Jane McGonigal is an extraordinary evangelist for games (computer or otherwise) as learning and activist tools, based at the Institute for the Future in California. She's quoted the Play Ethic in many of her presentations so it's nice to be able to return the favour.
Her ludic thang (first signalled by her 'I Love Bees' marketing campaign for Halo 2 in 2004) is 'alternatve reality games' - where the boundary between game and life is seamless for the players, and involves running around the real world as much as it does a virtual one, with signs and signals in each realm leading you to greater depths in the other.
In her current futurist guise, Jane is (in her own words):
explores how games are changing the way we conduct and influence real business, real health care, real scientific research, and our real social lives. She focuses on ways that alternate reality games in particular could lead to a higher quality of life in both Western and developing nations, and how they could produce more engaging and thriving democracies worldwide... She also develops massively multiplayer forecasting games.
An exciting agenda. But there's a phrase that been creeping into my vocabulary recently - "that's a real
time-suck". Which, apart from being grotesquely ugly, points up a little road-block in Jane's inexorable progress. To the degree that we get that '
cognitive surplus' which Clay Shirky talks about from not being enslaved to the tv, we might well have the social and personal time to invest in games that bring us the same civic motivations and humanist satisfactions as novels, movies, periodicals, music... cooking, attending meetings, caring for elders and children...
You get the point. I'm wondering simply what room there is left in a modern, over-worked life - even if we're becoming less entranced with the tv spectacle - to get "immersed" in "massively multiplayer games". (Although I keep coming back to my European-welfarist answer to the question of whether we have enough time our lives for play).
Jane has a fascinating, progressive answer to this. If we are increasingly interested in the "politics of happiness" in Western societies, then we should be looking to the games sector for inspiration and wisdom. As she says, "games designers have spent twenty years trying to optimise happiness". So maybe we should be prioritising games as a literacy and an experience (the cutting edges of e-education has been doing this for a while), vis a vis other cultural forms. As long as it's something accumulative and generative like Spore or The Movies, and not linear and destructive like most of the rest of the console games I steer my 11-year-old daughter away from, then I'll go with that.
Her recent slogan is "reality is broken - games aren't - so let our game experience help us fix reality". McGonigal wants to take those feelings of meaning, pleasure and community that a well-fashioned game provides, and reconnect them to citizenship - by creating games whose worlds contain recognisable crises and challenges. Her projects like A World Without Oil ("play it before you live it") and Superstruct (a multiplayer forecasting game - which came up with some great projects) attempted this last year. (I was signed up for the latter - but did I have the time, between playing with music, playing with words and playing with children? Nope...)
The new McGonigal project, discovered this morning, is The Signtific Lab (yes, that's the spelling, and here's the blog) - which seems to be an attempt to create a playful space in which future trends in science, technology and society can be collaboratively posted, sifted through, highlighted and then acted upon (here's their first experiment). I promise to get involved in this one - but Jane's energy and commitment will doubtless keep evolving play and games as a necessary social literacy well into the future. She's about as play-ethical as it gets.
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