The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It (10 page)
Read The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It Online
Authors: Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan
If you run an online porn website, especially a free one, add an Education category to the 50-plus categories that already exist, streaming videos that teach men how to be more skilled lovers. Or at least involve more dialogue between actors.
Another idea is ads: The average porn video is almost 20 minutes long. If you ran a 15-second ad on safer sex practices before every video, it would take up only about 1.25 percent of the entire video’s length. If users want to skip ads, they would have to pay you a fee. At the very least, clearly post resources that users can easily refer to if they suffer from porn addiction — much the same way casinos offer resources for people who have gambling addictions.
Bridge the gap between imagination and realization so that while users can enjoy playing your games, their time counts for something beyond themselves. You have the tools and ability to apply the game mindset to real-world problems and create generations of true-life heroes.
In
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
, Jane McGonigal discusses the power of crowdsourcing, making the observation that successful crowdsourcing projects are structured like a good multiplayer game. One example she uses is the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009. Essentially, many members of British Parliament, or MPs, had been filing illegal expense claims that added up to millions of pounds sterling, including frivolous charges like £32,000 (more than $50,000 at today’s rates) for personal gardening expenses and £1,645 (nearly $2,600) for a “floating duck island.”
The government released the expense forms in an unsorted collection of more than a million electronically scanned documents. The
Guardian
newspaper, which had been covering the scandal, knew it didn’t have enough manpower to sort through the mess, so it hired Simon Willison, a software developer, to design a website where anyone could examine the documents for incriminating details. With his help, the
Guardian
launched a site called Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, the world’s first massive multiplayer investigative journalism project. After just three days, more than 20,000 people had sifted through 170,000 documents. Investigate Your MP’s expenses also had a remarkable 56 percent visitor participation rate.
The investigation prompted the resignation of dozens of Parliament members, plus legal action, including suspensions and prosecutions. Ultimately, it led to widespread political reform.
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Though it may appear to be a suggestion not unlike Tom Sawyer persuading the neighborhood boys that whitewashing a fence is fun, imagine the kind of force gamers would become if every gamer dedicated just 1 percent of his gaming time — 30 million collective hours a week — to make a real-world impact like Investigate Your MP’s Expenses. Considering Wikipedia represents roughly 100 million hours of human thought, hypothetically 15.6 Wikipedia-size projects could be accomplished every year if each gamer invested that 1 percent into a crowdsourcing project. Now that would be a force to be reckoned with.
At the end of Phil’s short but provocative four-minute TEDTalk, he made clear that his primary goal at the conference was to raise awareness and even alarm people. His talk was not designed to calm with simple solutions to this complex problem. We attempted in the relatively short space provided by the new TED Books format both to extend that original analysis by revealing its seriousness as well as its breadth and depth in society, and to suggest some solution starters. Our hope is that readers like you will join a forum on our website at
demiseofguys.com
or on our Facebook page to add your views, experience and solutions regarding the argument presented here.
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