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Posts Tagged ‘Climate Change’

Thanks to my friend rdkt123

Airing on UK television, this charming little piece of propaganda is using the kiddies to get to the adults. Actually the adults wallets. Isn’t that the way Hitler did it? Get the children and the adults will follow. Anarchy is beginning to look real good to me about now.

When are people going to wake up to the truth about “climate change”? It’s weather, climate and it goes through natural changes. The sooner we come to realize that some things in life such as weather are naturally occurring and normal to the balance of life on Earth, the sooner we can begin to take a collective stand and clean house in our governments.

As I read recently, when we try to change the issues and stop trying to change the people who represent us, the sooner we will regain control of our lives. To the people we elect, we are nothing more than a means to an end. At the end of the day, we are expendable.

source: Jahbulon555
States Need To Launch Criminal Investigation Into BP, Federal Government’s Role In Oil Spill

Following the rise of sufficient indicators that BP knew about the conditions of its Gulf oil assets prior to the April 20 leak & explosion 62 long days ago and counting, Alex Jones has called for criminal investigations of key figures at BP, inside the White House administration and elsewhere. Further, Alex has urged activists and concerned citizens everywhere to take a proactive approach to dealing with the looming consequences of the massive oil leak.

He suggests calling on Governors and State Legislators in the Gulf Region to assert 10th Amendment rights– refute the Federal Government’s inaction, and institute measures to resolve the situation as best as can be.

In addition, Alex alerts awakened people everywhere to the renewed efforts by President Obama and certain allies, to ram through Carbon Taxes and other Climate Change measures via stealth, and using the crisis of the BP Oil Spill to justify such fascist policies– when the Obama Administration’s bewildered response (much like the Bush Administration’s delayed response at Katrina) exacerbated the scale and depth of the crisis BP may have let happen.

source: The Media Consortium

“There’s a dead dolphin on this beach,” Mother Jones‘ Mac McClelland, wrote yesterday in Louisiana. It’s one snapshot of the harm visited on the Gulf Coast by the BP oil spill. Back in Washington, the Senate climate bill, which would put the country on a path to cleaner energy consumption, is on its last legs.

You’d think that after a seemingly unstoppable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (official estimates are up to 50,000 barrels a day, as of yesterday) and the hottest spring on record (hello, climate change!), U.S. citizens and elected representatives would recognize that our country’s thirst for resources has consequences.

Read full article here

source: truthout.com
Where the Tea Party Rule and the Tea-hadis Roam

What if the Tea Party ruled? Imagine a land, let’s call it Glennbeckistan, where white, patriarchal, religiously zealous, Tea Party-type patriots hold a super-majority in both houses of the legislature, sit in the governor’s mansion, and control most local governments. It’s a place so out of sync with the rest of the nation that states’ rights and even secession are always on the agenda. It’s a place where gun-ownership trumps all other rights, climate change is considered an insidious socialist conspiracy, and a miscarriage can be investigated as a potential crime. Welcome to Utah.

Our rightwing red-state legislature just finished its annual 2010 session. So-called message bills challenged the federal government’s right to govern federal lands, enforce gun controls, legalize abortion, and mandate health reform. In addition, Utah’s lawmakers cut the education budget, raised tuitions, and slashed services to the disabled. In fairness, state legislators across the nation, faced with disastrous drops in revenue, have likewise slashed social services and balanced budgets on the backs of the poor. In Utah, however, they also shelved pensions for public employees. That they could take such draconian action is instructive — organized labor is weak here, unions being another manifestation of creeping socialism. Utah’s history of labor organizing, or grass roots and civil rights organizing for that matter, is anemic compared to most of America. This is the place, after all, where IWW radical Joe Hill was arrested and executed.

Although Utah may be unique in some ways, Republican leaders here want the rest of the nation to be more like us. In fact, a survey of the 2010 Utah legislative session could be considered a trailer for a movie the national Republican base would like all Americans to star in. This movie would be for the Tea Party movement what Avatar is to tree huggers.

