I am just one of a new generation that is growing up. A generation who may experience much more meaning through videogames than they will through the real world. (…) My virtual worlds are perfect, more beautiful and rich than the real world around us. I am not sure of the implications of my experience are, but the potential of using realistic videogames stimuli and repetition in a vast number world of participants is frightening to me. Today I believe (1984 Orwell´s) Big Brother would find much more success brainwashing the masses with videogames rather than just simply TVs. Videogames are fun, engaging and leave your brain completely vulnerable to reprogramming. But maybe brainwashing isn´t always bad, imagine a world that teaches us to respect each other, or to understand the problems we are all facing in the real world. There is a potential too good as well”
Michael Highland.
With more than half a billion people worldwide playing online games at least an hour a day -- and 183 million in the US alone, the “gamers community” has proven to be an important constituency to engage with. During the past decades, conservation organizations have paid marginal attention to the potential of online games as a means to promote nature-friendly attitudes. An exception is WWF, as it has developed a set of online games as part of its education strategies, but not appealing enough to attract the gaming community. But times are changing, and fast. Enthropia and Second Life offer the possibility to buy and manage landscapes in a virtual world, including the possibility of establishing restrictions to mining and regulating access to natural resources on your virtual land. On April 4th, Ecotopia –an online free-to-play game produced by Talkie in coordination with Conservation International- will be launched via the world’s largest social networking site: Facebook. Ecotopia, is advertised as a game with a social conscience, advances the popular city-building game model as it aims to wrap fun and compelling gameplay with philanthropy and real-world involvement.
Critical thinking on the potential and threats of videogames for the conservation agenda and better understanding of the videogame industry is needed, as several questions remain unsolved. How nature is framed in onlines games and what stories do they tell about our relationship with nature? Do experiences in the virtual world can affect real life habits and influence people´s attitudes -for instance towards nature conservation? Should conservation organizations invest in videogames as a mechanism to reach young people or to train future managers of protected areas?
Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken: How games make us better and how they can change the world, believes that videogames are a powerful platform to solve global problems. McGonigal argues that: “in today's society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not. And unless something dramatic happens to reverse the resulting exodus, we're fast on our way to becoming a society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing games, creates its best memories in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game worlds (McGonigal, 2011).” As time passes more people are living their lives in the boundaries between reality and virtual worlds, and considering that game developers are paying more attention on the use of emotion, purpose, meaning and feelings when creating these virtual worlds, the implications for conservation appear to be quite significant. After all, videogames have the power to break down reality, and introducing the ideology of endless restarts while confronting the “game over” discourse.
Statistics and relevant information:
• In total people around the world spend 3 billion hours each week playing online games.
• In 2005 video games became a $29 billion worldwide business. In 2010 was around $40 billion.
• Today 500 million people are gamers (this means that they play at least an hour per week), and the number is expected to grow to 1.5 billion in the next decade.
• On the contrary of what is assumed, games are not only for young people. While 97% of boys under 18 and 94% of girls under 18 report playing videogames regularly, the average age of gamers is 30. The people that buy more games are 37 years old and 43% of gamers are female (Perry, 2006).
• In a country with a strong “gaming culture”, the average young person racks up 10,000 hours of gaming by the age of 21, almost as much time as they spend in a classroom from fifth grade until they finish high school if they have perfect attendance. Most astonishingly, 5 million gamers in the U.S are spending more than 40 hours a week playing games, the same as a full time job (McGonigal 2011).
• Recent scientific research shows that the feelings and activities experienced in virtual worlds can trickle into our real lives. For example: kids who spend just 30 minutes playing a "pro-social" game like Super Mario Sunshine (in which you clean up pollution and graffiti around an island) are more likely to help friends, family and neighbors in real-life for a full week after playing the game. Also, people of all ages who play musical games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero report spending more time learning and playing real musical instruments than before they started playing the videogame (McGonigal, 2011).
• Games allow us to be more resilient in the face of failure. And when we play multiplayer games, we become more collaborative and more likely to help others (McGonigal, 2011).
• 83% of games have no mature content (including violence) at all (Perry, 2006).
Reference list
Perry, Davis. (2006) Are games better than life? TED.com http://blog.ted.com/2008/10/06/will_video_game/
McGonigal, Jane. (2010a) Gaming can make a better world. TED Talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html
McGonigal, Jane. (2010b) Reality is Broken: How can videogames save the world. Penguins press.
McGonigal, Jane (2011) Video Games: An Hour a Day is Key to success in Life. In: The Huffington Post, February 15th 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-mcgonigal/video-games_b_823208.html
Schell, Jesse. (2010) "Design Outside the Box" Presentation. DICE 2010. http://www.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/
Priebatsch, Seth (2010) The game layer on top of the world. TED Talk, Boston.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jesse_schell_when_games_invade_real_life.html
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