Game designer Jane McGonigal argues that games like World of Warcraft attract players because the worlds allow them to 1) experience blissful productivity 2) engage in an online community/social fabric 3) feel urgently optimistic about winning and 4) create epic meaning. We play for the epic wins. We play to be the best.

An average gamer plays 10,000 hours of video games before s/he is 21. That’s the same number of hours that person spends in school between fifth grade until high school graduation. That’s the same number of hours of work that it takes to achieve virtuosity according to Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. What if those same number of hours spent solving problems and achieving wins in our virtual worlds could move us closer to solving problems in our real world?…What if gaming could save the world?

That’s Jane McGonigal’s idea. She studied gaming at Berkeley and has been designing “games that help gamers enjoy their real lives more,…challenge players to tackle real-world problems, and collaborate at a planetary-scale” ever since. Her portfolio of games enable players to invent the future rather than just react to or escape from it. At TED, she gave a talk to convince us that we could save the world by spending more time gaming and that we achieve this through designing and playing more games with purpose.

Of course, the comments were littered with cynics. So here are some responses to the naysayers:

• Games are an escape and gamers don’t want to work on real problems. These games are designed so that they still offer an escape to the “real world” of the gamer’s daily life (zombie apocalypse, WWII battlefield, global oil crisis: all compelling terrains). Gamers exert a lot of time, brainpower, and work to solve the problems presented in their game worlds. McGonigal’s games just happen to present actual crises facing the current world, and the virtual answers these players find can translate to working solutions for real life. McGonigal says they tracked players of World Without Oil and that many continue to use the ideas they came up with in 2007 to survive the game’s simulated 32 weeks of global oil crisis.
• These games won’t appeal to all gamers. You’re right; they won’t. But that doesn’t mean they’re not useful. The newest game, Evoke, is targeted at university students and young people in developing countries. They are invested, they will come up with innovative ideas, they will create social enterprises that might change their corners of the world. Critical mass is important, but not everyone has to be on board for real change to occur.
• Online gaming relationships don’t built real trust or real friendship. There were many comments that said online relationships were fake, and many which said they made close friends with those with whom they’ve raided. To be honest, I’ve never played an MMO. So if you have, I’m curious: what makes an MMO forum rich enough to create the trust and collaboration McGonigal sees as pivotal to tackling real-world problems? And what ingredients are missing?

While gaming by itself will not save the world, what I appreciated most about McGonigal’s talk is that instead of denying gamers their pleasures and decrying the industry for the loss of our youth, she turns the thinking about the industry on its head. McGonigal wants to instead tap into gamers’ natural resources: their time, their attention, their commitment to finishing a game, their brainpower, and their optimism that they can win. In her games, winning just happens to also mean saving the (real) world. It’s a much more productive way to look at this growing industry, and I think it’s worth a shot.