Hot-Tubbing With a Naked Fifteen-Year-Old

Before we get to this movie’s best scenes, let’s identify some of the actors: The posse that goes after the bad guys — the black-hatted Obamacrats — are easy to identify. They wear white hats (and skins). They also wear their superior principles like shiny badges, and they claim to be the underdogs in this script, even while acting like schoolyard bullies. And the bad guys? In our state, they’re nowhere in sight unless you’re looking at Glenn Beck’s chalkboard.

Demonizing opponents is a creative activity for the posse and paranoia comes in endless variations, so the bad guys could be tax-and-spend liberals, illegal immigrants, gays (or at least those following “the gay agenda”), non-Republican blacks, federalists, socialists, environmentalists, pornographers, feminists, or those nature worshippers who believe in evolution. The cast of evil-doers changes each year. So this year, for example, immigrants and gays got a break. Proposed bills to scuttle Salt Lake City’s new nondiscrimination ordinances were shelved until a future session of the state legislature — the Utah-based Mormon church is already catching enough flack for its support of Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage in California. Further antagonizing the national gay community just now was deemed unwise. Immigrants were beaten up enough in last year’s session.

The good guys are easy to recognize because they’re the ones constantly telling the audience how good they are. Sadly, as is so often the case with holier-than-thou-heroes, there are visible stains on the white hats. In fact, the 2010 session was bookended by scandal. As the doors opened, Sheldon Killpack, the State Senate majority leader and an outspoken proponent of tougher drunk-driving laws, was busted for… drunk-driving. He promptly resigned.

On the last night of the session, Kevin Garn, the House majority leader, dramatically stood before packed chambers and declared that years earlier he had shared a hot tub with a naked fifteen-year-old and then paid her $150,000 to keep quiet. He could no longer “live a lie,” he insisted, and so was confessing and apologizing — as it happened, right after the young woman reneged on that deal and went public. His colleagues were “shocked,” but gave him a prolonged standing ovation anyway. Apparently, they find honesty inspiring, even from pedophiles. Hey, at least he wasn’t a polygamist.

So the white hats are a bit soiled, but by now that’s an old story — hypocrisy seems to be the evil twin of self-righteousness. Recent examples are too numerous to list.

Miscarriage Cops

Perhaps the most outrageous legislative move the posse made this year was to turn miscarriage into a crime. State Representative Carl Wimmer’s bill was admittedly directed at a very specific case of miscarriage. In 2009, a woman who had been abused by her boyfriend and feared his reaction if he discovered she was pregnant paid some dirt bag $150 to beat her up so she’d abort.

The crime was as rare as it was horrific and didn’t need its own bill. A rational person might reason that if the woman had access to affordable healthcare, including abortion, or if she had alternatives to living with an abusive partner, she might never have taken such drastic measures. Not Representative Wimmer, who was frank about his desire to challenge and “whittle away” at Roe v. Wade. Every year some Utah legislator takes a shot at limiting abortion or making women who get abortions feel guilty and scared.

The bill was, in the end, amended to ensure that only a woman who repeated the specific act that generated Wimmer’s concern could be prosecuted. Lawmakers, however, seemed oblivious to the fact that, although only a self-arranged, beating-induced miscarriage could land a woman in jail, all women who miscarry are potentially subject to investigation. If you miscarry in Utah, you’d better be sure you have an alibi ready. So much for keeping the damn guvmint off our backs.

Health Reform and Climate Change Banned

It looks like that woman will wait a long time for access to health care. Legislators passed a bill aimed at preventing Obamacare, as it is popularly known here, from coming to Utah without their explicit permission, no matter what the U.S. Congress does. They made it clear that if Utah’s citizens are required to buy insurance, the state will challenge the federal government’s right to mandate that in court. Opposition to health care reform is a centerpiece in a broader “states’ rights” campaign that even includes the weather.

So anti-climate change resolutions passed despite pleas from Brigham Young University and University of Utah professors to heed an overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject. Representative Mike Noel, a rancher, was successful in convincing his colleagues that global warming is just a hoax. They called on the Environmental Protection Agency and Congress to avoid carbon dioxide regulation until “a full and independent investigation of climate change science” is conducted. Give them some credit: language was stripped from the resolution accusing global warming advocates of “conspiracy” because, hey, they don’t want to come across as nuts.

