The Stone vs. Gladwell Debate Continues

While reading Dave Gilson’s article, “Wii Shall Overcome,” about game researcher and developer Jane McGonigal, I couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of déjà vu. I realized what it was as I reached the end of the article and the author made the comment, “But there’s a big difference between getting more people to take their medicine and enticing them to cure the world’s ills.” While Gilson was commenting on the participation levels when comparing large, popular games with the still-being-developed world-changing games McGonigal is creating, it reminded me of the Stone vs. Gladwell debate way back at the beginning of the semester.

There are two factors to the argument about games that I think correlate with the argument about Twitter as activism. First, there is the question of if gaming could be activism at all. Does simulating a game in which participants get a “crash course in changing the world” really effective it all in actually changing the world? Gladwell would argue no, whereas Stone would, of course, argue yes, that the community surrounding that activism and change would inspire change itself. For me, I’m still on the fence about this, as I am about Twitter.

The other issue is whether gaming should be utilized as an outlet of social/economic/political change or activism. Gladwell obviously dislikes the idea of Twitter, a social media outlet, being used in this way, but what would he say about video games? Well, as mentioned in the article, networked games, or games where you interact with other people playing the same game, allow for collaboration. This makes gaming seem more and more like a social media. Gladwell would, again, probably not agree that using social media interaction is the best way to solve world problems or do some activism would actually be beneficial. But Stone, on the other hand, would probably argue that interconnectivity is the only way it will happen.

For me to believe that both social media and gaming can be outlets of real change, I think both need to be reworked a bit. As of right now, there is too little evidence that change actually does happen because of these communities, and I think that is in part because both industries do not cater to that side of it by providing ways to actually do good. Hopefully, if both industries can work towards implementing some new ideas, we will actually be able to take advantage of the popularity of social media and gaming and change the world for the better.