Jane McGonical, or how I learned to love Games.

To pair itself very nicely with the previous video I posted, there's also this book I read. I might even call it one of the most amazing books I have read. It makes me hopeful, energized, and inspired - wow that sounds hokey. But I love it!
Jane McGonigal's site has videos, shows you the book, and so on

The book DOES talk about teaching, but not JUST about teaching. We can use games as tools and not just video games either, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Games are useful because they're fun and we want to play. When it comes down to it, people work at video games in spite of the inherent frustration of the challenges. I won't go into the details right now about the why, but it's at the start of the book. Then we expand on the concept and talk about how we can use games to improve our individual lives and our lives as a community, local all the way to global.

She outlines the history of gaming, the evolution, the difficulties, blah blah blah. Good read, but anyway. What I really love are the examples she gives of how gamification can helps us improve our lives (For really REAL examples!): here, here and here.

Have you used any games to help you do anything? I usually use it to avoid doing work, but that's just habit.