Subtitles section Play video
-
I'm Jane McGonigal. I'm a game designer.
-
I've been making games online now for 10 years,
-
and my goal for the next decade
-
is to try to make it as easy
-
to save the world in real life
-
as it is to save the world in online games.
-
Now, I have a plan for this,
-
and it entails convincing more people,
-
including all of you, to spend more time
-
playing bigger and better games.
-
Right now we spend three billion hours a week
-
playing online games.
-
Some of you might be thinking,
-
"That's a lot of time to spend playing games.
-
Maybe too much time, considering
-
how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world."
-
But actually, according to my research
-
at The Institute For The Future,
-
it's actually the opposite is true.
-
Three billion hours a week is not nearly enough
-
game play to solve the world's most urgent problems.
-
In fact, I believe that if we want to survive
-
the next century on this planet,
-
we need to increase that total dramatically.
-
I've calculated the total we need
-
at 21 billion hours of game play every week.
-
So, that's probably a bit of a counterintuitive idea,
-
so I'll say it again, let it sink in:
-
If we want to solve problems like hunger,
-
poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity,
-
I believe that we need to aspire
-
to play games online
-
for at least 21 billion hours a week,
-
by the end of the next decade. (Laughter)
-
No. I'm serious. I am.
-
Here's why. This picture pretty much
-
sums up why I think games are so essential
-
to the future survival of the human species. (Laughter) Truly.
-
This is a portrait by a photographer named Phil Toledano.
-
He wanted to capture the emotion of gaming,
-
so he set up a camera in front of gamers while they were playing.
-
And this is a classic gaming emotion.
-
Now, if you're not a gamer,
-
you might miss some of the nuance in this photo.
-
You probably see the sense of urgency,
-
a little bit of fear, but intense concentration,
-
deep, deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem.
-
If you are a gamer, you will notice
-
a few nuances here: the crinkle of the eyes up, and around the mouth
-
is a sign of optimism,
-
and the eyebrows up is surprise.
-
This is a gamer who is on the verge of something called
-
an epic win.
-
(Laughter)
-
Oh, you've heard of that. OK, good,
-
so we have some gamers among us.
-
An epic win is an outcome
-
that is so extraordinarily positive
-
you had no idea it was even possible until you achieved it.
-
It was almost beyond the threshold of imagination.
-
And when you get there you are shocked
-
to discover what you are truly capable of. That is an epic win.
-
This is a gamer on the verge of an epic win.
-
And this is the face that we need to see
-
on millions of problem-solvers all over the world
-
as we try to tackle the obstacles of the next century --
-
the face of someone who, against all odds
-
is on the verge of an epic win.
-
Now, unfortunately this is more of the face that we see
-
in everyday life now as we try to tackle urgent problems.
-
This is what I call the "I'm Not Good At Life" face,
-
and this is actually me making it. Can you see? Yes. Good.
-
This is actually me making the "I'm Not Good At Life" face.
-
This is a piece of graffiti in my old neighborhood
-
in Berkeley, California, where I did my PhD
-
on why we're better in games than we are in real life.
-
And this is a problem that a lot of gamers have.
-
We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games.
-
And I don't mean just good as in successful,
-
although that's part of it.
-
We do achieve more in game worlds. But I also
-
mean good as in
-
motivated to do something that matters,
-
inspired to collaborate and to cooperate.
-
And when we're in game worlds
-
I believe that many of us become
-
the best version of ourselves, the most likely to help at a moment's notice,
-
the most likely to stick with a problem
-
as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again.
-
And in real life, when we face failure,
-
when we confront obstacles, we often don't feel that way.
-
We feel overcome,
-
we feel overwhelmed,
-
we feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical.
-
We never have those feelings when we're playing games,
-
they just don't exist in games.
-
So, that's what I wanted to study
-
when I was a graduate student.
-
What about games makes it impossible
-
to feel that we can't achieve everything?
-
How can we take those feelings from games
-
and apply them to real-world work?
-
So, I looked at games like World of Warcraft,
-
which is really the ideal collaborative problem-solving environment.
-
And I started to notice a few things
-
that make epic wins so possible in online worlds.
-
So, the first thing is whenever you show up in one of these online games,
-
especially in World of Warcraft,
-
there are lots and lots of different characters
-
who are willing to trust you with a world-saving mission, right away.
-
But not just any mission, it's a mission that is perfectly matched
-
with your current level in the game. Right?
-
So, you can do it.
-
They never give you a challenge that you can't achieve.
-
But it is on the verge of what you're capable of. So, you have to try hard,
-
but there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft.
-
There is no sitting around wringing your hands,
-
there's always something specific and important to be done.
