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This is an excerpt from an interview with me by Jenn Webb. You can read the complete interview on O’Reilly Radar.
In your book’s introduction, you say, “I hope to start moving toward a post-hype discussion of how games can most effectively achieve great things in the real world.” Who is leading the way — or at least moving in the right direction — and what are they doing?There’s so much really inventive work being done right now. Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of “Zombies, Run!,” and I think it’s kind of great. This is a game for smartphones that overlays a narrative about survivors in a zombie apocalypse onto your daily run. As you’re out getting your exercise, you’re listening to the game events as they unfold, and you can hear the zombies closing in. It’s a great use of fantasy, and it plays as a true game with meaningful choices and conflict.There’s also a great group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that’s developed a smartphone app called ARIS, which builds game scenarios into physical locations, and they’ve developed dozens of applications for it. One of them is being developed as a museum tour for the Minnesota Historical Center, giving people quests to complete by scanning objects in the exhibit and then using them to complete objectives in a story line. The museum is actually changing the way the exhibit is laid out to better accommodate the gameplay, moving away from the traditional snaking path to more of an open layout that allows players to move more freely between the interacting displays to solve the game’s challenges.Some of the thought leaders who I really admire include Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil at MIT, Ian Bogost at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Jane McGonigal. A common current among these thinkers is their emphasis on games themselves as a force of cultural transformation, rather than simplistic “gamification” of software applications that lead to little or no meaningful change.
Good game design in the real world
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