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.

Homeless Time Travellers

Wow. Homelessness is no laughing matter, but this guy seems to be taking it with good humor. (Thanks 2Spare.) What actually makes me mad, though is that gridskipper can publish what amounts to a DC homelessness travel guide that trivializes homelessness but hides this behind a veil of sympathetic comments. I hate hipsters. Ok, so hate doesn't make the world better, but I sure wish they'd move on to their pupal stage of development, no matter what it is. (If you have any idea, leave it in the comments.) Trivializing homelessness is especially disgusting in the context of the recent tide of unprovoked violence against homeless people. Now that I've depressed you enough, here's something useful a graduate student did to educate people about this problem: Homeless: It's No Game a serious (yet fun and engaging) 2D video game about the problems of homelessness. Play it, and be inspired to go do something!

'Slippers' for Democracy

Plusea has posted directions on Instructables for how to make improved 'Joy Slippers.' Joy Slippers are footwear-based controllers (the 'joy' comes from 'joysticks') with four embedded analog pressure-sensitive sensors. The current design is wired, but in the comments, Plusea says that she will be making a Bluetooth version soon. Right now, the Joy Slippers' main use is drawing with the feet; however, the possibilities for such controllers are much larger. What if we could teach (or reinforce, during practice) foot positions for dancing or sports with Joy Slipper-like controllers? How about teaching rhythm through the familiar mechanism of the human foot? If manufacture of such controllers became cheaper because of innovation spurred by the DIY experimentation of people like Plusea, it could democratize aspects of training for physical activities. In addition, if Joy Slippers were used to control the movements of characters in popular video games, it could increase fitness levels in many households, much as the Dance Dance Revolution and the Wii have. This is particularly true in areas where parents might not feel safe simply sending their children to "play outside" (although many politicians, secure in their upper-middle-class suburban enclaves, seem to believe in that as the answer to the world's problems.)

Gamers to the Rescue!

If you're going to spend time playing games when you should be working, you might as well learn something. Games4Change is an organization that promotes digital games whose objective is social change. So instead of watching Strindberg and Helium for the umpteenth time, or playing the Plushies game (you know who you are), avoid work by playing games like Karma Tycoon, where you run a virtual nonprofit and "solve community problems, such as homelessness, in cities across the US," or try Melting Point, where you work to "balance the energy needs and economic growth of regions around the world against the accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO2)." If you find one you think is particularly cool, let me know in the comments. (I only have so much time to screw around, so I can't play ALL of them myself...one-year MA programs are killer on the work front.)