OK I'm a gamer. I admit... guilty. And if I am to add it all up I think I've spent several thousands of hours of my life playing games since I was about 14 or so.
I still remember the summer I was supposed to learn for my university admission exam; really serious business if I ever wanted to get a bachelor degree/education; I remember all I did that summer, from morning to dawn, was to play hot seat games with my friend trying to postpone the inevitable (having to prepare for the exam).
Was it wrong? Not a chance it was probably the best thing to do, I would have gone crazy had I spent all that time learning instead. It actually helped me study much faster, because it was in the way, I needed to get it done so I could play. :)
Now at some point in a gamer's life comes the question: "was I really wasting all of that time doing totally unimportant things when I could've been saving the world instead?". Or substitute "world" with whatever feels important for the person. This question, while important I admit, won't last long as soon the next gaming session starts in a try to forget about it and evade any answer :)
Jane McGonigal doesn't answer that question either, but she changed it from "Are gamers wasting time?" to "How can we make RL more like a game?" or "How can we design games that have an impact on RL?". Nice twist:
Who knows maybe our jobs would be so much more cooler if it were like an RPG. "Awesome, I've submitted another CL and got 200xp so I got to level 10 software engineer!" :D
And I share her believe, if you make a gamer believe it's a game... they can accomplish almost anything! As soon as we think the outcome doesn't really matter as "it's just a game"... we're doing so much better.
