Fix 7-8

What I've found again this week is that planning and thinking ahead saves me time in the long run when playing Settler's Online.  It's become part of my routine day, to login and see how my settlement looks and to see what I need to do to complete quests, check out new quests, and look at my mail.  I would say that by logging in everyday (sometimes multiple times in a day) that I've engaged in wholehearted participation in the game.  While I don't think that a game like Settler's can provide the same real-world connections like the games mentioned in the text do.(Chore Wars...who would've thought that the task of household chores could be made into a video game??)  McGonigal states that the future of gaming is "helping to promote the idea that game technologies can be used to organize real-world activity. Most importantly, it’s provoking innovative ideas about how to blend together what we love most about games and what we want most from our real lives."(Kindle Locations 2072-2073).   Making the everyday tasks of completing household chores an interactive video games with rewards, makes the engagement with the task more meaningful.  This can translate to how video gaming can be used in the classroom as well.  Taking those learning tasks and putting them into the setting of the video game makes them enormously more engaging to students who have grown up with the "digital native" mentality mentioned by Marc Prensky.  When we're already asking students to work collaboratively with each other, doesn't the MOOC format of many games seem like a great solution to keeping students engaged in their learning? 

A balance needs to be maintained so that the alternate reality games that are developing quickly don't take over a student's life.  I spent time using Second Life a couple of years ago and quickly found that I was spending too much time trying to live in both worlds that I wasn't accomplishing what I should have been.  The time commitment can become overwhelming.  It was interesting to me that even the creators of the alternate reality game believe that "we need to be both open-minded and critical about what actually raises our quality of life, what helps us participate more fully in our real lives, and what simply serves as yet another distraction."(Kindle Locations 2407-2408).

It does always seem to me that when I need a push or help accomplishing something in Settler's that I've got  a huge resource bank or a helping hand given to me by a member of my guild.  I know that the games can be designed to offer rewards when players are on the verge of a breakthrough and that is often enough to encourage the player to keep progressing and playing.  I can see how the link between our everyday activities, like flying, can be made more interesting by linking it to a video game.  I've known about FourSquare before, but didn't realize that it was a game environment.  I don't believe that right now in my life, I'm prepared to add more games like these into my life, but maybe when I finish school, I'll have the time and energy to try more games like these out!  They look like fun, but it raises a question in my mind, does every movement that we make become tracked and do we start making moves to improve our standing in the game environment at the expense of our real lives?  I don't know how gaming will continue to impact our society and that of our children growing up, but as games become more sophisticated and more connected to our real lives, it will be interesting to watch!