Another resolution called on Governor Gary Herbert to pull Utah out of the Western Climate Initiative, organized by a group of governors concerned about how climate change might affect fragile Western ecosystems. Then the posse passed another bill to protect utilities and energy producers from potential lawsuits claiming damage from greenhouse gasses. And they warned those pesky professors to shut up, too.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Wolves… or Stinkin’ Rangers Either

Legislators also tried to ban wolves. There is little evidence wolves have migrated south from Idaho or Wyoming into Utah — but they might. And if they do: bang! The lawmakers were actually using the assault on the (prospective) wolves to aim at another Big Bad Wolf, the federal government, which reintroduced the dang critters up north, protects them, and obviously cares more for the animals, fish, and reptiles on the endangered species list than it does for real human beings with guns and jeeps that will be more or less useless if pointy-headed Beltway types are allowed to boss the good people of Utah around. Advised by their lawyers that their wolf bill was clearly unconstitutional, they turned it into a strongly worded letter to the Interior Department instead.

Another bill challenged the power of federal law enforcement on roads running through federal lands, like our newest national monument, Grand Staircase Escalante. Local commissioners are still ticked off at President Bill Clinton for declaring a monument in southern Utah and so locking up large coal deposits owned by a foreign corporation that wanted to dig it up and send it to Asia.

And if telling forest rangers to take a hike wasn’t enough, yet another bill aimed to take over federal lands altogether, wielding the right of eminent domain. They know many consider that one laughable, but they’ve vowed to fight for it all the way to the Supreme Court, if they have to. Some $3 million was designated for lawyers in a year that saw education budgets slashed. You can look forward to oil derricks in national parks if they win.

Each region of Tea Party Nation has its own peculiar reasons for feeling oppressed. Westerners complain that they are bullied by big, distant bureaucracies like the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service that oversee most of their open lands. Law enforcement on public lands is intermittent and timid. Under Bush, the federal agencies kowtowed to local politicians. Nevertheless, rangers are right up there with the IRS on the posse’s most-wanted list. Oddly enough, Utahans did not object when, during the Cold War era, the military bombed, poisoned, and irradiated their vast land holdings in the Great Basin Desert.

Mr. Browning’s Holiday and the Ghost of Patrick Henry

It’s only right in a culture that celebrates guns for John Browning, the inventor of the automatic rifle, to get his own holiday, especially since he was born in Utah. State lawmakers originally intended to make his holiday the same as Martin Luther King’s — so they’d feel better about taking the day off, I suppose. Knowing that would cause controversy, though, they finally moved the date. In a more substantive show of support for gun owners, they just officially declared that guns made in Utah were not subject to federal regulation. So there. That one is also headed for the courts. (After all the lawyers are paid, we’ll be lucky if we have funds left over to pay teachers, but at least we have our priorities straight.)

Utah’s states-rights advocates even have their own caucus now. They call it the Patrick Henry Caucus, and they have a website with videos extolling their own patriotism and love of liberty (unless you miscarry, are gay, or enjoy the idea of a future benign climate). Also featured is a Glenn Beck interview of Representative Wimmer, a self-described “9/12er,” who proudly declares, “no doubt we’re going to add to that terrorist watch list.” It isn’t clear if he is talking about the potential actions of the caucus’s most militant supporters or if he wants to label his opponents as terrorists. Another featured video shows Beck interviewing a Texas state legislator who describes a project to pass “sovereignty” legislation and, like Utah, declare federal gun control null and void in the state.

The Ghost of Lester Maddox

The last time we witnessed such a hyperbolic states’ rights rebellion, it was led by strident segregationists like George Wallace and Lester Maddox. As Alabama’s governor, Wallace blocked the integration of the University of Alabama, and Maddox, who was later elected governor of Georgia, closed his restaurant rather than serve black customers. Back then, states’ rights was clearly a cover for shameful racism. Maddox was not a constitutional scholar — he ran a fried-chicken joint. Advocating states’ rights was the means to resist federal mandates to integrate restaurants, swimming pools, and schools. Is today’s talk of states’ rights and secession a response to the integration of the White House?

