I have had a post brewing in my head for days to weeks now, in part driven by some of the reaction to my “High Windows” talk at GDC — yes, the one with the corpse in Darfur, and the whining about how virtual worlds have not achieved their potential, the one I haven’t posted up yet.
Some called that speech inspiring, and others termed it depressing. One of the most interesting reactions came from Prokofy Neva, who has written several interesting posts about the influence of the digerati/tech crowd/game designer on the real world. Her reaction to Jane McGonigal’s turn in the GDC Rant session (slides are here) illustrates the gap that exists:
Then it was Jane McGonigal talking about how game companies were really really good at making people Happy. They had Figured Out what people need to be happy — to feel useful, and a part of something useful (Lenin understood this too! Hey, so did Hitler! And Jane did, too, repeating this exact same PowerPoint exactly the same, twice, once at GDC, and again at SXSW!). Games were so good at fixing stuff they could Fix Reality…
Now, leaving aside the giant culture gap between Prokofy and gamers which makes this commentary inflammatory to those on the other side, there’s stuff here worth listening to.
Edit: just to be clear, I am not at all endorsing Prokofy’s characterization of Jane and her work. It’s ridiculously over the top (and rather rude) to compare Jane to Hitler (!).
While I do think that there are many valid points in Prokofy’s writings on all this, the tone taken is really unnecessary. In writing a post like this, my goal is to try to bridge some gaps, and that means trying to look past the needlessly inflammatory stuff. But that doesn’t mean I should err by omission and fail to comment when a line is crossed. So I apologize for that, particularly to Jane, who doesn’t deserve the mudslinging.
