Mechanics in Motion

I rather enjoyed this presentation by Jane McGonigal.  Women in game design tend to have a much more socially conscious view, and  I always enjoy seeing conventional thinking challenged:

Gaming can make a better world

Listening to this talk brought up some old memories. Jane’s talk reminded me that once upon a time, I gave a crap about the world. As a kid, I remember the “Energy Ant” coloring books designed to help kids understand the energy crisis and do something about it. I remember that growing up, I put my young idealistic problem solving mind to the conundrums of society and how they might be resolved. Yet the more and more I learned just how screwed up the world was, I began to realize that there are very few people in this world who care about actually solving society’s problems. As a problem solver, I recognized that politicians didn’t seem to be doing it, they seemed to ignore all the sensible answers and care only about their mysterious agendas.

Politicians have so far deviated from the original plan of the founding “game designers” that Washington DC is the last place we are going to see any serious solutions. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that the US political “rules system” has become a hacked machine that sucks up even the best intentioned ideas and twists and warps them in a myriad of self interest so deep that they are lost forever.  The two party system has turned into a vote for your favorite football team, where supporting an idea from one side automatically makes you an enemy of the other. I think the really good problem solvers that really care have abandoned politics and are off looking for other pursuits, other methods to effect change. Maybe they don’t even know why, or how they will, but I think many of them feel deep down inside that they might like to make a positive change in a way that will really mean something.

And maybe for me, games might offer this hope. Somewhere along the way I stopped caring much for solving social problems and became much more interested in solving the ones found in games. And yet of course, I always have cared. The thing about life though, is one has to go where one is supposed to go. Joseph Campbell talks about following one’s bliss. I fully believe there is something to this, to following one’s purpose and doing what one knows they are supposed to be doing. This can be very difficult in a world that wants clearly defined roles and business card ready professional titles. It’s rather like class design in a role playing game; certainly it’s an artificial abstraction to take a set of skills and combine them into something called a “class”– and yet isn’t that what we do in real life with our job titles?

Life takes some interesting twists and turns; we never know quite where we are going to end up or how we will get there. I didn’t always know I would be a game designer; growing up, there really wasn’t such a profession for which to aspire. All I knew was where I was supposed to go, and what I was supposed to be working on. I learned that there isn’t any point in trying to guess where the path leads, only know when I am on it and when I am not. My entire career makes no sense as any kind of life plan, and yet following game design has only led me to increasing success. I’ve endured all the typical frustrations that come with following one’s bliss, and yet none of that pain has ever compared to the joy of doing what I love. Who would have ever known that games would become so huge and that schools would need people to teach game design? Who would have known that I would have found a team of brilliant Indie designers to work with that might actually make a difference? And who would have guessed that maybe, just maybe, the next real way to change the world might be through games?