Jane McGonigal describes an Epic Win in gamer culture:
An outcome that is so extraordinarily positive you had no idea that it was even possible until you achieved it — It was almost beyond the threshold of imagination and when you get there you are shocked at what you are truly capable of.
In her 2010 TED Talk, she made a convincing argument for the social value of video games. She believes “Gaming Can Make A Better World”. She wants to make the “real world more like the game” and cleverly uses Herodotus’ story about the King of Lydia’s creation of dice games to make her point. According to Herodotus, the King of Lydia created a kingdom-wide gaming policy that had his subjects playing games. This done to quell his subjects during a time of famine and social unrest. It worked. He successfully diverted his subjects’ attention from their real world problems because they were emotionally invested in their games.
She concludes her retelling of Herodotus’s story by drawing a parallel between the King of Lydia’s games and the World of Warcraft. Just like the Lydians saved their culture by applying the skills they learned from gaming toward establishing a new civilization (the Etruscans), Jane believes we can bring the skills we are learning in Warcraft to solve our real world problems.
Through the Institute of the Future, she has created games like World Without Oil, Superstruct, and Evoke. Each game tasks the player with providing a creative solution to a real world problem. In Evoke, which was created in partnership with the World Bank Institute, players are certified as “social innovators” upon completion.
Jane identifies four characteristics that keep gamers playing:
- Urgent Optimism – the desire to “act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.”
- Social Fabric – “We like people better after we play a game with them even if they’ve beaten us badly. The reason is that it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. We trust that they will spend their time with us, play by the same rules, value the same goal, stay with the game until its over.”
- Blissful Productivity – “we know we are optimized as human beings to do hard and meaningful work. Gamers are willing to work hard all of the time, if they are given the right work.”
- Epic Meaning – “gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions, to human planetary scale stories.”
I believe most students start out with an “urgent optimism” that quickly turns into cynicism or worse — apathy — as they lose faith in their ability to succeed or the value of their goal. As educational power brokers implement more testing and test preparation, they tear away at the “social fabric” students weave through group projects and discussion. “Blissful productivity”? The field of education has become a contentious battleground because students are not being given the “right work”. Instead their minds (and hearts) are being tethered to the rote memorization of prescribed responses. And with regard to “epic meaning”, students once studied to be doctors, poets, scientists, and artists. Now, they simply study to get from one test to the next.
In his Radio Rookies piece, Mike Brown speaks about how his mother and Mr. Ptah, the program director and founder of the Urban Assembly Academy, inspired him to stay in school. He says it was because he connected with Mr. Ptah and that Mr. Ptah helped him realize that he needed to stay in school to get the things he wanted out of life.
How do we replicate this? How do we as educators keep all of the students in school through high school or — if not in a traditional classroom — in pursuit of school and a GED through online courses? How can we get them to see the “epic meaning” in their daily educational trials and tribulations? How can we help them towards an Epic Win?
Danny Lamont Jones, who was a high school student in Baltimore, when he was interviewed by NPR in 2011 as a part of a special series on America’s Dropout Crisis, was unsure if he would stay in school and graduate.
How do we (as educators and society-at-large) inspire Danny like Mr. Ptah inspired Mike? What’s the awe-inspiring mission that will move him and nurture urgent optimism and blissful productivity within him?
I believe gaming can make better schools. If Institute of the Future set its sights on developing a game on solving the Dropout Crisis, I wonder what it might look like? Is the “exotic” environment of a game part of its draw? Would a game that challenged students to solve the Dropout Crisis fail because it would be too close to real life — too close to home?
K2Twelve 