I find it a bit outstretched, but not necessarily wrong. I do find a flaw in her reasoning that she did not address. Game's are designed to be "doable", you know that with enough work you will be able to do anything (in a PvE environment.) The real world is not. There's no security that, even with 21 billion hours a week, we'd be able to "win" against the world problems. So the "urgent optimism" is "safe optimism" in a game, but could be "get-disappointed-over-and-over optimism" in the real world. And since you can't know if you'll win, you lose motivation easily. That why the "seeing the world as I game" approach may fail.
I think that's the main reason people escape to games. They know they will always "win" in the end.
On a side note: My mother works in medicine, I'm an aspiring game developer (who isn't?), and she constantly says I should make a game where you play as the human immune system and have to fight off diseases with the different and specific defenses the body has. What an awful sentence. I always reply: "You know? If I could somehow program the whole "immune system vs illnesses" battle into a game, I bet gamers would find the cure to cancer and every other disease faster than any doctor", which is kind of what the woman was saying in the video.
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I think that's the main reason people escape to games. They know they will always "win" in the end.
On a side note: My mother works in medicine, I'm an aspiring game developer (who isn't?), and she constantly says I should make a game where you play as the human immune system and have to fight off diseases with the different and specific defenses the body has. What an awful sentence. I always reply: "You know? If I could somehow program the whole "immune system vs illnesses" battle into a game, I bet gamers would find the cure to cancer and every other disease faster than any doctor", which is kind of what the woman was saying in the video.