In this TED talk, Jane McGonigal argues that that complex games like World of Warcraft teach players important critical thinking skills and weave a social problem-solving fabric. She goes on to point out that humans have spent 5.9 million collective years playing World of Warcraft online, and that harnessing that sort of intense collaborative focus could actually precipitate solutions to real-world problems, if you build the right online games. She goes on to describe her latest effort, called .
I would also contend that this phenomenon holds true in large part for other social games that I spent a good bit of middle school immersed in: Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. More recently, my friends and family have taken up German-style board games like Settlers of Catan. Obviously with these paper-based games, you don’t get to leverage the huge numbers of players and massive amount of information they can process in an online environment, but the immersive, collaborative, analytic elements are all there.
The unsettling element of her talk simply being another potential reason to open a WoW account.