Alison Miller Richards

Attendees at the opening session.

After hearing the Jane Mcgonigal had been confirmed as the opening keynote, I was curious how her work in the world of gaming would translate to our world of local government. I listened to her speak with great interest this afternoon and walked away really enthused about the potential of the gaming community to change the world. 

Of the many stats and studies she highlighted, one really stuck out to me - as a planet, we spend roughly 1 billion hours per week playing online games. Jane questioned what would happen if we could leverage even 1% of those 1 billion hours for social good. Similarly, it took about 100 million hours to develop and build Wikipedia. Think about the potential for similarly epic projects with the billion hours of gaming.

The trick, then, is to find a way to build games that connect to social good in the "real" world. She cited examples of a couple platforms she's developed, including A World Without Oil and Urgent Evoke. Both of these are geared toward tapping into the resources and passion of gamers to solve real world issues. She also mentioned that most gamers will spend about 10,000 hours gaming by the time they are 21. Interestingly, this is the same amount of time that Malcolm Gladwell thinks it takes to become an expert or genius at something. Again, the challenge is to find a way to bridge the skills being learned and developed online to the real world, so that there's parallel growth and contribution.

In closing, Jane cited a desire to work with local governments to bring this kind of engagement to their communities. Are any of you doing this? Or thinking about doing it after hearing her talk? Let us know in the comments.