Video Game talk.

I found Jane McGonigal's talk about video gaming and saving the work to be very interesting.  Although I don't necessarily agree with everything she says.  Mainly that we need like 21 billion hours playing video games to save the world.  I do however believe that some life problems can't be solved in video games.  Video games give us multiple chances unlike real life in which, for the most part, we only have have one chance.  I do find her points about time to be very interesting.  People spend an incredible amount of time playing video games.  If we also used that time to solve problems, we would figure a lot of stuff out.  I also do agree with her points about it bringing people together from all over the world to work out problems. Now, I'm not sure how much using video games to solve real world problems would help, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did atleast a little.  I don't know if I agree with her saying that people immediately like each other more by playing a video game against them, I can think of a few personal experiences in which I didn't necessarily care for who I was playing against.

I also found the fact that she made games about world problems interesting.  In a way, those games could help people solve real world problems.  They could also help people be prepared for what they would do if those problems were never solved.  It helps either way, whether the problem is solved or not.  Now, I don't know how much it will help either way in reality, but I'm sure there is some effect.  Now, you can't make realistic games for every world problem, but you can for many of them and you can make them very realistic. 

What I am basically saying is, video games could help, but they could also harm our efforts.  If people spend too much time not focusing on a good task, they are wasting their time.  I wouldn't be surprised if people became unfocused on their true purpose because they were playing a game.  They may forget that they're trying to solve a real problem.  This would just ruin any true problem solving efforts.  If you could some how find a way to keep people focused on the task at hand video games may be a very good way to solve real world problems.