The Social Path

Could video game addiction help save the world?

Here's yet another incredible presentation from the folks at TED, this time from video game designer Jane McGonigal. It highlights the untapped potential for the world's most popular online social activity: video games.

A few stats that jumped out at me:

• World of Warcraft players have racked up more than 5.93 million years of total gametime.

• Young people now spend as many hours playing video games (10,000 hours) as they do in school.

• The World of Warcraft Wiki is second only to Wikipedia as the most-used Wikis on Earth.

• There are currently an estimated 500 million gamers on Earth, with another billion on the way in the next decade.

Most adults (especially parents) probably consider these stats "scary," but I think this video helps express how that mindset is changing under Generation Y.

For example, when McGonigal says that the average World of Warcraft player puts in 22 hours of game time a week, your first reaction might be, "What a waste of time!" But compare it to the average American's TV viewing habit of 38 hours a week.

Is it better to spend 20-40 hours a week in a fun, collaborative, interactive environment such as a video game, or just staring passively at a glowing television while you veg out on the couch?

(Full disclosure: I've never played World of Warcraft, nor do I subscribe to cable or satellite TV. My wife and I probably average 8 hours of video game time a week, versus 4 hours of TV via Netflix.)

So what do you think? Does McGonigal make a compelling case for the social potential of video games? Or is she simply trying to find a silver lining in the fact that people are hopelessly addicted to entertainment?

'Sometimes, you just have to save the world on your own.'

Is the solo video game a dying art?

I've been thinking about that quite a bit since picking up a few used Xbox 360 games during a recent sale at GameStop. As the guy behind the counter was ringing me up, he stopped to give me a warning about the critically acclaimed title Mass Effect: "You know that this one's offline-only, single-player, right?"

Until then, I'd honestly never realized how much video gaming has become a community experience, thanks largely to online services like XBox Live and innovative party games like Rock Band.

So is the solo gaming experience on the way out?

I posed this question to my friend Dale Mulcahy, a 3D effects artist for Activision's Treyarch Studio who worked on games such as Call of Duty: World at War. He said that game developers still put a lot of emphasis on the single-player aspect of each game, though players don't always share the priority:

"There is a very high percentage of Call of Duty: World at War players that skipped the solo campaign and went straight into multiplayer. I think I'm safe in assuming this is the case for Call of Duty 4 and any other game popular for its online component. But still, most of our development time goes into the flagship solo campaign because, I dunno, it just feels like it's the core of the game.

"Also, I think many developers feel that their multiplayer modes are extensions of the single player campaign. This philosophy might not prevail in a few years considering where the players are running to first."

Since GameStop's where I was first inspired to tackle this topic, I figured I might as well throw it back in their lap. I turned to Gary Offutt, GameStop's online editor, who just got back from the massive E3 gaming conference.

Gary responded with a truly fantastic writeup on why he believes single-player gaming will never die. I couldn't bear to cut a word, so read it in its entirety after the jump.