We need to play 21 billion hours of gameplay every week.
By playing games we experience what is called an epic-win. We become the best that we can be in video games. We are not as good in real life as we are in games. In games you become motivated to do something good, to collaborate, to cooperate. In game woulds we become better versions of ourselves, to help at a moments notice, to stick with it until the end, to get up after failure and try again. In really life when we fail we feel overwhelmed, overcome, maybe depressed and frustrated. We don’t feel this in games. In games like World of Warcraft, there are always characters who are willing to trust you with world saving missions, right away. It’s always a mission you can achieve, but you must try hard. And there is no sitting around, there is always something important and specific to be done. There are always hundreds, thousands of players ready to play with you, to help you achieve your goals and missions. That is something we don’t have in real life, collaborators who are willing to help you, to work with you.
Playing games is changing what we are capable of doing, becoming more collaborative.
The average young person today who lives in a strong gamer culture, will have spent over 10,000 hours playing video games by the age of 21.
A book by Malcolm Gladwell, “Outliers.” In which he has a theory of success. If we study for 10,000 effortful hours on anything, we would have by the age of 21, mastered it. Become virtuoso at it.
What are gamers getting so good at? Four things, urgent optimism(self motivation, desire to act immediately, to tackle an obstacle, combined with the believe that there is hope of success), social fabric(we like people better after playing video games with them, trust each other better, build bonds, better cooperation), blissful productivity(we are happier working hard than socializing or hanging out, willing to work hard all the time if they are given the right work), epic meaning(gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions, planetary scale stories). This all builds up to gamers being super-empowered hopeful individuals. These are people who believe they are individually capable of changing the world. Only problem is, they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world. In games they feel like they can achieve more than in the real worlds. Basically we can sort of change real world problems into kind of a game, to help solve them, using skills we learn from playing games.