It Takes All Kinds

PRESIDENT OBAMA, as part of his plan to entirely eliminate all gun violence in america forever, has proposed spending millions of our american dollars to study the effect of video games on people. A comprehensive sutdy will be undertaken to determine once and for all whether violent shoot 'em

up electronic entertainment of various sorts, movies and television included, cause human beings to commit random mass murder. Interesting to think that at this late date we still do not know the actual relationship between vicarous and actual violence.

Everybody has an opinion, and numerous statistics, but no coherent, cohsesive, pursuasvie theory. It has long been suspected by many people that playing violent video games raises the stress levels of children over an extended period of time, and combined perhaps with stress in real, daily life, then later challenges and failures in adulthood, and easy access to lethal weapons, causes accumulated anger and alienation to erupt in a display of horrendous violence. later on...

Now there is an alternate theory that violent video games actually help to prevent violence in real life, and reduce the number of random mass murders, by providing an outlet for preexisting anxiety, draining away the energy which might othwrise, and in some cases would otherwise explode in real world violence.

If this is true, heaven only knows how much random gun violence would drench america in blood if video games did not exist at all. Or if nobody had video games and everybody had a gun...

We come full circle in our speculations by introducing Jane Mcgonigal, a brilliant, highly educated proponont of video games, who claims that video games can save the world. Not only that, but she's serious as a heart attack.

Jane is the director of game design of the Institute For the Future. a website and think tank seeking innovative solutions to as yet unsolved problems. She says that the average person plays something like three thousand hours of video games each year, for a total of several billion worldwide.

She claims that if we could drastically increase the amount of time spent playing video games, and get the right people, the smart, creative, problem solving types in front of a screen for long enough periods of time, playing the right problem simulation games, that the solutions and answers which win video games can be used to heal the world.

Many of the games she has designed actually do simulate real world problems, such as depletion of natural resources. The game winners are those who create the best solutions. Reality is broken, she says, and we can first fix it by finding out how through gaming, then apply the solutions to the real world.

 And no, I am not kidding. Listening to her speak, she is very very convincing, and who knows, she may be right. It takes all kinds.