Proponents howl with indignation when that charge is made, but the Tea Party crowd that hurled racial epithets at a civil rights icon and spit on a Black congressman the day before the big vote on healthcare reform made mincemeat of such claims of innocence. Clearly, some of them see health-care reform as a scheme to make white taxpayers pay for services to blacks. Their resentment taps into old hatreds and fears from the days of Maddox and Wallace. Let’s hope that it doesn’t also tap into the old violence and terror that went with them.

Usually, however, the prejudice is subtler. For several years, Utah’s lily-white legislature defiantly insisted on opening its session on Martin Luther King Day, which they refused to call by its name (substituting “Civil Rights Day” instead). There are no powerful black leaders here in our state, where African Americans were excluded from the dominant Mormon church until 1978, and our miniscule population of African Americans is not a significant voting block, so politicians who disdained Dr. King felt unconstrained. And unguarded: last year, Representative Chris Buttars stood on the floor and denounced a bill he opposed as a “black baby — a dark and ugly thing.”

The states’ rights movement here is also rife with “Birthers” who understand that saying Barack Obama can’t be president because he wasn’t born here is a more socially acceptable stance than saying a black man cannot be president because he is… well, black. If you take Birthers at face value — that their complaint is constitutional in nature and not merely bigoted — then it is fair to ask: Were they also outraged in 2000 when George Bush lost the popular vote, tied in the Electoral College, and won by one vote among Supreme Court judges appointed by his daddy? No, at that time they were counseling Democrats to be good losers and quit whining. The question is: If not racism, why the double standard?

Fightin’ Words!

There was little talk of secession in this session of the legislature, but the rural newspapers and talk-radio shows that fan Tea Party sentiments in the state regularly entertain the notion that we should go our own way. Such talk is delusional. Utah is a net recipient of federal largesse. We can’t pay for our kids’ education by ourselves; we certainly couldn’t afford all those dams and pipelines that bring us life-giving water. Forget about maintaining the highways that run over a vast horizon. Most rural communities have fire stations, water tanks, community centers, and medical clinics made possible by federal grants. Utah’s economy is wedded to jobs generated by Hill Air Force Base. Why, then, so much animosity towards the hand that feeds us?

Because feeding from that hand radically contradicts our cherished image as independent, self-reliant, freedom-loving cowboys who don’t need stinkin’ handouts. We are proud to embody an American way of life that is seen mostly in the rear-view mirror, John Wayne westerns on Netflix, and in our own imaginations. The worst thing you can call a cowboy is a “welfare rancher,” especially when it’s true.

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Utah’s legislators are self-conscious about their image. For example, a bill sponsored by Chris (”Black Baby”) Buttars a few years ago to force the teaching of creationism was killed, not because his colleagues didn’t share his anti-evolution beliefs but because they feared more ridicule. After all, our Mormon majority has already suffered the embarrassment of Jon Krakauer’s best selling Under the Banner of Heaven and an ongoing, less than flattering television series, Big Love, about modern day polygamy.

Although it’s easy to scoff at the state’s buffoonish legislators, it would be a mistake to look at their shenanigans, outrageous as they are, and think: it can’t happen here. Maybe not all of it, but if the Republican base and its Tea Party allies can get their hooks into your state or local government, some of it will come your way, too. Utah, after all, is where the right wing shows its hand. Right-wing jihadis get their training in Glennbeckistan and then march off to places like California to battle gay marriage.

Guess where polluters will go if Utah exempts itself from environmental laws that the rest of the country decides are reasonable to protect your health? If Utah-made guns are exempt from federal regulation, guess where guns will be made? And that’s the idea — to create “nullification sanctuaries” where congressional laws and presidential directives cannot be enforced. Asserting state rights is not simply a way of pursuing regional independence and expressing differences, it is a means of avoiding and undermining the national consensus on any number of important issues.

