Summary: The average American will have spent 10,000 hours playing video games by the time they reach their 21st birthday. Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo and gaming expert Jane McGonigal discuss the profound impacts of this simple statistic, from individual cognitive development to society as a whole. This program features visual aids. A full video version is available at: http://fora.tv/2010/11/06/Wonderfest_2010_Does_10k_Hours_of_Gaming_Have_Effects This program was recorded at the 12th Annual Wonderfest, the San Francisco Bay Area Festival of Science, on November 6, 2010. Jane McGonigal is the director of games research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California. She has created and deployed games and missions in more than 30 countries on six continents. She specializes in games that help gamers enjoy their real lives more -- and games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, through planetary-scale collaboration. McGonigal is the author of the newly released book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Philip Zimbardo is internationally recognized as a leading "voice and face of contemporary psychology" through his widely seen PBS-TV series, "Discovering Psychology," his media appearances, best-selling trade books on shyness, and his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo has been a Stanford University professor since 1968 (now an Emeritus Professor). His current research interests continue in the domain of social psychology, with a broad emphasis on everything interesting to study from shyness to time perspective, madness, cults, vandalism, political psychology, torture, terrorism, and evil. He is most recently the author of The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life (2008).
