On the verge of an epic win.
I rediscovered a conversation Jane McGonigal gave on the TED channel back in February of 2010. McGonigal is the director of Game Research & Development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California.
An epic win, if you’re unaware of gamers parlance, is an outcome so extraordinarily positive you had no idea it was possible. You’re shocked to discover you were even capable until you achieved it.
As it is, I’m no gamer. I haven’t played video or online games for years, since my kids were small. So this conversation was a real eye opener. McGonigal is dedicated to solving huge global problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, and global conflict by harnessing the amazing knowledge pool and collective resources of online gamers. I think she’s truly onto something.
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The gaming emotion contains intense concentration, deep deep focus, and optimism. In games you’re always on the verge of an epic win. In games you’re motivated to take on something that matters. To reach the desired outcome you learn to trust, collaborate, and cooperate. |
Often gamers become a best version of themselves and are most likely to help at a moments notice. They’ll stick to the problem as long as it takes and they’ll get back up failure after failure to try it again.
Rarely do we get that in real life facing failure and obstacles. We don’t find collaborators everywhere we go to help us achieve our mission and we can’t always count on positive feedback like leveling up, plus 1 strength, and plus 1 intelligence.
Today, the average person turning 21 has spent 10,000 hours gaming. That’s almost the same amount of time they spent in school from the 5th grade to graduation. They’ve learned as much about being a good gamer as they did learning about everything else they were taught in school.
Remember Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Outliers... If you spend 10,000 hours focused on any endeavor you will become a master, a virtuoso.
So what exactly are gamers getting good at?
Worldwide in 2010 there were about 500 million gamers and in this decade we’ll have another billion virtuoso gamers. Through games they are learning...
Urgent Optimism
Gamers are extremely self motivated, they desire to act immediately, and they have the ability to tackle obstacles with optimism believing the epic win is possible.
Social Fabric
Gamers are great at creating a tight social fabric. Relationships are built on trust that you’ll hang in there for the entire game, play by the rules, and value the same goals.
Blissful Productivity
Instead of just hanging out, they’re optimized to take action. Given the right work they’ll be hard at it all the time.
Epic Meaning
Gamers love to be attached to awe inspiring stories. (Don’t we all?)
By the end of this decade the world will have about 1.5 billion virtuoso gamers...
The challenge as I see it will be to recognize this virtuoso dream team of super-empowered hopeful individuals and to enroll them into helping us save the ‘real world’ we live in. I’m thinking we could certainly use their help.
I hope you enjoy this conversation by Jane McGonigal as much as I have and let’s all hope we’ll soon be on the verge of an epic win.
We can make any future we can imagine and we can play any games we want.
~Jane McGonigal
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