April 2010
15 posts
Why playing games is a good thing and Farmville isn’t.
Do you know about this site, http://www.freerice.com? It’s a site where you click through browser-based trivia questions and with every correct answer, you “win” food for developing countries. It’s a noble endeavor.
The idea struck me the other day that someone should take this model, but build it out into a sort of system, that, like, tracks data from all sorts of wildly popular mobile/FB games. It could be funded by large corporate donations and the pot would be divvied up based on player scores/achievements in the various games, e.g. @JohnJohnson is at the top of the leaderboard with his 1,000,000 points in BlockStackleVille— so 500 lbs. of food and medicine is donated to Sierra Leone in his name.
I just see so many people, everywhere I go, expending
SO MUCH time and effort pushing blocks around their iPhone screens. Seems like it’d be pretty cool if all that time and effort could actually result in something— I mean, something other than virtual prizes and pixel badges and “local coupons.”
If you want to elevator pitch it, use something like “Tom’s Shoes meets Mobile Gaming.”
One of the main reasons I never got good at gaming is because it was a “waste of time” in light of Real Human Problems. But maybe it’s too late to sway people of that. Perhaps we need to meet them where they already are.
Also, this:
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
Anyone have ideas of place I should eat while I’m here? Oh yeah, and a place where I can have a drink? Preferably somewhere laid back.
The Roost. Cool, laid-back place to get a drink that will make you feel like you just fell into a Tom Waits song. And it’s just enough off the beaten path that parking isn’t a disaster.
Oh, and they have a POPCORN MACHINE.
