Jane McGonigal on how games can make the world a better place

Cory Doctorow 9:09 am Fri Mar 19, 2010

Here's game-designer Jane McGonigal at her most incandescently inspiring, speaking at TED. Her hypothesis is that games allow us to experience epic wins, incentivizing us to give them millions of hours to them in order to feel the thrill of success. She proposes that we can harness all that energy — and all the good feeling and camaraderie that emerges from all that play — to solve the world's hardest problems.

And she makes a good case that we can do it. Key phrases: "blissful productivity" and "urgent optimism" and "the desire for epic meaning."

Games can make a better world

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