Feeling Gameful!

I have been spending a fair amount of my time on gameful.org recently. If you are not familiar with Jane Mcgonigal or her work you can catch up really quickly by watching her TED talk. The basic Idea of her book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World, is that video gamer energy can be directed into things that are good in the real world.

The fast breakdown goes like this: Wikipedia took 7 years and 100 million man hours to create. It was done for FREE by users interested in contributing to the project. The contribution system was set up like a GAME where contributions allow players to level up, and contribute to more important pages based on level. Other players checked and rated their contributions- like a GAME- to determine the wikipedia data that the players agreed was accurate.... ok so.... World of Warcraft has enough man hours poured into it globally that Blizzard could make 1 wikipedia every 6 days.

In short: all the quality work energy of our generation is being poured into gaming- into virtual worlds, but if we direct that energy back on the real world then we could REALLY start tackling some of this worlds major problems.

This is my hope for Zombie Apocalypse... I want to encourage gamers to interact with their neighbors instead of logging onto a virtual community. I want people to walk 20 blocks because it gets them points in my game, and they've started to lose weight- 2 strikes against driving. I want strangers to laugh with eachother in public because "I just killed your guy in a funny way". I want my players to be able to fight "tsunami monsters" to support the relief effort in Japan. In short- I want to make a game that changes the way people see the world for the better.