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On the final day of the Web 2.0 Summit, game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal gave a fascinating presentation about how gaming life and real life are merging—and how that could possibly be a good thing.

McGonigal offered some research findings that suggest the average gamer spends 16 hours per week in videogames or virtual worlds, and up to an additional 10 hours per week thinking about about gaming. She explained that young people worldwide (and in Asia, especially) have revealed that they feel more comfortable and more successful in the structured environment of games—where rules, goals, and paths to success are clearly defined—than in the real world. Sounds like a depressing trend, but one that’s perfectly reasonable from a psychological standpoint. So what’s the best way to reach a generation of people who prefer the safety of gaming worlds to real-world interactions? As McGonigal pointed out, game designers can keep cashing in by designing more interesting and elaborate games that allow people to withdraw to their computers, or they can help schools, charities and workplaces to introduce some of the best parts of gaming into everyday life, to make the real world more fun and less confusing.

Two notable examples of the latter, positive trend are the alternate reality game Cruel 2 B Kind, from McGonigal’s company, Avant Games, and Attent, a workplace productivity app created by Seriosity.

Cruel 2 B Kind requires players to “attack” strangers through random acts of kindness—a stray compliment or helpful deed can earn a player points and weaken opponents. Strangers don’t know why you’re being especially nice to them, but it doesn’t really matter. Nice is nice, right?

Attent helps desk jockeys build an “attention economy” in the office by providing prioritizing emails both sent and received through a currency system. Users trade virtual cash for getting things done through collaboration. The app also includes a really cool mapping function that shows, through cumulative email data, which people on your team are active contributors, and which could use a little, well, encouragement. Translation: everyone is accountable, so no more ignoring emails or passing the buck. Plus, it’s kind of fun, and the game doesn’t require any more effort than that annoying “high-priority” exclamation point people already stick on emails.

McGonigal’s suggestion that adapting real-world processes to the psychology of gamers could increase productivity (and maybe even kindness) certainly is compelling…as long as we can get everyone out of WoW and into the office in the first place.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative has had its share of development hiccups. The project hasn’t gotten the notebooks down to goal of $100 per machine, and a few recent bugs have delayed the recently proposed Give One Get One plan, in which customers in developed countries buy one of the laptops for themselves, and another for someone in need.

But down at the grassroots level, the project seems to be taking hold. In India, for example, the group is developing a cow-powered system in an area short on sunlight, wind and other good renewable energy sources. Cattle would pull on a series of belts and pulleys, activating a dynamo that re-charges spent laptops. Which is exactly how I use my cows

Phillippe Dauman, the CEO of Viacom (You know, the little company currently embroiled in a lawsuit with YouTube?) was brave enough to get up on stage and field questions at the Web 2.0 Summit today. Gotta give him props for that. But surprise, surprise: he doesn’t really get Web 2.0 at all. His idea of opening up Viacom content is to make it available on Viacom-branded show Web sites—with no embed codes for sharing, naturally.

At one point during the interview, he was asked to comment on the announcement today by a coalition of big media companies that industry standards for digital copyright use need to be enacted. Dauman responded:

“There’s been a consensus among developers and content providers. Today’s announcement is meant to benefit consumers, bringing them what they want and encouraging creators of great professional content to continue to produce great content. And there’s been an acknowledgment by all parties that there needs to be rules of the road.”

Now, as far as I can tell, that’s whole point of the alternative copyrights offered by Creative Commons. And I was surprised that the interviewer didn’t call Dauman out on that, so I went up to the mic and asked the question myself. Here’s what I said:

“I noticed that you very carefully expressed the value of “professional creators of great content.â€� To me, the emphasis on the word “professional” seems to indicate some sort of implicit feeling about non-professional content creators. So my question for you is two-pronged: What’s your feeling about the value of user-generated content and remix culture, and what do you think of Creative Commons?

Dauman sat silent for a moment, looking—as an audience member later commented—”like a deer in the headlights.” He finally responded, “I’m sorry, Creative…?” The interviewer on stage repeated the question to him and he said,

“I love all creators of content. I did not mean to make the distintion between professional and non-pro content creators. UGC is great. We’re 100% focused on content creation, that’s all we do.�

And then he rambled on for several minutes about the Laguna Beach virtual world, effectively avoiding the question. Sorry, CC, I tried