States-rights legislators are not shy about their long-range goals. Representative Keith Grover said of the 2010 session, “It doesn’t end at midnight.” Members of the Patrick Henry caucus have already contacted lawmakers in Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Texas, Arizona, and Virginia to trade ideas and strategies. South Dakota and Wyoming have also declared their gun-makers exempt from federal law, and Oklahoma’s legislature will also try to block health-care reform.

Better pay attention: tea-hadi warriors from the Republic of Glennbeckistan could be coming soon to a legislative theater near you.

War Is Peace
Freedom Is Slavery
Ignorance Is Power
George Orwell ‘1984′

source: Singularity Hub - Aaron Saenz

Do you know your IQ, that little number that’s supposed to measure how smart you are? Forget it. Individual intelligence is old news, collective intelligence (CI) is the future. And it’s already here. Google lets you access the collective records of the world via internet searches. Wikipedia assembles the shared knowledge of humanity in an ever refined research tool that anyone can access. Oh, these systems have their limits, to be sure, but they allow an individual to quickly leverage the expertise of millions in just a few seconds. That’s incredible, and that’s the promise of CI. The Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT was formed in 2006 by Thomas Malone and his colleagues. CCI tries to answer a guiding question: how can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any individual, group, or computer has ever done before? Thomas Malone addressed the World Economic Forum in Switzerland earlier this year and explained the nature of collective intelligence, how we may track it, and how it could help solve problems like climate change. Check out his talk in the video below.

Collective intelligence can include distributed computing. We’ve seen how a complex problem can be solved by using millions of connected computers working in tandem. So too can any task be divided among a set of human peers. You do this all the time at work, or at home with your family. CI takes the same phenomenon and spreads it among thousands or millions. Linux, the operating system, is an example of CI – it was built and is continually updated by the collective work of its users. Similarly, OpenWetWare is a synthetic biology resource maintained by a group of users, generally with expertise in the field. Future CI may rely on cultivating expertise (among billions of humans, there is likely to be at least one expert in every possible field). It could also harness the statistical genius of a collective of average people (among billions of humans, there’s bound to be at least a few people who have a great idea about a problem).

The great advantage of CI as opposed to IQ, is that CI is growing rapidly, probably exponentially. Individual intelligence is hard to measure – there are many critiques of IQ testing based on racial bias, economic bias, the limited scope of what kinds of skills are tested, and how such tests are applied. Still, it seems that the average IQ is slowly growing at a rate of 3 points per decade – the so-called Flynn Effect. Again, there’s debate over what causes the Flynn Effect (genetics, socialization, nutrition, etc.), but the trend is there. It’s just too slow to really matter. A slight rise in individual intelligence can’t compare to the effect of hundreds of millions of people going online in the next decade. Internet connectivity is increasing quicker than biology could every hope to keep up with.

Another reason why CI will dominate IQ is that individual intelligence is subsumed by the collective. An expert or genius can participate in a group task as easily as an average person. Collective intelligence reflects the group work of the smart, the average, and the dull. While this may seem to average out, a wise application of CI will be able to filter out the dross while saving the best work – no matter where it comes from.

To this end, CCI at MIT is working to understand and guide collective intelligence. Their research includes way to measure CI, studies of how CI is already used in organizations, and tracking how individuals interact in a group. They’ve even started a Handbook of Collective Intelligence – it’s written and edited as a wiki of course. CCI at MIT is also working on applications for collective intelligence: they’re looking into how groups may generate solutions to climate change, make accurate predictions about the future, or find ways to improve healthcare.

Collective intelligence can also take the form of collective art or creativity. Do you play a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG)? Games like World of Warcraft allow millions of users to create a shared entertainment experience within a controlled virtual environment. Little Big Planet and similar games actually have users build levels for other users to explore. The best levels get shared and enjoyed more – CI creates a better video game. CNN has an interesting story about how this trend is extending into other artistic media like music and film.

