McGonigal

In writing about video games McGonigal is of the viewpoint that they are good for the world and can be used to enact change, invent new and exciting technologies, and generally save the world. I disagree. I was a fairly hardcore gamer for most of my life, playing games like World of Warcraft and Call Of Duty, along with many other games starting from around the age of 5. I have seen nothing in video games that has the ability to change the world, and unfortunately the reason for this is not because of the games themselves: it is because of the gamers. Because gamers use the games they play as alternate reality's they often take on totally new personalities as opposed to the ones they have in the real world. This means that in most games, someone you may think of as a nerd in the real world might act like a bully in the game world. This is especially common in the games that someone like McGonigal might be seeing as the most likely to change the world: MMORPG's. Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, like World of Warcraft, are the only games with the huge customer base necessary to be tools for progress. The problem with these games is that, like politics in the real world, the politics in the game will prevent most people from using their power for good. The reasons for this are myriad: some people just wouldn't want to, being "trolls" for no reason; others would choose not to participate due to the idea that the video game is an alternate reality, one that they don't want to infect with ideas from the real world. The point is, that like anything in life, you need a majority of people to agree on something for it to actually work and do some good, and gamers are the last group of people who you could get to agree on anything other than gaming. While I don't believe the hype that video games promote gratuitous violence, or children who grow up playing video games become violent killers, I also don't think that video games are a machine for change of any sort other than the kind associated with video games themselves.