Lest you forget that there is a Jane McGonigal in the world, preaching good news to gamers (and social activists) everywhere…
I notice a lot of people making astonished noises when Jane says we need more gamers and more hours of gaming, but the assumption being made in these cases is that “gaming” is restricted to XBox, Nintendo, and World of Warcraft — platforms and environments commonly understood to be the province of “gamers”. I adore her matter-of-fact creation of a new, better reality. There are many more possible games, and everyone is a gamer. All we have to do is become aware of the games available to us.
Jane does this by building games based on real-world premises, but those aren’t the only games we can be playing, either. What makes a game is mindset — the creative, collaborative, problem-solving, leveling up we do throughout our entire lives, in every task we seek to undertake. My social experiments are a game. The evolution and momentum of Ideaschema’s mission is a game. Even World of Warcraft isn’t entirely inconsequential, and the positive change, personal wellness, and community growth games we can play with ourselves and the rest of the world are the least inconsequential of the bunch.
Check out Evoke, if you haven’t already, and take a look at the rest of Jane’s projects. What games could you playing… and winning?
Marty and I play a lot of Scrabble lately.
We use this little iPhone app that Tom Guarriello introduced me to, “Words with Friends”. It’s super cute, and you can keep five or six Scrabble games going on forever. (It occurs to me now that I’d better call them Words games, or Scrabble might get mad. Hmm. That’s annoying.)
Anyway, we’ve been playing these awesome Scrabble games using Words with Friends. And it occurred to me that there have got to be a lot of great Scrabble offshoots out there.
So why don’t we have this game somewhere: Phonetic Scrabble. If I have “sirs” on the board and “ease” in my tiles, I should be able to spell “sirsease” (surcease). Aside from the people who will be mad that I am contributing to childhood spelling mistakes, this would be a FUN game. All it would need is software that attributes sounds to letters in a certain order. I’m sure that exists somewhere! It wouldn’t be precise, and that would make it even more fun.
(Aside to Words with Friends people — if you add this game option to your iPhone app, I will enthusiastically beta test it for you!)
What other Scrabble offshoots can you think of? Let’s see if we can get the actual Scrabble company really mad. ;}
PS. I’m kidding. Sort of. I like you, Scrabble company. See: I think your game is good enough to be a household name, a common noun that I can use to apply to any game with similar attributes. That’s good for your brand, as far as I’m concerned.
Update: Haven’t found actual phonetic Scrabble yet, but did find someone speculating about IPA Scrabble. IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet, and it’s what we used in music school to properly notate the way words needed to be pronounced in all kinds of languages. My IPA is pretty rusty, but I’d still be really interested in giving this a try. Of course, I’d need to be playing against folks with IPA experience. IPA Scrabble, anyone?
Why on earth is there no “ball pit” app for the iPhone? We searched and searched, but found nothing.
I guess we’ll just need to built a real one. But still… I’d pay money, app developers. I really think I would. Let’s think about this just for a moment, shall we?
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