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During my down-time in traveling to work and back, I've been able to start reading the books that have been backlogged at the Library.
One of the recent ones I got through was Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. It outlines how reality isn't "fun" enough to be enjoyable, yet somehow we play games - what if we could harness that gamer power? We should try to use gamer's collective powers to make reality a better place to live. Each chapter outlines a different idea to fix (i.e. "Epic Scale": Make reality on a grander scale to realize out full potential, or "Ten Thousand Hours Collaborating": By playing games until college, you likely have become a "master" of gaming through 10,000 hours of play, let's try to use that masterfulness somehow and create collaboration superpowers).
The ideas are wide and diverse and each chapter also focuses on different games such as Halo 3 or World of Warcraft. But some of the games I had never heard of, but now I want to find out more about them. Games like The Extraordinaries are fascinating to me. The idea of The Extradordinaries (now Sparked) is that you are tasked with small, 5-minute volunteer tasks (such as photographing a defibrillator tagged with GPS coordinates) so that people in the future can be better helped (for example, if someone were to have a heart attack, your defibrillator information might save a life). One of the other challenges was to write an encouraging e-mail to someone in a third-world country who is about to take a difficult test.
Games that were created as part of a promotion, such as Tombstone Hold'Em, invite people to rethink ideals such as death, and ask people to play a friendly yet unusual game of poker in a cemetery. Apparently cemeteries are wanting more people to visit, but as we have several negative connotations of cemeteries with death, many people aren't visiting. By playing the game, you spend time looking at tombstones, finding out a little about the people who are buried there, and some would even say do a little housekeeping to keep the place looking nice.
A game called Investigate Your MP's Expenses was created by The Guardian Newspaper when it was discovered that several MPs in Britain were filing outlandish claim receipts, including what was discovered as a "floating duck island" in one MP's home. By gathering all the materials together into a simple game mechanic to weed out anything that looks suspicious, almost 30,000 people banded together to look through the paperwork, and it resulted in several MPs either resigning, being brought to court to return the money, or in some cases, both.
Some runners may already be using Nike+, a jogging system that fits inside your Nike running shoe (and wirelessly connects to your iPhone) to keep track of your running progress By using this system, you are challenging yourself as well as opening displaying your abilities to others, which makes you want to do better. They also say that the Mii-like avatar in the Nike+ web browser is another draw, as apparently seeing your avatar doing exercise (as you do better) is motivating, and seeing his slack-off (when you miss a couple of runs) is actually motivating as well.
The book has a lot of great ideas that can be played on smartphones, as well as web browsers. One I was thinking of setting up here was Chore Wars, a game where you gain XP through doing real-life chores. You set your XP requirements for each task (doing the dishes: 10XP, take out the recycling: 30XP, cleaning the toilet: 50XP, and so on) and challenge your roommates/significant others/family to try to level up before you do.
Personally, I thought the idea of Groundcrew to be fascinating: Like the Sims, people have "wishes", like "I could really use a latte right now." Someone else in the area also looking at the Groundcrew app could see this call for a "wish" and think "I could grant this!", go get a latte, then bring it to the person. We could use this power for greater things than just a latte, of course, but the idea that someone could call out for help and anonymous people would come to their aid - the mind boggles. :)
For those who are looking for something different in their life, I might suggest taking a look at the book and seeing if any of the "reality fixes" might be used to make your life a little more interesting.
One of the recent ones I got through was Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. It outlines how reality isn't "fun" enough to be enjoyable, yet somehow we play games - what if we could harness that gamer power? We should try to use gamer's collective powers to make reality a better place to live. Each chapter outlines a different idea to fix (i.e. "Epic Scale": Make reality on a grander scale to realize out full potential, or "Ten Thousand Hours Collaborating": By playing games until college, you likely have become a "master" of gaming through 10,000 hours of play, let's try to use that masterfulness somehow and create collaboration superpowers).
The ideas are wide and diverse and each chapter also focuses on different games such as Halo 3 or World of Warcraft. But some of the games I had never heard of, but now I want to find out more about them. Games like The Extraordinaries are fascinating to me. The idea of The Extradordinaries (now Sparked) is that you are tasked with small, 5-minute volunteer tasks (such as photographing a defibrillator tagged with GPS coordinates) so that people in the future can be better helped (for example, if someone were to have a heart attack, your defibrillator information might save a life). One of the other challenges was to write an encouraging e-mail to someone in a third-world country who is about to take a difficult test.
Games that were created as part of a promotion, such as Tombstone Hold'Em, invite people to rethink ideals such as death, and ask people to play a friendly yet unusual game of poker in a cemetery. Apparently cemeteries are wanting more people to visit, but as we have several negative connotations of cemeteries with death, many people aren't visiting. By playing the game, you spend time looking at tombstones, finding out a little about the people who are buried there, and some would even say do a little housekeeping to keep the place looking nice.
A game called Investigate Your MP's Expenses was created by The Guardian Newspaper when it was discovered that several MPs in Britain were filing outlandish claim receipts, including what was discovered as a "floating duck island" in one MP's home. By gathering all the materials together into a simple game mechanic to weed out anything that looks suspicious, almost 30,000 people banded together to look through the paperwork, and it resulted in several MPs either resigning, being brought to court to return the money, or in some cases, both.
Some runners may already be using Nike+, a jogging system that fits inside your Nike running shoe (and wirelessly connects to your iPhone) to keep track of your running progress By using this system, you are challenging yourself as well as opening displaying your abilities to others, which makes you want to do better. They also say that the Mii-like avatar in the Nike+ web browser is another draw, as apparently seeing your avatar doing exercise (as you do better) is motivating, and seeing his slack-off (when you miss a couple of runs) is actually motivating as well.
The book has a lot of great ideas that can be played on smartphones, as well as web browsers. One I was thinking of setting up here was Chore Wars, a game where you gain XP through doing real-life chores. You set your XP requirements for each task (doing the dishes: 10XP, take out the recycling: 30XP, cleaning the toilet: 50XP, and so on) and challenge your roommates/significant others/family to try to level up before you do.
Personally, I thought the idea of Groundcrew to be fascinating: Like the Sims, people have "wishes", like "I could really use a latte right now." Someone else in the area also looking at the Groundcrew app could see this call for a "wish" and think "I could grant this!", go get a latte, then bring it to the person. We could use this power for greater things than just a latte, of course, but the idea that someone could call out for help and anonymous people would come to their aid - the mind boggles. :)
For those who are looking for something different in their life, I might suggest taking a look at the book and seeing if any of the "reality fixes" might be used to make your life a little more interesting.