Do you think there needs to be a new understanding of gaming? Yes, absolutely. One of the things I have been talking about recently is, we need to stop thinking of games as just escapist and start thinking of them as “returnist”—this idea [that after playing a game] we return to our real lives and the real world with a different way of feeling and thinking.
How can games improve meetings? TheInstitute for the Future has anumberof annual meetings with large corporations to help planfor the futureandunderstandfuture trends. One of my roles was to develop games for these events. What I’ve often found is that when you have people convened for a live event, that issomething special that can’t happen online: a face-to-face opportunity to share ideas and brainstorm. What we always try to have toward the end of the event is
a live, kind of brainstorming, future-looking game you could play to process what you learned. There are lots of ways to do it. You can use online technology.We developed a simple plat- form, where you could tweet or post a message online. At the end of an hour of game-playing, you might have 4,000 ideas
“When we sit down at a bridge table or around a Scrabble board, what we are really doing is agreeing to spend time together and focus all our attention and social energy around a challenge.”
about the conference that attendees could then go home and share with their companies or colleagues. You can also use face-to-face events around a table. One of
our most successful gameswas this idea of a giant Connect Four board. In order to get a space on the board, [people] had to come up with an “epic win” for their organization or project based on something they heard a speaker say, or an idea that had been triggered.Wewere able to generate thousands of really concrete next steps. Which was great, because then you are really tak- ing value away from the event. A lot of times we attend and we share great things, but we don’t necessarily follow up or implement what we have learned.
Is there an affordable way to add games to meetings? What we fail to see a lot of people successfully doing is just using regular social media as a platform. You can do a Twitter game using a hashtag; Facebook groups are running games.You don’t have to have a full-featured video game.
You talk in your book about harnessing the power of games to solve real-world problems. How do you do that and retain the element of fun that makes games appealing? That’s really a challenge. There are a few secrets we really like to draw on. One has to do with a kind of ethics goal—one of the things that makes games so engaging is the sort of heroic quality, where you are saving somebody or the world.We like
Download a free game board and instructions for a future forecasting game created for meetings at the Institute for the Future atwww.iftf.org/2010 MotDGameGuide. Learn more about Jane McGonigal’s work atwww.janemcgonical.com.
tomake real-world games have a kind of epic promise, that you can change your life, or help achieve something extraordinary. In the “Find the Future” game I did with the NewYork Pub-
lic Library this year, they wanted to bring young people to the physical library, because young folks useWikipedia and that’s it.Andso our design team thought, what would be the most epic win that a young person could possibly have at the library?We decided it would be to actually write a book and have that book becomea part of the collection—thatwould be anextraordinary accomplishment.Wemadeagamewhere winningthegamemeans you have written a book. The library took the work of the first 500 players to play and entered it into the rare-books collection.
There are 183 million active gamers in the United States, but younger people play video and computer games more than older people. How do you overcome the gamer vs. non-gamer divide? We are seeing that divide get closed, thanks to parents and their kids and grandparents playing. What I try to emphasize is that games had a long history before they were digital. Almost every- body can identify with a game like golf or bridge, or Scrabble for people who don’t play digital games. When we sit down at a bridge table or around a Scrabble
board, what we are really doing is agreeing to spend time together and focus all our attention and social energy around a challenge.We help each other get better at the challenge, and compare strategies, and we get better ourselves, by playing with each other. When you think about it that way, it is usually easy to connect with folks, even if they feel like they don’t have a lot of interest in digital games or video games.
Some people have played “World ofWarcraft” for a decade. Is there value in creating games for meeting communities that they might keep playing beyond a conference? The benefit of a short-term game is you get everyone to focus their attention and you really get a critical mass [of players].You don’t always need the long term. But what can happen if you have longer-term games is that you tend to have more creative ideas or stranger strategies as you go on through the game. At the Institute for the Future,we find thatwhenwe ask peo-
ple for their first idea, usually they will come up with something that is kind of boring or standard. Their second idea may push it further, but it is not until the third idea that they have a kind of unusual insight. Having prolonged engagement can really help provide a platform for people to keep talking with each other outside the game.