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.