The TED presentation originally given by Jane McGonigal, McGonigal (2012) in February of 2010 and again during the June 2012 TED conference and based on her book McGonigal (2011), was exceptionally fresh in many ways. Firstly, the consensus of non-gamers is that gaming is seen as a sort of passive activity removed from the pressures of reality. It is correlated with inactive research and unrestrained behavior. However, as McGonigal explains, gaming has introduced a new kind of collaborative and interactive research methodology. Gaming also gives groups (and individuals) the opportunity to express and experience co-opetition - a game-theoretic notion of cooperative survival as seen sometimes through the lens of the very famous Prisoner's Dilemma game and its variants, including the Tragedy of the Commons in which groups do not participate in a common good if they think they can garner the benefits of the group's work without they themselves being participatory. These are game-theoretic strategies that have been around for 5 decades now, since the notion of the Cold War end to the world was envisaged by both US and USSR scientists post World War II.
While McGonigal does not directly mention these strategies in her book and talk, her intuition and research premise that gaming leads to cooperative and competitive regimes simultaneously while having groups solve problems in the collective is singularly unique when she takes that notion to the next level - crafting a different way of attacking reality and real problems. Gaming is potentially a new scientific methodology - a distinctive point in the spectrum of collective intelligence approaches on the semantic web. Gaming has most famously led to solving some topological protein shaping problems in biology. Gaming may lead to solving some very sticky problems in computational dynamics as well. Generally speaking, McGonigal points to some very positive psychologically inspiring phenomena in gamers when they try to solve problems, a sort of collective addiction to getting to the problem at hand and solving it as the collective. This leads to similar, if not exaggerated features that are shared by the intense work done by researchers when they know what is at stake and are close to the finish line, case in point, CERN and FermiLab's quests to statistically validate the Higgs Field and hence, the Higgs boson and its potential artifacts.
This methodology can be carried into the realm of future technological prowess because it points to a new way of approaching future problem solving - a mixture of computational and human collective power usurping that of the traditional disciplinary methodologies of qualitative and quantitative (and their hybrids) research. Futuring may then be seen as simple computational collective experiments.
Finally, to reiterate the forces involved in the theory of gaming interaction and development as posited by McGonigal, the one I emphasized the most would be the technical aspect of advancement, a new paradigm of research, interacting with others as one does this and of a collective acceleration of it. The other force involved in this theory would be the societal aspect essentially because it's widespread usage would change the fundamental way in which society interacts in work, design, and implementation. This is so because it would set a precedent for safer prototyping, dissemination of ideas connected to a development, and of publication of them.
References
McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. New York: Penguin Press HC.
McGonigal, J. (2012). Gaming can make a better world. TEDGlobal 2012. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html.
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