Epic Wins!

I learned about epic wins from this talk below!

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

This is a great TED talk. Jane McGonigal is leading the NYPL Find the Future game.

Essentially, she believes the world can be a better place if we can harness the skills we gain from gaming into solving real world problems. She is definitely right about people wanting meaningful engaging hard work, which explains why active players of World of Warcraft spend around 22 hrs/week on the game.

She identifies 4 things that gamers gain from gaming

1. Urgent optimism - knowing you can get to an epic win

2. Blissful productivity- engaging hard work with a positive end result

3. Trust and cooperation- often working in teams to accomplish missions

3. Epic meaning- believing and working towards a greater goal

So if you can harness all 4 of these qualities into solving issues that plague the world, that would be pretty incredible.

And for those of us who haven't had a good engaging game to play, Jane McGonigal also shares a historical story the town of Lydia, in Greece, where 2500 years ago there was an 18 yr famine and to help people cope with famine, their king had a day where people could eat and a day where people would play games to take their minds off the lack of food.

Here's the story below,

"According to Herodotus, after 18 years the famine wasn't getting better, So, the king decided they would play one final dice game. They divided the entire kingdom in half. They played one dice game, and the winners of that game got to go on an epic adventure. They would leave Lydia, And they would go out in search of a new place to live,leaving behind just enough people to survive on the resources that were available, and hopefully to take the civilization somewhere else where they could thrive.

Now, this sounds crazy, right? But recently, DNA evidence has shown that the Etruscans, who lead to the Roman empire, actually share the same DNA as the ancient Lydians. And so, recently, scientists have suggested that Herodotus's crazy story is actually true. And geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly 20 years that could have explained the famine. So, this crazy story might be true. They might have actually saved their culture by playing games,escaping to games for 18 years and then been so inspired, and knew so much about how to come together with games, that they actually saved the entire civilization that way."

I think it is very impressive to identify qualities and skills in one area of life and try to apply to a wider swatch of life. That stuff is really interesting to me so I'm going to continue with writing about what I learn about gaming this week.