Could Gaming be used to solve world’s urgent problems?

As Jane McGonigal, Game Designer says, we need to increase the current spending of 3 billion hours per week to 21 billion hours for gaming to solve the world’s most urgent problems. These problems are poverty, hunger, drinking water, sanitation, global conflicts etc.

When examining, the gaming emotions are vivid and need to be analyzed to see, what impressions that gamers show when they do gaming. For example, if a gamer is close to an epic win, which beyond the threshold of imagination, shows high motivation and enthusiasm. So this could be used to solve the world’s urgent problems and there are millions of gamers playing and finding the solution to the same problem at a time. In this method, there could be thousands of innovative solutions that nobody could ever imagine before, in the real world. In the game space, the potential is enormous and the limitations are far lesser than the real world. In the real-world scenario, we have lots of restrictions and sanctions, which eventually reduce the innovativeness.

In the World of War Crafts, the ideal collaborative problem-solving environment, which provides a lot of insights into the real world, could be applied in solving difficult problems. People have spent 5.93 million years in this game trying to solve problems in the gaming context, which is huge. In a country that has a good gaming environment, the child spent about 10,000 hours playing games at the age of 21. This is equivalent to the total duration of 5th grade to high school graduate spends in school. So there is an alternative education track exists to learn, think, solve while playing games, which is amazing. There are 500 million people extraordinarily good at something and its keep on growing to 1 billion gamers by next decade.

Thinking about what these games could offer to us it proposes four things.

1.      Urgent Optimism – This is acting immediately to a critical problem having the reasonable hope of winning, which called the “epic win”.

2.      Social Fabric – Playing a game together builds the bonds and therefore improve the trust between people in the gaming environment.

3.      Blissful Productivity – Being in a game, people feel like relaxing, happier, working hard etc. Gamers are willing to work hard all the time optimizing the capacity of a human being.

4.      Epic Meaning – Gamers always want to solve the world’s problems and save the world. So gamer’s ultimate goal is to achieve something meaningful.

Harnessing the capability of gamers into the real world problems is the challenge of social innovators. How we are going to solve the real world problems by playing games?.

We have following games that harness the real world and the gaming contexts that will lead to find a reasonable solution to real-world problems. Using games, we want not to predict the future but to make the future as the way we want, using the epic wins to today’s critical and urgent problems.

So we can divide the current problems into a few groups and some examples could be cited as follows

1.      European Social Innovation Competition – The European Social Innovation Competition (EUSIC) is a challenge prize run by the European Commission across all Horizon 2020 associated countries. Organised in memory of Diogo Vasconcelos, the Competition calls all Europeans to come up with solutions to the problems affecting our society.

2.      Challenge.gov – This is US site to throw challenges to solve by the community and offer cash prizes for the winners.

3.      A world without fossil fuels – In this game players are given a certain scenario that the world is out of fossil fuels and they need to find alternate methods to live and do daily needs.

4.      Save Human Race extinction within the next two decades – This is a higher issue than the earlier and there are tasks given to everybody to do something to save life on earth. So each and everyone is doing their best to make plans and find solutions in their particular area.

5.      Improve social innovation skills – This includes improving skills on knowledge management, sustainability, networking approaches etc. Also how these skills lead to set up social enterprises and to contribute the social innovation by individual or group of people.