In May Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker presented the 2017 Internet Trends report. The report is always highly anticipated and Mary Meeker's presentation and slides (not all were presented) included topics like the global internet trends, internet in China and India and health care. Interactive games also had a prominent spot in the report and for our July research meeting we've discussed some of the points that interested us the most. Here are a few of them:

• First of all, Mary Meeker calls interactive gaming "the mother lode of tech product innovation/evolution + modern learning". This fits very well with the vision of GEMH lab, as we see games as an excellent platform for children to learn new things and work on the challenges they encounter in their daily lives. 
• Gaming is part of the lives of 2.6 billion people (compared to 100 million in 1995) and Gen X and Millennials have been "gamified since birth". There is a shift in the way people play video games, from the individual play sessions in arcades in 1967 to global collaborative play in 2017 with online multiplayer games and eSports bringing players and spectators together. This all means that the world of games is increasingly social and a part of many people's lives. Gaming is not just a hobby for a selected group of people, but we can all call ourselves gamers nowadays. It is in that world that we as the GEMH lab build our interventions to improve young people's emotional and mental health. 
• Mary Meeker mentions many benefits of interactive gaming, like the opportunity to "learn from losing" in an "engaging process" and the many skills that are trained in video games. These only add to the benefits we see as reasons for using games in our field (see our page on Why we use games). 
• Another fascinating aspect was the way "gaming has driven internet services". From the way we tell stories on the internet, to downloadable content, to how sports are being shown on TV. This shows the transformative power games have. 
• We ended the discussion with a question Mary Meeker asks and one that only makes us more excited about the future of gaming and the role it has in our society: "perhaps interactive gaming [...] has been helping prepare society for [the] ongoing rise of human-computer interaction?".

If you want to look at Mary Meeker's slides or live presentation you can find them here: https://www.recode.net/2017/5/31/15693686/mary-meeker-kleiner-perkins-kpcb-slides-internet-trends-code-2017

If you'd like to discuss above points, or if you've found some other interesting trends you'd like to talk about, feel free to comment below!