The Greatest Freakout Ever

Jane McGonigal presented the idea of playing more video games to an audience at a Ted Talk conference. She suggested that we should plug into this market and try to elicit the skills of people who are gamers and utilize them to solve the world's problems. The video above is one reason we should not.

McGonigal claims that withing these games, gamers accumulate skills that would be beneficial in society. My thought is, these people are currently a part of society, so why are the skills that they already have, not helping society now? It's not like they are being put in a dungeon somewhere and being forced to play their games and not allowed out until they abandon those skills.

From my personal experience, video games can be harmful - an aspect that McGonigal does not acknowledge. My brother was addicted to his Play Station for many many years and was often playing violent video games. (The number of violent video games outweigh the number of non-violent or beneficial video games in the market.) Because of his addiction to these video games, he developed violent tendencies and became very confrontational. He saw these actions were acceptable in the video game, so why would they not be in society? These misconceptions of what were acceptable and what were not, were irreversible and caused a lot of problems with his ability to concentrate and be a valuable member of society. Because of these video games he has isolated himself and burned all of the bridges he's ever had.

Granted not all of this is not strictly due to video games, but according to counselors it "unleashed" poor behaviors.

In addition to this experience I had a friend who was addicted to WOW (World of Warcraft). It was to the point that he would ask me to hang out, but what that meant was sit and watch him play WOW. We would sit for hours and not say a word to each other.

I'm not saying that video games are evil, but I do believe that our generation and generations behind me have come to a point where video game consumption is somewhat borderline dangerous. There are skills that can be built with video games, but there are also bad habits that can be developed and it is important to acknowledge them both. We need to tap into the good that we can create with video games, but we also need to minimize the violence and addiction.

The behavior showcased in the video above is disturbing and caused all because his mom cancelled his WOW subscription. Isn't there another way to tap into that passion and develop a way to put it to good use?