Friday, May 13, 2011

Social Network Positive Challenge

http://www.sparked.com/home appeared when researching a suggestion made by Jane McGonigal in "Reality is Broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world" published in 2011. I noted her reference to The Extraordinaries game which is intended to harness people who do internet gaming to positive social change across the globe.

Upon signing up at Sparked for The Extraordinaries the process led choosing a category, in this instance "religion", the choice came to decide on support of a specific non profit venture benefiting people somewhere in the world.  The choice for me was The African Child Foundation in Kenya, Africa. The commitment I made was to call attention to this Foundation on this web site in order to encourage more gaming people to know about and perhaps respond to this social effort.

The "Reality is Broken" is quite a challenge to American cultural notions of how a person spends time and what "work" actually means. It does raise serious questions as to what makes for fun and whether a person should put with a boring life. Apparently the number of people who are into doing games on various devices is considerable. McGonigal makes the case for using gaming for the good of society and to offer personal satisfaction while people learn how have fun and as a side effect discover how to solve life problems.  Time will tell how this works out.

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Being in my upper 80s means that I have more experience than energy. This is simply my experience.