Video Games

No not this one:

I respect a radical idea. Really, I do - I love thought provoking and crazy ideas. These are usually what end up being the greatest leaps in industry and art and essentially any field. Excluding accounting, taking risks and being bold is generally good. However, I find that Jane McGonigal's idea is, what's the best way to say it, incredibly ideal and rooted out of a fantasy world.

That might be harsh and I must admit all grand ideas throughout history had their critics - perhaps I will be one of them people will be talking about a hundred years from now. "Oh what a fool those people who didn't think that video games and sitting on the couch doing nothing physical would be productive!" - I earnestly pray people of the future will say this. But I doubt it.

I love a good gaming session. I'm not inherently against video games and against wasting time. Because I find some real truth in the saying of "time you enjoy wasting is not time wasted." But I also agree with the idea of wasting time by doing something physical. Can we start a National Save the World League? It's kind of like basketball but instead of a ball and hoop we use phones and chairs to argue and discuss how to create peace and solve world hunger. 

I understand and appreciate the amount of time the world spends on video games. And even more so I love the effect that game play has on the mind. However, I find this growth and these new found "abilities" are of little use when there is no connecting tissue from actual game play of pointless results to real, hard, physical production. 

There are no immediate and critically daunting repercussions to failing at a video game. There are in the real world. And the combination of "gaming" and the real world mixes to become something similar to Hunger Games (most recent example I could conjure up) and a factual example the Roman gladiators. All very unproductive for the greater good. Isn't that kind of the point of games? As soon as you create a video game that has real world repercussions it really seizes to be a "game". It is now a job, a responsibility and if something good or bad happens, someone will take the blame.

It's a fantastic idea and should really be written up into a book or screenplay - perhaps all the glitches and strange mutations this idea must take can be worked out.