Kim-Ung Yong might be the world’s smartest man, his IQ is reportedly 210. Marilyn Vos Savant may have an IQ of 186 or even 230 (depends on how you measure it). But these are just the brightest stars in a Milky Way of intelligence. As many average computers can be harnessed into doing the work of a supercomputer (or many such supercomputers), so too will we harness our individual minds for a shared goal through the internet. In fact, CI is really a combination of both these trends. Distributed computing and distributed human problem solving will become one and the same as man and machine become more connected. Every bit of intelligence (human or artificial) will be needed to solve humanity’s grand challenges and take advantage of our growing technologies. So jump in any time, guys. Edit a wiki, join a distributed computation project, start a tech blog…wait. Um, ignore that last one. We’ve got it covered. Promise.

[image credits: JMKnapp via Flickr]
[video credits: World Economic Forum and Ideas Lab (MIT)]
[sources: Indiana University, CCI at MIT]

Another propaganda piece from National Geographic channel.

Not only is it a New World Order “climate change” piece, it even uses the words “New World Order” numerous times.

Source: Wired

Playing digital games is something people do for fun, right? It’s not brain surgery, and it’s certainly never going to change the world.

Except game designer Jane McGonigal thinks games can change the world and that game developers have a responsibility to make it happen. Instead of just inviting gamers to escape into a game world that is more attractive than the real world, game developers have a responsibility to steer gamers toward improving the real world.

Director of game research and development for the Institute for the Future, McGonigal says reality is broken and can only be fixed if we make the real world work like massive, multiplayer games.

Games — particularly alternate reality games — inspire large groups of people to pool their knowledge and skills to overcome obstacles, and this is precisely what’s needed to tackle global social issues, such as poverty, hunger, disease and climate change, McGonigal says.

An example of this is a popular game McGonigal developed in 2007 with Ken Eklund called World Without Oil, which asked 1,800 players in 12 countries to re-imagine their life in a world bereft of oil. The aim was to get players to adjust their thinking and actions if there weren’t enough fuel to ship foods long distances, bus their children to school or simply commute to work.

This week, McGonigal will unveil her new massive multiplayer game at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference. It’s called Evoke, and was designed for the World Bank Institute, the teaching division of the World Bank. It has participants, with the help of real-world mentors they enlist, complete 10 missions and 10 quests — one a week — with the aim of helping them develop skills and solutions to world problems. The 10-week game is free to play and begins March 3.

Wired.com spoke with McGonigal about the role games play in inducing happiness and what lawyers can teach game developers.

Wired.com: You say that reality is broken and that it’s the responsibility of game designers to fix it. What makes game designers the perfect choice to fix the world?

Jane McGonigal: The game industry has spent the last 30 years optimizing two things: how to make people happy and how to inspire collaboration on really complex challenges…. We have all the problems surrounding hunger, poverty, climate change, energy and those are all such extreme-scale problems that require so many different actors to work together, so much concerted effort and so much creative thinking that they seem to be the kinds of problems that gamers have been trained to solve.

In game worlds and in game environments we have these really sophisticated ways of working with other people and figuring out what each others’ strengths are, putting together a team where everybody has something important to contribute, coordinating globally in a virtual environment. The idea is to make games that take those sophisticated ways of collaborating and apply those to real-world problems.

Wired.com: You’ve said that game designers are in the happiness business. What do you mean by this?

McGonigal: Games support happiness … by giving us more satisfying work or concrete tasks that we can accomplish…. Studies have shown that playing a short game — having something concrete that you can accomplish — actually gives you the motivation, energy and optimism to go back and tackle real work.

There have actually been interesting studies that 62 percent of executives at work play games online and they do it to feel more productive. That’s because when you’re trying to do real-world work it’s frustrating; we don’t see the results of our actions right away. So games give us that sense of blissful productivity…. Neurochemically we’re kind of fired up … to take on challenges…. Games take us immediately out of a state of paralysis or alienation or depression and they switch on the positive ways of thinking. They trigger the brain to a state in which it’s possible to do good work. It’s possible to aspire to tough goals.

