I grew up thinking video games were bad. They were a fun way to waste time, but they ultimately caused children to go numb with stupidity and a lack of awareness for their surroundings. They could be played completely stationary, allowing a child to exert little-to-no energy, save for the twiddling of their thumbs. They could be played alone, isolating a child from friends and family. And...they seemed to be the number one way to procrastinate doing homework.

All things bad.

There was and still is a stigma tagged to video-game-playing-children (assigned mostly by the mothers of their non-video-game-playing friends) that seems to say you're not good at many things, are you? Not good at school, not good at sports, probably not very good at playing with other kids, either.

My older brother is a gamer. He has gamer friends. And, over the years, I've watched him become engrossed in one game and then another, coming down for dinner only after reaching the coveted "save point," doing homework assignments only during mandatory game breaks, and taking little interest in things like "books," unless they are filled with game strategies and cheats.

I'm not going to lie to you...I was unimpressed. I was the little sister, the one who always did well in school. The one who could be found studying or at an extra-curricular event, pulling all-nighters even in high school. The one who, save for a Super Mario game here and there, had little interest in (nor talent for) video games. So when Older Brother used to peep into my room to congratulate me for a good report card and express how he wished he could do as well as me in school, there was little sympathy on my end.

What does this nostalgic look at video games have to do with my journey into the world of library? Well...two things have recently forced me to take a different look at video games and the gamers who play them. Nay, conquer them.

The first thing was a radio snippet. My roommate and best friend, G, recently installed a shower radio in our New York apartment that is always tuned to NPR. This has resulted in my morning prep time not only being more enjoyable, but productive and educational, as well. One morning I heard a snippet of a lecture by Jane McGonical, a game designer and researcher at the "Institute for the Future." Jane was discussing (in a very light-hearted, yet I'mbeing100%serious tone) the fact that there is a vast human resource of online gamers whose intelligence and skill can be tapped to solve real world problems.

I was inspired to hear more. A google search returned the full talk on TED: "Gaming Can Make a Better World."

McGonical's goal is to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games. Her mission is to convince more people to spend more time playing games. She has estimated that so far, gamers in the World of WarCraft have spent 5.93 million years playing the game - in real time, this would take human evolution back to when our earliest primate ancestors stood up on two legs for the first time. She also estimates that on average, American youngsters spend 10,000 hours playing online games by age 21. This is the amount of time spent in grade school from 5th grade to graduation, with perfect attendance. So, she concludes that young people are learning as much about gaming as they are everything else in school...creating "virtuoso gamers."

Her question is, "What exactly are gamers getting good at?" Her research has come up with four areas:

1. Urgent Optimism: The desire to act immediately with the belief that we have a reasonable hope for success.

2. Social Fabric: We create strong relationships with other gamers, because we trust and like people better after playing a game with them.

3. Blissful Productivity: We are happier when we are working hard to achieve a goal than when we are just spending idle time passively.

4. Epic Meaning: The goals in the game matter. The World of WarCraft Wiki is the second largest wiki (first is Wikipedia.org) on the web. It is an "epic knowledge resource."

So what do those four things add up to? A band of "Super-empowered hopeful individuals."

McGonical says that gamers really believe they are capable of changing the virtual world - but what if they believed they could also change the real world? What if we could use games to solve real world problems, rather than just escape real world suffering? What if gamers, who in virtual worlds are motivated, inspired, dedicated, collaborative, and cooperative, could pool their knowledge, skills, and ingenuity to solve problems such as hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, and obesity?

So far, McGonical's research team has piloted several online games that have urged players to solve such problems. One is SuperStruct, a game which asked 8,000 players to learn about "super threats" in the year 2019, and devise ways to solve and survive them. At the time of the talk, McGonical said there were 500 inspiring solutions already created.

Most inspirational to me, McGonical says that her team believes and professes that "we can make any future we can imagine." Their motto is "I have seen am making the future."

While listening to her talk, my thoughts immediately went to my gamer brother. While growing up, he would often be up late at night playing games with this friends. His friends were not over at the house, though. They were in their respective homes with their own game consoles, all hooked up to the Internet, and talking to each other through text chat and audio headsets. I would bang on the bedroom well to tell my brother to be quiet - it wasn't the volume of the game that kept me awake, but the volume and intensity of his voice as he played with his friends. I look back on that experience and realize the amount of collaboration and cooperation that was involved in his gaming. His complex and severely leveled games seemed trivial to me, but in his world, he was solving problems and solving them well.

There are millions of kids like my brother. What if, as McGonigal suggests, these kids believed they could achieve as much success and change in the real world as they could in their games? What if we used their expertise and devotion to brainstorm solutions for the world's problems? What if we stopped seeing games as procrastination, and started to understand their potential for education, productivity, and yes, saving the world?

The second thing that happened: I couldn't shut up about how inspired I was by Jane McGonical's TED talk, and eventually, another friend of mine suggested I read Ender's Game, the classic novel by Orson Scott Card. She explained that it takes place in a future world riddled with alien threats, where the only hope for humanity is an elite children's army that is being trained by playing virtual games. I was hooked right there and vowed to find a copy to read sometime in the future; but then, serendipitously, the title showed up on my Young Adult Lit course reading list. I love when the Universe comes together like that.

I won't go too much into the plot of Ender's Game. The point is, there seems to be something in fiction and reality that indicates games have a place in the real world. If we played life like we played games, without as many inhibitions, but with as much zeal and dedication, we might actually make some major improvements.

So how does this tie into education? Library is all about technology right now. Well, it always has been, hasn't it? But there is so much technology out there that can be used to enhance education, and online games are part of that. There are students out there who spend almost every waking hour outside of school playing games. These kids are the aforementioned virtuoso gamers. They also tend to seem aloof in school - uninterested and therefore unmotivated. Perhaps, like my brother, they just don't think they can be good at it. But 10,000 hours seems like a long time to just let a kid be aloof, does it not?

So how can we bring games into education so that those kids who feel like they aren't good at anything in real life can experience a 180? I can't help but think it's going to happen in the library. What if research assignments could be structured like collaborative games? What if students could assemble "dream teams" to run inquiry missions? What if students felt so invested in the goals of their education that they tried just as hard to succeed as they do while playing video games? What if kids weren't afraid to fail - because they know they get another life line? What if, what if, what if???

And then, what if those kids, after spending 10,000 hours in school learning to be cooperative, collaborative, motivated, dedicated, and inspired to make change, went out into the real world and...made the future that they imagined?

Hm. Video games might not be so bad, after all.

LB