How to use for the gamers’ collective intelligence for social good

Prepared by Remi Sussan:

Jane McGonigal is one of the best specialists of the new gaming scene, which is not, as some may believe, based on ultrasophisticated computer technologies,; but on the notion of “alternate reality game”‘ or “pervasive game” : those games involve the player in a narrative through a multiplication of channels, the web, mail, even fax or phone, asking him to solve a puzzle. In fact, this enigma cannot, most of the time, be solved by an individual alone. In her essay “i love bees“, Jane McGonigal has given a very deep analysis of the very sophisticated kind of collective intelligence these new forms of game can give birth to.

McGonigal has then tried, with various games such as Superstruct,, World Without Oil or Evoke to use this collective intelligence in order to solve real life planetary problems, and not only imaginary ones.

John Robb, author of the excellent book Brave New war and famous blogger on strategic and military matters certainly agrees with Jane mcgonigal about the power of games develop collective intelligence. But he views differently the goal of this intelligence: Jane McGonigal tries to harness it to direct it toward “noble goals” such as curing hunger or poverty.

Robb ‘s vision is different:

“So the really big idea isn’t figuring out how to USE online gamers for real world purposes (as in the dirty word: crowdsourcing — the act of other people to do work for you for FREE — blech!). Instead, it’s about finding a way to use online games to make real life better for the gamers. In short, turn games into economic darknets that work in parallel and better than the broken status quo systems. As in: economic games that connect effort with reward. Economic games with transparent rules that tangibly improve the lives of all of the players in the REAL WORLD.

This isn’t tech utopian. It’s reality. The global electronic marketplace and the political system that currently dominates our lives is at root a game but with hidden rule sets. As a result, it’s a game that being run for the benefit of the game designers to the detriment of the players. The reason we keep playing is that we don’t have any choice. Let’s invent something better and compete with it. Let’s provide people with a choice. ”

In an other post , he goes further by analyzing capitalism as a -flawed- game :

” If you built a massively multiplayer game called Capitalism (you could even throw in Democracy), based on the way it runs today, would anyone play it?

NOTE: here’s a quick response to those that maintain that the system we have today is a perversion of Capitalism and not Capitalism itself. The implication is that the term is being misused in the question above.

Some thoughts: What makes Capitalism so weak, as a system, that it is so easily and horribly misused and/or perverted? Any theory that relies on a tightly bound set of theoretical assumptions and lofty preconditions in order to perform effectively sounds very similar to an ideology. It’s unlikely that any existing economic system, including Capitalism, is the best of all possible systems (we aren’t Panglossian here). So, if the technology is available to compete with it (it is), why don’t we? May the best system win.”

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