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~ Is it possible to make games useful to society?

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DaggerLite:
[Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world (20 minutes)]

This speech starts out fairly light-hearted and fun, but as she comes near the end, I thought she brought up some good possibilities for future gaming. Sure, it's pretty far-fetched, but if you get a good mind on the case I think there's pretty much no limit to what you could use gaming for as a social concept. I've already heard about social and psychological studies the past years on gamers and gaming, and the people who game is a fairly large group today. Obviously, games have a huge impact on today's generations. If only it could be harnessed for greater human goals.

Hopefully, the thread will bring forth some conflicting views on the matter. Is making gaming more real a bad thing? Would this end up to be a niche within the huge market for "useless gaming"?

Note: I wasn't sure whether to put this in the gaming forum or the general discussions, but I guess it's more of an interest to gamers. Perhaps it would get more conflicting views in a different forum, but it belongs here for the most part, I think.

MammalSauce:
those games look really boring

Sosseres:

--- Quote from: MammalSauce on March 20, 2010, 07:23:35 AM ---those games look really boring

--- End quote ---

Most educational games tend to be boring.

DaggerLite:

--- Quote from: MammalSauce on March 20, 2010, 07:23:35 AM ---those games look really boring

--- End quote ---
Eck, did you really have to post something like that?

It's not about her games, nor about educational games. It's about finding an outstanding interest that could be used in order to make a game useful. Her theories and games are just touching the tip of it, and while her games are, as mentioned, only interesting to a very small niche market, does that mean that all games developed in this nature have to be? Or will they always be boring to most people? Is there not room for various niche games in order to make gamers with various skills able to actually do something?

Carnivus:
Well you can learn quite a lot from games as they are. I learned a lot of history and some geography from the Total War series or the COD series. Also, I grew up on games and cartoons, learning English almost as a native speaker. I mean, I understood quite a lot of English before I learnt to read.

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