Jane McGonigal. Did she make a good argument?

In Dr. Jane McGonigal’s video “Gaming Can Make a Better World” she makes the argument about how people can change the world by playing video games. She makes a couple valid points to back up her thoughts. One of her first arguments is saying that the only way we’re going to survive the next century on this planet is to increase the amount of game play from 3 billion hours to 21 billion hours. In doing this she believes we will help solve problems such as hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, and obesity. She believes if we can get people to save the real world like they do in game world then we could really make a difference. She shows a picture taken by Phil Tildano of a boy whose face shows some fear, excitement, anxiousness, and deep concentration. McGonigal calls this the face of an epic win. Stating that an epic win is an outcome in which they had no idea was possible until they achieve it. She wants to see this face on problem solvers around the world while trying to solve world problems. But unfortunately the face we make as problem solvers is the “I’m not good at life face” basically lowering our self-confidence and motivation to solve problems. One of my favorite arguments is about how ancient historian Herodotus wrote about a kingdom in Lidia and how they invented ancient dice made from sheep knuckles and that is where the first dice games were invented and played. The kingdom of Lidia was in such a horrible famine so the king set up a policy that one-day they would eat and then the next day they would play games - in order to get their minds off of the fact that they had no food. McGonigal believes that this is how we use games today too. She feels that we play games to escape real world suffering and everything not satisfying about real life. I cannot say I fully agree with Jane McGonigal because I do not personally play enough video games to know if we could change the world, but I can say that she has some very convincing arguments. I believe that if she really got out there and tested the games she made and spoke more on her thoughts she could really make a huge difference. Who knows, maybe she’s got the right idea and we all need to open our minds and see what could come out of it.