The Future

Jane McGonigal is a game designer from California and is the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future. She believes that “The best hope we have for surviving the next century on this planet? Games… we need to achieve 21 billion hours of online gaming a week by the year 2020. That’ll be just an hour a day, every day, for half of the people on Earth…”

Not being an avid gamer I found this interesting… my brother is what I would call a part time gamer – he doesn’t necessarily play all the time, especially now that he has a full time job, but then again he could be playing for 6 hours straight some days. I sometimes watch and, on the odd occasion, play along as well but I seriously couldn’t see myself really getting that “into” being a gamer. McGonical’s  ideas at first seem to be a little far fetched and her saying that we need to play 21 billion hours a week confused me in the beginning. Something that I have always heard about gaming is the fact that they make people more violent and aggressive in everyday life because they are able to be so in the game. However McGonical flips this on it’s head and says that the things that a gamer goes through within a game can help society survive in the future. That was a little vague – within a game the gamer is focused and optimistically concentrating on tackling a problem or as McGonical puts it “on the verge of an epic win”. Furthermore McGonical mentions the 4 superpowers of gaming “urgent optimism”, “weaving a tight social fabric”, “blissful productivity” and “epic meaning”. It is these aspects of gaming, including the focus and concentration, which Mcgonical believes will allow us to survive in the future. If we were to bring these characteristics out of the virtual world and into reality, which we can only do by continually gaming and becoming better at each, we will be able to solve the problems that arise in the future. McGonical says that these gamers believe that they are capable of changing the virtual world and that is the problem she is trying to solve – she wants to make them believe they are capable of saving the actual world as well.

Another interesting aspect of Jane MsGonical’s blog site was the games she created that dealt with hypothetical obstacles we may come across in the future and ways in which we can deal with them – (this is how she is solving the ‘issue’ of saving the virtual and actual worlds). I found this really interesting because it allowed me to understand what she was talking about more as she wasn’t talking about the virtual gaming world of World of Warcraft but of a hypothetical reality that could someday become our actual reality. these hypothetical games allow the gamers to work together and come up with ideas and solve problems as they would playing WOW however they are solving issues that relate to our survival rather than just the virtual world in the game.

e.g.

and there are a tonne more as well…

reference:

McGonigal, J. (2011). You found me. <http://www.janemcgonigal.com”>

Micropolitics, Networks, Designing for and Living in New Communities

When reading rushkoff’s article I found some of this later comments really interesting about the emails he received asking about p2p networks and the power of the government over the internet. What I found most intriguing (or ridiculous) was his answer to “could a government really just “turn off” the net? Yes. It’s true.” Obviously there has been a recent example of this with the Egyptian revolution however I was ignorant enough to think that it would never happen in Australia. I guess its true that ignorance is bliss.

 

Micropolitics seems to me to be more of a collaborative democratic network that lets people participate and voice their own opinions. Rushkoff’s article investigates the peer to peer networking within a contemporary society. He argues that nowadays the internet doesn’t fully allow people to express their own opinion, mainly due to restrictions by laws set up by the government. He also makes a point that society in its entirety should stop all communication with and surrounding the internet in order to force its shut down. He says this because he believes that we have begun to become controlled and even possessed by the internet and thus the major corporations and banks of the world. “we are witnessing the potential of a peer-to-peer networking become overshadowed by the hierarchies of the status quo” (2011).  He also suggests that “we accept the fact that the internet is built on a fundamentally hierarchical architecture, surrender it to the corporations who run it, and consider building something else for ourselves”

 

The most latest example that we can see regarding to this, as I mentioned before, could be the corporate-government banishment of Wikileaks, as well as the shutting off its networks in attempt to stop a revolution in Egypt. Maybe we can say p2p network is still existing. A p2p network protected only by laws – that exists but for the grace of those in charge – but is this really a p2p network? It is a hierarchical network allowing itself to be used in a p2p fashion, when convenient to those currently in charge.

 

Rushkoff, Douglas (2011) ‘The Evolution Will Be Socialized’, Shareable: Science and Tech, Viewed on 2^nd of May 2011 http://shareable.net/blog/the-evolution-will-be-socialized