Gaming can make a better world

[Klumpen]

Although I don't like the many WoW-references, it's actually quite interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/dE1DuBesGYM?feature=oembed

 

[Null]

Transcript for people that like that kind of thing.

 

[Askarus]

800+ Hours with Super Smash Bros Brawl.

I think I got the 10.000 Hours of Gaming already and I'm 21 Years old.

 

[crosspoint]

While I sympathize with this approach I totally doubt that the average gamer would be interested in these kind of 'serious games'. There are too many Call of Duties and Battlefields out there and it is much more fun to kill virtual people than to save them.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

^ Yep.  If all games are like the good old days then this approach may work...

 

[Askarus]

Only thing I want in Super Smash Bros 4 and Fire Emblem.

 

[_jr_]

That's old news. We at the future future institute discovered that humans use a lot less ressources (water, food, energy) while sleeping. We calculated that if everybody slept for 24 hours a day the earth could easily acommodate 100 billion. Donate today so that we can fund research of another exciting and seemingly misunderstood phenomenon: being dead. First results indicate that humans being dead actually have negative ressource consumption. Even small numbera of individuals spending their life being dead could power an entire city.


Sorry, couldn't resist


Edit: seriously, there is a lot of 'I believe ...' that doesn't get substantiated. My (also non scientific) observation as an assistant teacher and manager remains: gamers on average do not excel at anything relevant to computer science/software engineering, actually they seem to perform below average. I suspect this is because they think they are smarter with computers than they really are (and fail to realize that it's not actually about computers). This may not be relevant for solving the world's problems, though.

 

[ekianjo]

gamers on average do not excel at anything relevant to computer science/software engineering, actually they seem to perform below average.

That's because playing a game and engineering something require VERY different skills. I would be surprised if there was any correlation.

And you can't just put "gamers" in a single bag either.

A guy playing "angry birds" 10 minutes per day on his iPhone is not the same gamer as the guy playing Baldur's Gate II several hours in a row. The gamer crowd is far from being unified, it's actually extremely fragmented, between casual and more involved gamers, and between social and solo players. There's a LOT to say about gamer segmentation and there's hardly any study on these aspects, which is fairly disappointing.  

 

[_jr_]

Yes, it would be interesting to see some data.

 

[kuru]

We feel overcome, we feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical. We never have those feelings when we're playing games, they just don't exist in games.

Lol. Go play EVE Online, lady, that should change your opinion.

Those years-spent-in-gaming numbers do really sound impressive. But I wonder how many people you can get to really use their brain in order to tackle social and economic problems instead of having near-mindless fun that's supposed to take your mind OFF real-world after school or work.