The other thing is, there have been myriad studies of the long-term effects of socializing in game environments and how they make people feel more connected to other people. It kind of reawakens our sense of extroversion. For people who are introverted, it actually changes our brain structure so that we are more rewarded when we interact with other people. The brain structure of an introvert is that we don’t get as much dopamine when we’re around other people that extroverts do. Games, when you play them with other people, … actually strengthen the reward circuitry so it actually makes people more social and more likely to collaborate because their brains are actually more responsive to people online and offline. Games are transforming the brains of people who play them in largely positive ways.

Wired.com: You talk about building games to change the world but do you have any evidence to show that what people do in games translates to the real world? When the game is over, do people sustain a momentum for change?

McGonigal: Yes. Many of the games I’ve done have triggered lasting change. With the World Without Oil project … we have followed [the players] for years now looking at what their everyday behaviors are like and overwhelmingly they report, three years later, having not only changed their own daily habits, but [they are] teaching friends, coworkers, family members, neighbors to adopt these habits as well. So at a micro level we can change people’s behavior and show them it’s possible to contribute to a better way of living on the planet and empower them to share that with other people.

Wired.com: What is the aim of your new game Evoke?

McGonigal: It’s oriented toward young people in Africa primarily and more broadly to anyone in the world who wants to help solve problems in the developing areas. It’s a crash course in how to start a venture, a business, that can tackle these problems [of poverty, disease, hunger] at a local level…. By the end of the game you have developed a real-world pitch for a venture [and] have acquired mentors to help you make it real. If you play the game you’re connected to somebody in the real world who has entrepreneurial experience to mentor you; you’ve also developed skills to make you a better problem solver.

Wired.com: Aren’t there some people who are more likely to participate in these kinds of games who are already pre-wired for social activism? How do you get the average person to participate and be inspired to make a difference?

McGonigal: I believe that we can use the same emotional strategies, the same storytelling strategies, the same techniques that blockbuster games use to attract a larger audience. The response to [Evoke] is that this is the kind of game that has crossover potential. It feels like a blockbuster, not a niche project.

Three years ago, the World Bank Institute tried an online project that would teach social innovation to university students, and it was not overwhelmingly well-received. The students were not engaged. They didn’t believe that they could be the kind of person to do that work.

So we’ve been doing a roadshow around different parts of Africa … to see do students respond to this better and … the people at the universities are saying that the difference is overwhelming compared to three years ago. That this kind of a game makes it seem real and possible and exciting. So it does seem to me that we can use games to engage people who otherwise wouldn’t be engaged. It’s not an easy obstacle to overcome. There will always be more who are ready to participate because they already care. But it’s not just about caring. It’s about convincing people that they can make a difference. It’s about giving them concrete ways to contribute.

Wired.com: It’s great to bring people together for a fun game but can you actually get them into the long-term commitment that real-world change requires?

McGonigal: Well, we know that contributing to world change does not require a long time commitment, necessarily. We’re inventing all the time new ways to make a difference at a micro scale. When you add up [small] contributions, they make something bigger, like Wikipedia, like micro-financing. These are scalable actions that when you add them all up they do make something bigger.

I don’t want a gamer to feel like they have to commit their whole life to changing the world…. If you’re a mentor [in the Evoke game], you’re contributing maybe 20 minutes of time once a week. But if you have changed someone’s life who is actually on the ground trying to solve a problem in a village in Africa, your 20 minutes has actually been amplified to do something more.

Wired.com: How will games change in the future? And how will game developers need to change to create that future?

McGonigal: [One thing we'll need] is that the mainstream game industry keeps doing what it’s doing, which is trying to create bigger collaborative work environments. There’s a new game MAG that will for the first time have 250 people collaborating simultaneously on a playing field. And the structure for collaborating in that environment is very sophisticated.

Game developers know that people have more fun when they’re in large groups. They feel more fired up when the challenges are more epic. So game developers should figure out to keep innovating in that direction…. And that’s really important because they’re showing “serious game” developers what the right design strategies are for taking these techniques for happiness and collaboration and applying them to real problems. I’d like to see crossover, though. I’d like to see Blizzard take on a serious game. I’d like it to not to just be two separate tracks of game development. I think … the way the legal system has pro bono allocations for lawyers I think game developers should have some kind of pro bono allocation for games for good.