We have covered a range of topics since January. From affordance, participate, collaborate, to create, aggregate, and finally to immerse. It’s hard to believe we are winding down. Despite my last post, I am optimistic about the future of social media for information professionals. I recently watched a 2010 TED Talk by game designer Jane McGonigal about how gaming can make the world a better place. I felt that her talk touched on a lot of ideas we have covered in LIBR 559m and helped me draw more connections between them.
So how do immersive worlds facilitate collaboration for information professionals? I think this question can be answered with four points McGonigal highlighted in her talk:
- Urgent optimism (gamers develop extreme self motivation, they have a need to act immediately)
- Social fabric (gamers are virtuoso’s at weaving a tight social fabric. We like people better after playing a game with them, because we build trust. Through game-play we build strong social ties)
- Blissful productivity (we are happier working hard if given the right work, which is why some World of Warcraft gamers dedicate an average of 22 hours a week to games)
- Epic meaning (gamers love being attached to awe-inspiring missions. The World of Warcraft wiki is the second largest wiki in the world. “They are bulding and epic knowledge resource about the World of Warcraft”.)
McGonigal suggests gamers can achieve more in virtual worlds than in real life because they receive better feed back in games than they do in real life. To access these skills we need to start making the real world more like a game. Sound familiar? It should: gamification.
For me this video ties it all (most of it) together: as gamers we are participating, collaborating, creating, all the while immersed in a virtual world. We can take the skills and lessons learnt through these experiences and translate them to our real world environment.
