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"Jane McGonigal talks with Daniel Zalewski about alternate-reality gaming. From "Stories from the Near Future," the 2008 New Yorker Conference."

"Can the alllure of gameplay be a force that draws people together?" Mcgonigal talks about massively multiplay gaming. She believes that instead of building games that are very different from the reality, she wants to build reality within the games.She starts off by telling the history of game and the father of games, herotitus. She saids that the core focus in game play is to engage yourself within the system. She also states that she believes that people play games because when they're playing a game, they're not suffering. I think this is true because people feel happy when they play a game that they like. Whenever I'm bored and unhappy, I go to my computer and start playing one of my favorite games. I really like the examples that she gives. One of the examples is world of warcraft. Tons of people play this game and wish that it were to become true because people online are so much more cooperative than people in reality. Before watching this video, I never thought about this kind of stuff before. I've always wondered what kinds of new games they would create since games are starting to become boring. I think that there should be more reality games instead of make believes so that we can learn from those games to live a better life. We can treat those games as personal trainers. I think that it would benefit many people because because there is a high percentage attraction towards games.

Well right know, we are learning about gaming. I never really thought about the new technology that's going to be produce for gaming since I always really just thought about the games. I do wonder though what kind of technology would be produced. I hope it's pretty cool though like one of those future movies excluding the part where it takes over humans....I rather not be running around with little robots chasing me. Yeah, that really doesn't sound to appealing "This is ancient dice from the kingdom Lydia where Turkey is today. They used knuckle bones like from sheep to make dice." I find the dice very interesting. I really can't imagine the dice being formed from knuckle bones. I wonder how they do it. I'm going to guess that they used fire and pressure to form it? Not really sure, it's probably going to be similar to that I guess. "A future forecast: 2013. We increasingly live our real lives inside of massively multiplayer games." I find that pretty interesting for the fact of its 2010 and it kind of like that now. I mean people are playing massively multiplayer games even today. Mostly online. I think by 2013 something of what she's talking about will appear. It'll probably from Asia and it can be like that future movie where people live in a 3D world. They're like hooked onto machines and stuff. That would be interesting. Maybe dangerous.

I'm looking into Jane McGonigal's work around ARG's - Alternate Reality Games. In particular I'm wondering how playing one of these games changes the way people interact because they are thinking differently. This is what McGonigal has to say about such changes: "Games, when you play them with other people, … actually strengthen the reward circuitry so it actually makes people more social and more likely to collaborate because their brains are actually more responsive to people online and offline. Games are transforming the brains of people who play them in largely positive ways." She is saying that by playing a game, we adopt a role and use our brains differently. This expands what is possible in our brains, and has impacts on what we do in life after we are finished playing the games. And this is what games should do: change how we live our lives when the games aren't there. Like art helps us see differently, games should help us live by different rules, recognize different systems than we saw before playing the game.

Recently gaming has been coming up everywhere! I was listening to Jay Rosen and Dave Winer's podcast, "Rebooting the News." Rosen reported on his panel at South by Southwest. He said that at the end he twittered about how interested he had become about looking at the intersection of gaming and journalism. Rosen also mentioned that they had set up a webset for their Future of Context panel. I went looking and I found a post about gaming and journalism that includes these paragraphs about how gaming might bring context into journalism. "The way I envision it is to create some sort of social gaming experience that fills in the gaps. Want to fill the audience in on why health care costs so much? Why not an audience scavenger hunt that takes them through insurance companies, doctors, service providers, employers who pay premiums, and such? Or why not a Farmville type of game run in a hospital where users have to try and actually bend the cost curve themselves lest they go bankrupt, a situation that allows them to experiment with different health care systems so they can see the cause and effect of the choices we make as a society (in terms of patient coverage, costs, profits, etc? If Mafia Wars on Facebook can take off, surely this could. And how do they make these choices along the way? With blasts of information, ideally pulled from well reported news stories, that the user can actually apply to the situation in a way that increases both recall and understanding." Littau is presenting his vision here, and what a fvision it is. I can totally imagine playing a game in place of reading an article about health care. Once again, just when I thought I understood what gaming is, I see that there is more to learn. This is exciting!

I spent my whole Saturday morning working with 5 of the best educators I know. We're bringing gaming into the classroom. Once Suzie Boss pointed me to Jane McGonigal, I became a follower. So yeah, can I put follow McGonigal for Act1 in Evoke? Why not? After all she says things like this: "In "EVOKE," you're leveling up in world-changing superpowers like creativity and resourcefulness. You're unlocking achievements by completing real social innovation missions. Even though much of the game material is real and important and serious, you get the motivational push of game dynamics and the rewards and satisfactions of making real progress. Plus, it's a social network, and once you start making friends with other players, there's all the social stickiness that involves." In this quote, you can see that McGonigal is attempting to bring together the power connective powers of social network with the addictive and motivational mechanisms of games. Plus it's all about doing REAL missions, missions in real life. I'm still not sure that my students will see the connections between their addictions and the learning/doing/re-wiring that McGonigal is aiming for in Evoke. I'm not sure, but I've been VERY impressed so far with how Evoke feels, and I've been seeing that the gamers in my classroom are the first to "get" this game. I want to learn more about McGonigal now, because it gives me more confidence that she is up to something with Evoke, that it has the power of a massively multiplayer online game and the seriousness of a political action social network.

"The secret of making a great game, Meier said, is to get inside the player's head. "

The Redistricting Game is designed to educate, engage, and empower citizens around the issue of political redistricting. Currently, the political system in most states allows the state legislators themselves to draw the lines. This system is subject to a wide range of abuses and manipulations that encourage incumbents to draw districts which protect their seats rather than risk an open contest.

Game art exhibition. Unveils June 6th