{"id":4167,"date":"2010-03-01T07:34:12","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T15:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=4167"},"modified":"2010-03-01T07:34:12","modified_gmt":"2010-03-01T15:34:12","slug":"will-video-games-save-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/01\/will-video-games-save-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Video Games Save the World?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2010\/OPINION\/02\/16\/ted.people\/\">Jane McGonigal thinks they can help<\/a>.  She&#8217;s a game designer who gave a talk at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ted.com\/themes\/a_taste_of_ted2010.html\">TED<\/a> conference this year (although her talk isn&#8217;t up yet).<\/p>\n<p>McGonigal makes some good points in this short video, especially about how dealing with things in a video-game environment &#8212; like failure, or social interactions &#8212; can be greatly helpful when one eventually has to deal with them in the real world.  She also helped put together Urgent Evoke, a large-scale multiperson game where you collect achievements by performing world-saving tasks.<\/p>\n<p>The kids these days, they love their gaming.  So it makes sense to ask how that passion can be put to good use.  Personally I&#8217;m fascinated by the prospects of using games to teach people science.  Not just facts and features of the real world &#8212; although those are important &#8212; but the scientific method of hypothesis-testing and experiment.  Games already feature exactly those features, of course; everyone who figures out the &#8220;laws of nature&#8221; in the game world is secretly doing science.  It wouldn&#8217;t be that hard to tweak things here and there so that the techniques they were practicing connected more directly with science in the non-virtual reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jane McGonigal thinks they can help. She&#8217;s a game designer who gave a talk at the TED conference this year (although her talk isn&#8217;t up yet). McGonigal makes some good points in this short video, especially about how dealing with things in a video-game environment &#8212; like failure, or social interactions &#8212; can be greatly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","category-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}