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

by Jane McGonigal

In short, good games don’t just happen. Gamers work to make them happen. Any time you play a game with someone else, unless you’re just trying to spoil the experience, you are actively engaged in highly coordinated, prosocial behavior.

No one forces gamers to play by the rules, to concentrate deeply, to try their best, to stay in the game, or to act as if they care about the outcome. They do it voluntarily, for the mutual benefit of everyone playing, because it makes a better game.

That’s why today competitive online gamers—even after they’ve been virtually beaten, bloodied, or blasted by each other—thank each other afterward by typing or saying “GG,” short for “good game.” It’s a grateful acknowledgment that, regardless of who wins or loses, everyone in a good game has tried hard, played fair, and worked together.

The industry’s increased attention to co-op mode represents an extremely significant development in gaming culture.

It’s not easy to design a good world, of course. So alongside the growing collection of collaborative creation systems, there are also a growing number of player-created guides to creating better levels and maps. Take, for example, the Forge Hub, a resource for becoming a better Halo 3 world builder. It offers extensive tutorials in various mapmaking skills and curates player-created maps into different collections. It’s a natural extension of the knowledge sharing and collective intelligence culture already taking place on the more than ten thousand player-created game wikis. Gamers aren’t just making each other better players; they’re making each other better designers.

Compared with games, reality is disorganized and divided. Games help us make a more concerted effort—and over time, they give us collaboration superpowers.

What do I mean by collaboration superpowers? A superpower is not just a new skill. It’s a skill that so far surpasses any previously demonstrated skill, and it effectively changes our notion of what is humanly possible.

Extraordinary collaborators are extremely extroverted or outgoing in a network environment—even if they’re introverted or shy in face-to-face settings. They have what I call a high ping quotient, or high PQ. (In tech speak, a “ping” is a computer network tool that sends a message from one computer to another in order to check whether it is reachable and active. If it is, it will send back the message “pong,” thus establishing an active line of communication.) Extraordinary collaborators have no qualms about pinging—or reaching out via electronic means—to others to ask for their participation. They’re also highly likely to pong back when other people ping them. That’s what makes a high ping quotient a form of social capital.

That’s why extraordinary collaborators develop a kind of internal collaboration radar, or sixth sense, about who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission.

Finally, the most extraordinary collaborators in the world exercise a superpower I call emergensight. It’s the ability to thrive in a chaotic collaborative environment. The bigger and more distributed a collaborative effort gets, the more likely it is to become both chaotic and hard to predict.

Collaboration is most effective when there are diverse actors. We need to put these collaboration superpowers in the hands of as many people as possible—especially young people, who represent the next generation of social actors and problem solvers.

and longest-lasting effort to use games as a platform for establishing common ground, focusing global attention, fostering mutual regard, and creating global community. I couldn’t imagine a better context than the Olympics for trying to build a global collaboratory.

In 2004, researchers Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson published Character Strengths and Virtues, a manual with twenty-four such categories, divided into six groups: wisdom and knowledge—cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge; courage—emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal; humanity—interpersonal strengths that involve tending to and befriending others; justice—civic strengths that underlie healthy community life; temperance—strengths that protect against excess; and transcendence—strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning.9

As Seligman and Peterson have often pointed out, we seem to be happiest when we are putting our signature strengths to good use in a group setting.

We never imagined the athletic feats that our players eventually made themselves capable of—indeed, no one had ever imagined such a feat until the players undertook it. The lost sport had never really existed—and it never would have, either, if not for the concerted effort of the global gamers.

We can break free of the cognitive chains of short-term isolated thinking, with games that direct our collective attention to the future and challenge us to take a global perspective.

Because the best way to change the future is to play with it first.

There are 400 different positions after each player makes one move apiece. There are 72,084 positions after two moves apiece. There are 9-plus million positions after three moves apiece. There are 288-plus billion different possible positions after four moves apiece. There are more potential games than the number of electrons in our universe.20

And that’s what I believe Einstein meant when he described games as an elevated form of investigation. 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.

SEHIs don’t wait around for the world to save itself. They invent and spread their own humanitarian missions. More importantly, they are “able to do so with smaller numbers, greater speed, and a far larger impact” than a slow-moving, risk-averse organization.

superstruct/ˈsüprˌstrkt/ verb trans. [L. superstructus, p.p. of superstruere, to build upon; super-, over + -struere, to build. See super-, and structure.] To build over or upon another structure; to erect upon a foundation.25

The existing structures of human civilization just aren’t enough. We need a new set of superstructures to rise above, to take humans to the next stage.

It’s not that hard to imagine people spending their entire lives playing a single game. Many World of Warcraft gamers have now been playing their favorite game for nearly an entire decade already; so has the Halo community. Countless among us spend a lifetime mastering a game like chess, poker, or golf.

If I’m going to be happy anywhere, Or achieve greatness anywhere, Or learn true secrets anywhere, Or save the world anywhere, Or feel strongly anywhere, Or help people anywhere, I may as well do it in reality. —FUTURIST ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY

We’ve learned that a good game is simply an unnecessary obstacle—and that unnecessary obstacles increase self-motivation, provoke interest and creativity, and help us work at the very edge of our abilities (Fix #1: Tackle unnecessary obstacles).

