![]() ![]() These days, it often produces a game along with a documentary. World Without Oil was produced by the nonprofit ITVS, which is primarily known for its documentaries. Woodside notes that World Without Oil only had about 2,000 players, whereas World of Warcraft - which is all about fun - has 11 million. "They may feel better, but the world is still swimming in problems." "My principal critique is that it doesn't translate into any sort of real-world consequences," he says. Woodside says he has seen a lot of designers hype up the power of games, and he thinks McGonigal is no exception. And he would know - he recently retired from a career as an animator of online games. "It's very true that people invest a great deal of themselves in virtual worlds," Woodside says. Bruce Woodside also played World Without Oil. ![]() "The goal of this game was to get people to make real-life changes to the amount of energy they were consuming," McGonigal says, "to change the way they cooked, the way they drove, and to do it by challenging them to survive a fictional oil crisis."īut raising awareness of a problem isn't the same as solving it. She says she couldn't help thinking of all the extra money and fuel that would go into a gas-guzzler, so she went for a fuel-efficient car instead.Īnd that, McGonigal says, proves her point exactly. To be able to see all this chaotic action and realize, 'That could be you out in the street one day because you can't get to work, because you can't make money, because you can't feed your family.' "ĭraycott says that when she needed to buy a car in real life, her stepfather pushed for a high-powered engine, but she wasn't so sure. "When I watched somebody else's responses, it felt real," Draycott says, "and that was kind of the turning point for me. She says watching other players experience the game made its message hit home in a way that no movie or book could. Making The Virtual Message Hit Home - For Realĭraycott is a poster child for McGonigal's argument that a game can change the way someone thinks and, more importantly, acts in the real world. The only thing I could afford to buy were simple things like Kraft dinner and canned soup. In one, a scared-sounding player named Chantalle Draycott tells virtual world listeners, "I went grocery shopping today and I couldn't afford to buy food. Audio blogs often sounded like secret messages from a war zone. Players shared blog posts, videos and audio updates about how they were coping. Over the course of a month in 2007, Eklund says, people living in the game's virtual world got a taste of what would happen if the price of oil were to rise dramatically.Įklund says the game would up the ante as the price of oil rose with messages like, "Our transit systems are being overloaded," or, "It's very hard to hang on to your bicycle because bicycle theft is rampant." McGonigal was a consultant on the game, and Ken Eklund was the game's designer. When Jane McGonigal suffered a concussion that impeded her ability to read and write, she created a game to help herself recover. ![]() But in McGonigal's games, even if the world is fake, the problems are often real. McGonigal agrees that getting it right may not mean much when you're solving fake problems in a fake world. "I'm getting stronger and I'm getting smarter, and this is obviously meant to model what would happen in real life if you kept tackling an obstacle." "Even if I've failed a quest a dozen times, I'm still improving my abilities with each try," she says. Her main research method: playing the game herself. While getting her doctorate in performance studies from University of California, Berkeley, McGonigal took a close look at people's behavior while playing games like World of Warcraft, where trolls battle with monsters. The attractive 34-year-old has a mane of curly blond hair and cat-like blue eyes. McGonigal looks a bit like a character in a video game, perhaps an enchanted sorceress. In fact, McGonigal has used games to get people to think differently about the world's oil supply, household chores and entrepreneurship in the developing world. ![]() "We know that it has a real impact on how we think and how we act." "What I'm trying to change is this perception that playing a game is just a waste of time," she said. ![]()
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