Game Site Makes Me Ululate With Glee!

I am in love...with a blog. Avant Game is a blog focusing mainly on the untapped potential of the games industry to change the world for the better. (I bet you can see why I like it now.) Jane McGonigal (that's right, a lady!), the site's creator, describes herself as "a game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster." She fundamentally believes that the gaming industry has the responsibility to improve non-virtual reality, too. Here are some excerpts from a speech she gave at the Game Developers Conference on Friday that I found totally inspiring.

...as an industry, we’ve spent the last 30 years learning how to optimize human experience....as an industry, we’ve spent three whole decades figuring out how to engineer systems that fully engage our brains, and our bodies, and our hearts. And we’ve pretty much solved that problem.

That’s the good news. But the problem is, we don’t rule the real world. For the most part, we rule the virtual world, because it’s easier to optimize experience in a world entirely of our own making. The fact is the real world is too f’ed up, it’s too broken, we don’t want to deal with it. So right now, pretty much every one of our games works better than reality, because we are the best designers of human experience, and we’re applying all of our talent, all our insight to optimizing virtual experience. And you know what? That needs to end, starting today.

My rant is about the fact that reality is fundamentally broken, and we have a responsibility as game designers to fix it, with better algorithms and better missions and better feedback and better stories and better community and everything else we know how to make. We have a responsibility as the smartest people in the world, the people who understand how to make systems that make people feel engaged, successful, happy, and completely alive, and we have the knowledge and the power to invent systems that make reality work better...

Can we fix it? Yes. We have the technology and the knowledge. Should we fix it? Hell yes. We have the power AND the responsibility...

We can take what we’ve learned by making games and apply it to reality, to make real life work more like a game – not make our games more realistic and lifelike, but make our real life more game like – so that when people all over the world wake up every morning, they wake up with a mission, with allies, with a sense of being a part of a bigger story, part of a system that wants them to be happy. We can do it, we should do it, and I hope that we will do it.