Many people consider spending time playing video games a waste of time. Game designer Jane McGonigal’s closing keynote address for the Borah Symposium aimed to change that.
McGonigal began her address by confronting the misconception that gaming does not produce any real-world results.
“Microsoft Research estimated that the United States’ global life expectancy had increased by 2.825 million years just because of the amount of increase in physical activity [from the release of Pokémon Go],” McGonigal said. “That’s a real outcome.”
Increased physical activity due to games such as Pokémon Go are not the only positive impacts of gaming, however, according to McGonigal, an advisor and affiliate researcher with the Institute for the Future. Citing neurological research data, McGonigal said gaming and play are the opposite of depression.
McGonigal said gaming encourages players to feel optimistic about succeeding, learning and improving, helps players access a wide range of positive emotions, aids players in connecting to the people around them, gives players common experiences and is physiologically energizing for people who enjoy it.
“If you were to reverse all of these phenomena,” McGonigal said, “you would have a situation where you felt pessimistic about your ability to succeed, pessimistic about your ability to learn and improve, you would have a hard time accessing positive emotions, you would have a hard time connecting with the people around you … and of course, that’s a perfect description of what it feels like to be depressed.”
According to McGonigal, gaming can also facilitate social interaction, which is partly why McGonigal and the Institute for the Future developed a software aiming to encourage people to interact on a platform called Foresight Engine. McGonigal, however, wanted to introduce the attendees of the Borah Symposium to a more recent development as well.
In addition to her main address, Dr. McGonigal announced a project that she and her team at Institute for the Future had been working on for some time. Ethical OS, or Ethical Operating System, is a free resource that allows users to explore ideas about ethics and technology.
Ethical issues addressed by Ethical OS as of now include: information and propaganda, addiction and the dopamine economy, and economic and asset inequalities. These issues are three of the eight risk zones assessed by Ethical OS.
“Our goal is to be continuously updating it,” McGonigal said during a question and answer session after her address. “There are ways for you to provide input … there’s a kind of conversation happening and a community effort to find and upgrade and reissue [Ethical OS].”
More information on Dr. Jane McGonigal’s work can be found on her website, janemcgonigal.com, or a page on her work located on the Institute for the Future’s website, www.iftf.org/janemcgonigal.