Thursday, February 11, 2010

TED2010 Jane McGonigal on gamers

Jane puts a really positive spin on the time people spend gaming. Games give us much more positive reinforcement than we get from real life, and people are consequently spending HUGE amounts of time gaming. 500 million gamers worldwide spend at least an hour a day gaming. Serious gamers spend 10,000 hours gaming by the time they turn 21 -- the same time they spent in K-12 education. People have spent 6 million man-years playing World of Warcraft.

I have long felt that we need to find a way to give people in real life the kind of positive stimulus they get in games, and she puts it in a much more optimistic way than I could. I'm really glad she's working on it.

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