-
And there are also tons of collaborators.
-
Everywhere you go, hundreds of thousands of people
-
ready to work with you
-
to achieve your epic mission.
-
That's not something that we have in real life that easily,
-
this sense that at our fingertips
-
are tons of collaborators.
-
And also there is this epic story, this inspiring story
-
of why we're there, and what we're doing.
-
And then we get all this positive feedback.
-
You guys have heard of leveling up and plus-one strength,
-
and plus-one intelligence.
-
We don't get that kind of constant feedback in real life.
-
When I get off this stage I'm not going to have
-
plus-one speaking, and plus-one crazy idea,
-
plus-20 crazy idea.
-
I don't get that feedback in real life.
-
Now, the problem with collaborative online environments
-
like World of Warcraft
-
is that it's so satisfying
-
to be on the verge of an epic win all the time
-
that we decide to spend all our time in these game worlds.
-
It's just better than reality.
-
So, so far, collectively all the World of Warcraft gamers
-
have spent 5.93 million years
-
solving the virtual problems of Azeroth.
-
Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
-
It might sound like it's a bad thing.
-
But to put that in context:
-
5.93 million years ago
-
was when our earliest primate human ancestors stood up.
-
That was the first upright primate.
-
Okay, so when we talk about how much time we're currently investing
-
in playing games, the only way it makes sense
-
to even think about it is to talk about time
-
at the magnitude of human evolution,
-
which is an extraordinary thing.
-
But it's also apt. Because it turns out
-
that by spending all this time playing games,
-
we're actually changing what we
-
are capable of as human beings.
-
We are evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species.
-
This is true. I believe this.
-
So, consider this really interesting statistic;
-
it was recently published by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University:
-
The average young person today
-
in a country with a strong gamer culture
-
will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games
-
by the age of 21.
-
Now 10,000 hours is a really
-
interesting number for two reasons.
-
First of all, for children in the United States
-
10,080 hours is the exact amount of time
-
you will spend in school
-
from fifth grade to high school graduation
-
if you have perfect attendance.
-
So, we have an entire
-
parallel track of education going on
-
where young people are learning as much about
-
what it takes to be a good gamer
-
as they are learning about everything else in school.
-
And some of you have probably read
-
Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers."
-
So, you would have heard of his theory of success,
-
the 10,000 hour theory of success.
-
It's based on this great cognitive science research
-
that if we can master 10,000 hours
-
of effortful study at anything
-
by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it.
-
We will be as good at whatever we do
-
as the greatest people in the world.
-
And so, now what we're looking at
-
is an entire generation of young people
-
who are virtuoso gamers.
-
So, the big question is,
-
"What exactly are gamers getting so good at?"
-
Because if we could figure that out,
-
we would have a virtually unprecedented
-
human resource on our hands.
-
This is how many people we now have in the world
-
who spend at least an hour a day playing online games.
-
These are our virtuoso gamers,
-
500 million people who are extraordinarily good at something.
-
And in the next decade
-
we're going to have another billion gamers
-
who are extraordinarily good at whatever that is.
-
If you don't know it already, this is coming.
-
The game industry is developing consoles
-
that are low energy and that work with the wireless phone networks
-
instead of broadband Internet
-
so that gamers all over the world,
-
particularly in India, China, Brazil, can get online.
-
They expect one billion more gamers in the next decade.
-
It will bring us up to 1.5 billion gamers.
-
So, I've started to think about what these games
-
are making us virtuosos at.
-
Here are the four things I came up with. The first is urgent optimism.
-
OK, think of this as extreme self-motivation.
-
Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately
-
to tackle an obstacle,
-
combined with the belief
-
that we have a reasonable hope of success.
-
Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible,
-
and that it is always worth trying, and trying now.
-
Gamers don't sit around.
-
Gamers are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric.
-
There's a lot of interesting research that shows
-
that we like people better after we play a game with them,
-
even if they've beaten us badly.
-
And the reason is, it takes a lot of trust
-
to play a game with someone.
-
We trust that they will spend their time with us,
-
that they will play by the same rules,
-
value the same goal, they'll stay with the game until it's over.
-
And so, playing a game together actually builds up
-
bonds and trust and cooperation.
-
And we actually build stronger social relationships as a result.
-
Blissful productivity. I love it.
-
You know there's a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer
-
plays for 22 hours a week,
-
kind of a half-time job.
-
It's because we know, when we're playing a game,
-
that we're actually happier
-
working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out.
-
We know that we are optimized, as human beings,
-
to do hard meaningful work.
-
And gamers are willing to work hard
-
all the time, if they're given the right work.
-
Finally: epic meaning.