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McGonigal goes on to talk about an alternate reality game she helped build for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. She talks a lot about how engaged the players were and how fulfilled they felt by their collaboration and success of mastering the game — all wonderful feelings that games can absolutely induce. But then she mentions in passing that the game was sponsored by McDonald’s. McGonigal talks specifically about solving problems like global warming and global poverty, yet she doesn’t seem to realize that a corporation such as McDonald’s is actually part of the system that creates these problems in the first place. And something is terribly wrong about the fact that it didn’t even seem to feel odd to McGonigal to be making this game for an Olympics held in Beijing, the capital of one of the most terrifying, totalitarian regimes on earth. How out of touch with reality can you be?
Of course, McGonigal built her rep as a gaming expert at the Institute For The Future, which is a nonprofit forecasting organization. And, oh that’s right, it happens to be made up of a who’s who of the most powerful global corporations on the planet. Monsanto, General Mills, General Motors, Kraft Foods, Pfizer, Unilever, Amway Corporation and PepsiCo, to name a few. So when McGonigal preens over her game World Without Oil, in which players participated in an interactive narrative exercise about what would happen if we ran out of oil, the reality is she’s actually providing data for global corporations about how to sell things to us down the line. Also players are providing millions of dollars in value with their creative output in the game — which McGonigal talks about so enthusiastically — but are not paid a cent. McGonigal says paying people for this kind of work would actually be a mistake because people are better motivated by a system of pretend points than they are by money. In fact, she has coined a term for this: the “engagement economy.”
I can’t decide if I think this is simply fairy-tale thinking or out-and-out evil plotting. It makes me think of all those bloggers working for free for the Huffington Post who didn’t see any of the $315 million AOL paid for the site in its recent acquisition, despite having helped create its value through the content they produced.
This is an unsolved problem in the digital economy, and I don’t blame McGonigal for it. But I do blame her for being so caught up in a fantasyland as to fail to see the real consequences of what she’s so eagerly championing, which is more for the people who already have it and less for those who don’t. That’s not my idea of a better world.
I shared some of these thoughts while listening to McGonigal - upshot: one potential strategy for world change but not the only one. And I agree with the critique re. corporations & the question of who is being served - definitely a relationship that needs critical reflection
Read the full article:
http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2011/04/game-engine-the-real-world-is-s...
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