Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (a book by Jane McGonigal)
by Fran Ilich <fran@eyebeam.org>
This book starts by bringing into our imagination the amazing shift that is happening in the material world as millions of persons all over the map decide to step aside from it to retreat and detach by immersing themselves into the virtual world of their preference. They may forget about following the regular paths of the American Way of Life, the rags-to-riches plots that some legends argue can be found in Vegas, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and so on. This has reached such epidemic proportions that at one point the People’s Bank of China had to intervene to prevent devaluation of the Yuan because too many renmibis were being converted and invested into virtual currency (in particularly the QQ coin), which the bank called “Coins of no return”. Its official comments were along the lines of the following: ”Once the company gets the money that people paid for the QQ coins, they can do virtually anything with it. They can invest in real estate or the stock market, without having to return a penny. It’s not just as if they are opening a bank – but the bank could possibly turn into a black hole.”
In any case, McGonigal refers to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, which holds that, by playing or enjoying herself, any given person can achieve a state of joy that can remove her from her own regular limitations and take her into an unlimited moment of creativity. More or less, this is the general idea — and I have a hunch that we’re all familiar with the general direction of this argument. She goes on to tell a story that appears in the first book of Herodotus’ Histories: the Lidyans were suffering a serious food shortage that they couldn’t resolve. So, they decided to spend their time playing dice. This helped them forget their sad reality for 18 years, as they were less hungry because they spent their time playing. But McGonigal believes that games of today will not only allow us to hide from the grim realities of our present (neoliberal capitalism?), but can also help us focus jointly on creative solutions.
McGonigal goes on to describe what she considers to be the four traits of any game: goals, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. Games, she says, immerse us in an experience that has the unconscious effect of making us concentrate and achieving more synapses than usual. As a result, something that would normally be hard work ends up being less difficult because we experience it as enjoyable and fun. McGonigal also makes a point to differentiate and explain different types of work, such as high stakes work, busy work, mental work, physical work, team work, and creative work. She believes that everyone can benefit from “eustress” (good stress) in order to achieve better results: happier endings create happier subjects and so on…
One example McGonigal offers: David Sudnow wasn’t having much success in his regular job as a musician; he was also addicted to the Atari game Breakout. He went on to write the first book account of a videogame, which is the classic Pilgrim in the Micro World. McGonigal uses this example to argue that depression could be a physiological indicator that the road being folowed is a bad one; depression is a way in which the body itself stops us from heading into trouble. (She also brings our attention to New Games (1977) by the New Games Foundation, as another classic texts in the field.)
McGonigal describes churches, pyramids, and other monumental institutions as social organizations that are the result of co-operative labor. She believes that games could be organizational and about life management, and that clues could be used to assign tasks.In general, she is drawn towards what could be described as “life-improvement” games, which can be played through all sorts of methods such as videogames, cards, larping, or alternative reality playing. Overall, she insists that players should feel invested in their virtual or game worlds and have long-term goals within them. Content generated from games becomes a reward in itself. This is content, she suggests, is like so many puzzle-pieces that are assembled through the co-operative labor of gaming: ”Until players put a chaotic story together it doesn’t really exist -it’s just a web of evidence, the raw materials for a story: it’s up to the players to do the actual final storytelling, which typically occurs on a wiki that ultimately represents an “official” story of the game.
Of course, McGonigal is able to draw on her own exceptional expertise, as she is the designer of an impressive amont of successful games. These include her invention of a “lost” ancient Olympic sport and the falsified history around it, which managed take on a life of its own after it was first “resurrected” at the Beijing Olympics. McGonigal was chosen as one of the “Women to Watch” who are changing industries (and the way we think) in the last issue of Entrepreneur magazine, alongside minds such as Limor Fried (of Adafruit fame) and Tara Hunt (The Whuffie Factor).
I’ll close this review with what I find to be one of McGonigal’s most provocative suggestions: “And finally, as the Llydians were so quick to realize, games do not rely on scarce or finite resources. We can play games endlessly, no matter how limited our resources. Moreover when we play games, we consume less. We are just starting to realize this possibility ourselves today, we are starting to question material wealth as a source of authentic happiness.”
I was game to such ideas before opening this book. In my case, however, it’s the result of a certain exasperation with so many trends in digital activism that seem to celebrate themselves and supercede each other in such rapid succession that the absence of any greater strategy is hardly noted.
