"This Face Will Save The World"

ARTIST	Linda Chung
YEAR	2011
MATERIAL	Digital Prints
DIMENSIONS	16" x 10"
DESCRIPTION	Jane McGonigal, a game researcher, a game designer and the director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future, states that gaming can save the world by tackling worldwide issues such as hunger, obesity, and climate change by proposing to play games online for "at least twenty one billion hours a week by the end of the next decade." MORE... She lists the four gaming qualities that contribute to the gaming communities: urgent optimism, social fabric, blissful productivity, and epic meaning; these good feelings are the result of having a sense to achieve more in the virtual world. I am doing a parody challenging McGonigal's claim. She shows a picture that captures an intense emotion of a gamer to the attending audience and describes the emotion as a sense of urgency, fear, intense concentration, and a deep focus on tackling problems. She then notes that the crinkle of the gamer’s eyes and around the mouth are 'signs of optimism' and the eyebrows shooting up are 'signs of surprise' which are features of an ‘epic win.’ She states that “this is the face we need to see on millions of problem solvers that we need to tackle obstacles of the next century.” I enjoy the speaker's enthusiasm about her studies and her ambitious, yet out-of-the-world ideas, and want to further her faces-of-the-world idea. << BACK