We’ve learned that gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression: it’s an invigorating rush of activity, combined with an optimistic sense of our own capability (Fix #2: Activate extreme positive emotions). That’s why games can put us in a positive mood when everything else fails—when we’re angry, when we’re bored, when we’re anxious, when we’re lonely, when we’re hopeless, or when we’re aimless.

We’ve discovered how game designers help us achieve a state of blissful productivity: with clear, actionable goals and vivid results (Fix #3: Do more satisfying work). We’ve seen how games make failure fun and train us to focus our time and energy on truly attainable goals (Fix #4: Find better hope of success ). We’ve seen how they build up our social stamina and provoke us to act in ways that make us more likeable (Fix #5: Strengthen your social connectivity) , and how they make ...

WE’VE ALSO EXPLORED how alternate reality games are reinventing our real-life experience of everything from commercial flying to public education, from health care to housework, from our fitness routines to our social lives. We’ve seen how these games can help us enjoy our real lives more, instead of feeling like we want to escape from them (Fix #7: Participate wholeheartedly wherever, whenever we can).

We’ve considered how points, levels, and achievements can motivate us to get through the toughest situations and inspire us to work harder to excel at things we already love (Fix #8: Seek meaning ful rewards for making a better effort).

We’ve looked at how games can be a springboard for community and build our capacity for social participation, connecting us in spaces as diverse as museums, senior centers, and busy cit...

We’ve even looked at ways that big crowd games can make it easier for us to adopt scientific advice for living a good life—to think about death every day, for example, or to dance mor...

We’ve looked at crowdsourcing games that successfully engage tens of thousands of players in tackling real-world problems for free—from curing cancer to investigating political scandals (Fix #11: Contribute to a sustainable engagement economy).

We’ve looked at social participation games that help players save real lives and grant real wishes, by creating real-world volunteer tasks that feel as heroic, as satisfying, and as readily achievable as online game quests (Fix #12: Seek out more epic wins).

We’ve learned that young people are spending more and more time playing computer and video games—on average, ten thousand hours by the time they turn twenty-one. And we’ve learned that these ten thousand hours are just enough time to become extraordinary at the one thing all games make us good at: cooperating, coordinating, ...

And we’ve seen how forecasting games can turn ordinary people into super-empowered hopeful individuals—by training us to take a longer view, to practice ecosystems thinking, and to pilot massively multiple strategies for solving planetary-sc...

Very big games represent the future of collaboration. They are, quite simply, the best hope we have for solving the most complex problems of our time. They are giving more people than ever before in human history the opportunity to do work that reall...

Reality is too easy. Reality is depressing. It’s unproductive, and hopeless. It’s disconnected, and trivial. It’s hard to get into. It’s pointless, unrewarding, lonely, and isolating. It’s hard to swallow. It’s unsustainable. It’s unambitious. It’s disorganized and divided. It’s stuck in the present. Reality is all of these things. But in at least one crucially important way, reality is also better: reality is our destiny. We are hardwired to care about reality—with every cell in our bodies and every neuron in our brains. We are the result of five million years’ worth of genetic adaptations, each and every one designed to help us survive our natural environment and thrive in our real, physical world.2 That’s why our single most urgent mission in life—the mission of every human being on the planet—is to engage with reality, as fully and as deeply as we can, every waking moment of our lives.

That doesn’t mean we can’t play games. It simply means that we have to stop thinking of games as only escapist entertainment.

For the starving and suffering Lydians, games were a way to raise real quality of life. This was their primary function: to provide real positive emotions, real positive experiences, and real social connections during a difficult time. This is still the primary function of games for us today. They serve to make our real lives better. And they serve this purpose beautifully, better than any other tool we have. No one is immune to boredom or anxiety, loneliness or depression. Games solve these problems, quickly, cheaply, and dramatically. Life is hard, and games make it better.

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. Games help us work together to achieve massively more.

We can play games endlessly, no matter how limited our resources. Moreover, when we play games, we consume less. This is perhaps the most overlooked lesson of the story that Herodotus told. For the ancient Lydians, games were actually a way to introduce and support a more sustainable way of life. It was impossible for them to consume their natural resources at the old rate, so new games enabled them to adopt more sustainable habits.

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.

These are exactly the good game skills and abilities that the ancient Lydians drew upon in order to survive catastrophic climate change and reinvent their own civilization. If they did it then, we can do it again today. We have been playing computer games together for more than three decades now. By that count, we’ve accumulated our own eighteen years’ worth of preparatory good gaming, and then some. We have the collaboration superpowers. We have the interactive technology and global communication networks. We have the human resources—more than half a billion gamers and counting. More than three thousand years after the ancient Lydians harnessed their game skills and abilities to reinvent the world, we are ready to do the same. We are ready for humanity’s next epic win.

WE CAN no longer afford to view games as separate from our real lives and our real work. It is not only a waste of the potential of games to do real good—it is simply untrue. Games don’t distract us from our real lives. They fill our real lives: with positive emotions, positive activity, positive experiences, and positive strengths. Games aren’t leading us to the downfall of human civilization. They’re leading us to its reinvention.