If You Want to Save the Earth, Think Like a Game Designer, Jesse Schell PhD Ep20

If you want to save the Earth, you need to think like a game designer. 
In this episode, I sat down with Jesse Schell, author of the canonical game design textbook, The Art of Game Design, and asked him how he would go about saving the planet as a game designer. Jesse is a Distinguished Professor of Experience Design at Carnegie Mellon University and the CEO of Schell Games.
Think about these qualities :  peak motivation, obsessive focus, a drive to win, life-long mastery of a complex skill, desire for epic planetary-wide quests — it all sounds like a pretty good skill set to save our real planet, right? 
Manifesting these emotions listed above is the craft that game designers specialize in.  People who specialize in game design are a treasure-trove of design-thinking insight about how to get people into a state of obsessive flow, hack into human happiness, and pique the reward system of the brain.
I love Jesse’s book The Art of Game Design because when I read it a few years ago, I asked myself “how would l apply all this game design thinking to climate change, plastic waste, or eating less meat”?  Reading a game design textbook through the eyes of an environmentalist opened my imagination when thinking of ideas for environmental change, in a way that nothing else really has.

Jesse joined us for our monthly Fitbit for the Planet video hangout for this episode.
Sign up to join the live monthly group calls at katiepatrick.com/fitbit.
Read the blog article about this episode.

Follow Jesse Schell
Get a copy of The Art of Game Design on Amazon
Jesseschell.com
Twitter @jesseschell

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