As time goes on video games are slowly shaking off their reputation of being nothing more pointless escapism. With many of the original video gamers well into their 30's and 40's, it makes sense that more and more of the decision makers in the world have, at some point in their lives, had a positive experience with gaming.

Today I have a series of three articles that articulate some of the non-traditional uses that have been found for games..... they're no longer just about having fun.

1. Tackling societal problems
CNN has a great interview up with Jane McGonigal, a games developer who focuses on "the way that massively multiplayer online gaming generates collective intelligence, and interested in the way that the collective intelligences thus generated can be utilized as a means of improving the world". (ref)



Here's a quote from the article:

The cooperative skills and hopefulness that people learn while pecking away at online games like World of Warcraft will help our society address real-world problems like climate change and nuclear arms proliferation, she says. To get people to use less oil and mentor entrepreneurs in Africa, she also is developing games that merge the digital and real worlds.

"My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games," she said.

2. Winning hearts and minds in a warzone
The American military has created a video game that attempts to teach soldiers how to properly deal with the civilians that they interact with during wartime and peacekeeping operations. This is always a sticky problem, as different societies are often completely alien to foreign visitors - especially those bearing arms.

A new game may help soldiers in that problematic campaign–winning the hearts and minds of people in occupied countries. The game, developed by the University of Texas and backed by the U.S. Army, gives American soldiers deployed abroad some lessons in foreign customs and cultures. This is the opposite of a first-person shooter game; the Pentagon calls it a “first-person cultural trainer” game.

Air-dropped into foreign lands, soldiers often find themselves at a loss, knowing neither the local language nor the cultural conventions. The new 3D simulation game is intended for soldiers to learn the niceties in Iraq and Afghanistan, where a friendly relations with locals could make the difference between life and death.

3.Teaching science
Finally, Discover.com blogger Sean Carroll discusses his greatest hope for video games, which is well within their capacity to accomplish:

The kids these days, they love their gaming. So it makes sense to ask how that passion can be put to good use. Personally I’m fascinated by the prospects of using games to teach people science. Not just facts and features of the real world — although those are important — but the scientific method of hypothesis-testing and experiment.

Games already feature exactly those features, of course; everyone who figures out the "laws of nature" in the game world is secretly doing science. It wouldn’t be that hard to tweak things here and there so that the techniques they were practicing connected more directly with science in the non-virtual reality.