Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

by Jane McGonigal

According to Hecht, since ancient times meditations on death have served the same purpose: to replace fear and anxiety with a kind of calm, mellow gratitude for the life that we’re given.

In this way, the game perfectly serves its purpose: it simultaneously activates positive emotions and social bonds while putting us in the perfect environment to get our recommended daily reminder that we are all dust, and to dust we shall return.

We’re used to being creative and playing outside of social norms when we’re inside the socially safe “magic circle” of a game.

When we dance, we’re forced into an emotionally and socially vulnerable state in which we have to hope and trust that others will embrace us, rather than judge us. At the same time, we’re given the opportunity to embrace others and help them feel more comfortable dancing.

Crowdsourcing is a way to do collectively, faster, better, and more cheaply what might otherwise be impossible for a single organization to do alone.

According to Shirky, more than half of all collaborative projects online fail to achieve the minimum number of participants necessary to even begin working on their goal, let alone achieve it.

Their primary purpose is to be rewarding, not to solve a problem or get work done. Unlike serious projects, they are engineered first and foremost to engage and satisfy our emotional cravings. And as a result, they are the projects that are absorbing the vast majority of our online participation bandwidth

As it becomes easier and cheaper to launch a participation network, it will likely become equally difficult to sustain it.

It’s very difficult to motivate large numbers of people to come together at the same time and to contribute any significant amount of energy—let alone their very best effort—to a collaborative project.

crowdsourcing projects—if they have any hope of capturing enough participation bandwidth to achieve truly ambitious goals—must be intentionally designed to offer the same kinds of intrinsic rewards we get from good games.

There’s no evidence that hundreds of thousands of people would show up to play a bad game just to help out a good cause. But the combination of good game design and real-world results is irresistible.

Compensation increases participation only among groups who would never engage otherwise—and as soon as you stop paying them, they stop participating.

We need a more sustainable engagement economy—an economy that works by motivating and rewarding participants with intrinsic rewards, and not more lucrative compensation.

They are a natural source of participation bandwidth for the kinds of citizen journalism, collective intelligence, humanitarian, and citizen science projects that we will increasingly seek to undertake.

With each epic win, our possibility space expands—dramatically. That’s why epic wins are so crucial to creating sustainable economies of engagement. They make us curious about what more we can do—and as a result, we are more likely to take positive action again in the future.

With good mission design—a focused task, a clearly defined context for action, a real window of opportunity—something previously impossible to achieve, like saving a life, becomes possible.

Emphatically, these are problems that cannot be solved online. They require real-world action, not just online interaction.

By creating a sense of urgency, presenting a clear challenge, and adding a layer of social competition, the game turns what would otherwise feel like an ordinary, mundane effort to do a bit of good into an extraordinary effort.

By turning energy saving into a massively multiplayer experience, Lost Joules takes advantage of the network effect: it amplifies my private epic wins into spectacular social achievements.

They actively focus their attention on the game, and they agree to ignore everything else for as long as they’re playing. They practice shared concentration and synchronized engagement.

To compete against someone still requires coming together with them: to strive toward the same goal, to push each other to do better, and to participate wholeheartedly in seeing the competition through to completion.

What all of these god games have in common is that they encourage players to practice the three skills that are critical for real planet craft: taking a long view, ecosystems thinking, and pilot experimentation.

Via the game, players made themselves better citizens.”

By turning a real problem into a voluntary obstacle, we activated more genuine interest, curiosity, motivation, effort, and optimism than we would have otherwise.

Gamers are ready and willing to take on challenges outside of strictly virtual environments. Meanwhile, people who don’t ordinarily play games are happy to do so when it can help make a difference in the real world.

When enough people play a game, it becomes a massively collaborative study of a problem, an extreme-scale test of potential action in a specific possibility space.

Superstruct was designed to wake gamers up to the possibility of making the future together—a critical first step to increasing our collective engagement with global superthreats.

Games are a way of creating new civic and social infrastructure. They are the scaffold for coordinated effort. And we can apply that effort toward any kind of change we want to make, in any community, anywhere in the world.

The ancient Lydians just had dice games. Today, we are developing a much more powerful kind of game. We are making world-changing games, in order to solve real problems and drive real collective action.