Jane McGonigal

Reality is certainly broken. Leave aside the big problems like climate change, peak oil, political instability, and economic collapse, on a day to day basis, people are feeling alienated from their jobs, their communities, their very lives, and are fleeing into virtual worlds. Jane McGonigal makes the claim that this is not as bad as it appears, that in fact, games might save the world. Unfortunately, the book falls into the what I might call the Malcolm Gladwell (sorry, Malcolm) trap of show more thinking that an interesting idea and a bunch of anecdotes somehow adds up to a well-supported thesis.

McGonigal breaks the book into three sections. The first is about why we game. She brings into two unusual emotions, fiero, which is triumphant pride in victory, and naches the pleasure of helping someone else become accomplished to explain we find games fun. Games provide ample opportunities to experience these otherwise rare emotions. Games also help us bond, socially, in that they can be a shared interest, but also help us feel like part of a larger project. Just walking around World of Warcraft feels like being part of a community. The second and third part focus on Alternate Reality Games (ARG), which can be used to get people to help with everything from household chores (Chore Wars) to urban decay (Groundcrew.us). Another side of games is developing long term thinking, whether it be a World Without Oil, or SUPERSTRUCT.

Now, I'm going to be a little critical. One important question that McGonigal drops are if forms of community fostered actually as meaningful as 'traditional communities'. It's one thing if people are replacing watching Jerry Springer with gaming, it's another if it's replacing the traditional institutions of cohesion. My D&D group are some of my closest friends on campus, but it's not because we play D&D, it's because we sit around the table for four hours a week and talk, face to face (and as my players will tell you, I'm the worst for letting table talk interrupt the game.) I can't say that the virtual communities I've belong to have felt event a little bit as real.

On a related note, can games create valuable behavior? There are certainly lessons to be learned from game design about making boring tasks like work and school more interesting and intrinsically rewarding, but a fundamental facet of games is the freedom to leave. Can games replace other forms of organization with the going gets tough, or boring? Bruce Sterling said something like, "Good luck getting these twitterhead neterati to pay attention to anything long enough to govern it," in relation to the recent uprising in the Middle East. The same likely applies to game. Chapter 11, on the Engagement Economy, is one of the better ones in the book, but really deserves somebody with an economics PhD to flesh it out. Translating value between the game and the cash economy will be a perennial problem for serious game designers, and is one that McGonigal sidesteps.

Finally, there is the idea that games can reprogram us, to be be nicer, more collaborative, or wiser. Certainly, gamers have created immense things, after Wikipedia, most of the the large wikis on the web are about videogames, but questions of external value still apply. Futurism is hard work, and while you can say "crowd-sourced many-eyes good-results", I'm not sure if these kind of open scenario exercises actually inspire true reflection or wisdom, or merely reinforce pre-existing biases.

I wanted to like this book. Games are important, as the ever increasing number of game players demonstrates, but we need to have a clearer conception of what they can and cannot do. Uncritical cheerleading doesn't help; the topic deserves a better book. show less

Very interesting take on games to bring about change in oneself and the world around us. I felt better for playing games after reading this book. The author takes a contrarian view on deeply established antipathy towards games. I learnt interesting bit about psychology, sociology, neuroscience. I loved the section on making game out of illness (recuperation). There are a few sections that are repetitive and tedious.

You don't have to be a gamer of any kind to find value in this book. Quite possibly the best self-help book I've ever read, but confessedly haven't helped myself with it yet. Well written and researched, McGonigal shows you how you can turn your challenges into a game. Strategies for winning at life can be drawn from how you play, making the daunting, the insurmountable, the overwhelming seem manageable. If you watch her TED talk "The Game that can give you Ten Extra Years of Life" you'll show more get a good sense of her approach. The book is in three parts: (1) why games make us "SuperBetter", which provides the research background on how games/gaming can improve aspects of life, (2) How to be Gameful, or how to apply gaming strategies to real challenges, and (3) Adventures, which are three generic challenges all laid out so you can see how it works over a series of days. I'm working my way through the pre-cooked adventures before I start building my own and I can already see the value. Highly recommend, even if you think you have everything under control! show less

Part One - Why Games Make Us Happy is awesome. The book's true strength lies in describing games that already exist and examining their appeal. Why do we play games? What makes games better (more appealing) than everyday life? I am not a gamer, but as I read each chapter, I wanted to run out and try the games described. (This time electronic gaming will take -- hope springs eternal, despite my history of frustration and abandoned gaming platforms.) I loved the definition for games used show more throughout the book, and I liked the idea of applying a gaming mindset to everyday challenges.

Part Two - Reinventing Reality and Part Three - How Very Big Games Can Change the World, however, made me feel less optimistic about the possibility of changing the world with games. Mostly because the games described in those chapters, the games overtly trying to Do Something, sounded... well, lame. For the most part, they read like Very Special Episodes of the gaming world, with the fun lost beneath the message.

But, hey, practice may make perfect. If the ideas in Reality is Broken are already circulating in the game design world, perhaps games are evolving that meet real world needs - without feeling a bit too serious. show less