Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

       Comedians say that comedy is not meant to last forever. Humour presses up against its own boundaries, expands them, and then ceases to be relevant. I wonder if something similar is true in the realm of video games. It wouldn’t be surprising, exactly. Pretty much any game genre I can think of has evolved over time to new heights of complexity. Even something like Mario Kart serves as an example here: in the original Mario Kart, you selected a character, but not a kart or tires or flying mechanics. In terms of storytelling, the boundary between video game and animated film sometimes becomes unclear through cutscenes or even mechanics (specifically: Quick Time Events have come and hopefully gone, it would seem). All this to say that Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal, originally published in 2011, offers a thoughtful framework but ultimately seems to be outdated in its specifics—more on that momentarily.

The passage below outlines McGonigal’s central thesis, so I think it’s worth it for me to quote it at length:

"In today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not. And unless something dramatic happens to reverse the resulting exodus, we are fast on our way to becoming a society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing games,

creates its best memories in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game worlds."

McGonigal’s framing of the problem is an interesting inversion that places games above reality. Games offer what reality cannot and we need to reshape our reality more along the lines of games. She offers a number of supporting claims throughout the book, and restates them all in the conclusion as a reminder. Reasons that games are outpacing reality are for reasons like how they offer meaningful work, connecting with strangers, sense of pride, and so on. 

I would like to believe that all the hours I’ve spent playing video games is somehow meaningful in my real life and in the world at large. I’d also like to believe that we can elevate games into a meaningful artform and leverage them to promote social and environmental injustice in the world. I’d like to be an optimist, but I haven’t cultivated the radical belief that all of what McGonigal has outlined is possible—and the fact that a number of projects she discusses are defunct or inaccessible is not encouraging. (But then again, a lot can change in the world of technology and society in the span of 13 years…)

I do think that the principles of gaming can be applied in other domains productively. McGonigal’s section on education gives me a great deal to think about. She describes the Quest to Learn school in New York that has switched to an entirely gamified model and I find it really interesting. Students are encouraged towards group projects where they’re doing “quests.” Students are encouraged to form teams based on particular skill sets—your quest might require someone who is a good verbal communicator, someone who is a good artist, and someone who likes music, for example. Students gain experience points and level up (I really wonder if they’ve been able to escape grading…). Students can even obtain secret quests, like discovering a note in a book that tells them to do something before anyone else. I find all of this amazing. I’ve already started having students group up based on a particular realm of expertise, but I’m trying to envision all of the different branching paths students might take in studying English, like pursuing particular areas of expertise and leveling up in that area. If I could make a network of skills and have paths that cross over with different assignments for different skillsets, I would completely revolutionize my classroom. I’m wondering how I might create a platform that allows students that kind of exploration where they could save their progress in a particular path and a skill tree that they can unlock. Man that would be amazing.

Ultimately, I want to know how we can leverage games to create social change. I believe that that starts at the level of education, but I would like to see some more practical impacts. McGonigal documents projects like FreeRice, with which I was already familiar and very much enjoy. If you’re not familiar with it, you answer questions and for every question you get right it donates rice to the UN. The questions are adaptive and get harder and easier based on what you get right or wrong and advertisers pay for placement on the FreeRice website. I love the project, but it my struggle with where it fits into the broader narrative is that it is not the game itself that changes reality; it still relies on capital to finance it. Essentially, the game is not self-sufficient in changing the world and so the questions are: 1) how revolutionary can it be if we’re still at the mercy of capitalism and 2) how can we scale something like this — it really relies on people playing the same games and that each of those games are potentially financed by more profitable companies. The companies themselves need to have a social conscience, which, as we know, is not something we can likely take on trust.

McGonigal does outline some other projects that sounded very interesting and meaningful, though they did not necessarily stand the test of time. To give you an example, McGonigal described a game where the whole purpose was to do favours for people and create little miracles. You got points for doing good deeds in the real world and getting recommendations and so on. When I went to investigate, it seems that the game no longer exists, which was something that repeated a few more times when I was looking for the games being described. I’m not saying that games have to last forever, but it’s a little bit of a downer.

A lot of the projects in the back half of the book are McGonigal’s own projects, which are generally fueled by psychological principles and geared towards social participation. She describes, for instance, orchestrating a game for the Olympics that was done around the world and was a mix of online activity and real-world activity researching a supposedly lost Olympic game that players constructed together based on artifacts and reenacted in the real world. She describes the Graveyard Hold’em game she developed for people to play poker in graveyards using information on tombstones. She links the ideas to happiness research and it comes across as a little bit cheesy (cf. the “secret dance battle” game). The games seem like amazing projects, but they seem to lack the appeal for other types of games that I think people are more drawn to that are less intellectually demanding.

I think that McGonigal gets a couple of things wrong, actually, and I would argue that it’s the result of time. I think one of the questions is the question of scale. McGonigal outlines a game with a social conscience that had a measurable effect. Players would make their energy consumption public; you would set goals for reducing your consumption and then your friends would either bet on or against you and earn points. There were some measurable improvements for the reduction of energy consumption and I love that. The question to me is how can we do this for more things and how is it sustainable? I’m thinking of myself here: if I gamify my energy consumption and my water and I gamify picking up trash and donating to charities and helping strangers— at some point I am going to burn out. I can hardly deal with notifications for one game let alone a whole array of games. I think we have the capacity for certain types of activities, but we can’t do it all. I suppose every difference is beneficial, but can we scale to something truly revolutionary?

McGonigal also really values the collaborative nature of games and aims to have people do 10, 000 hours of collaboration in games (under the theory that 10, 000 hours doing any one thing creates experts in that thing). While it seems that gaming is more collaborative, I would make the case that gaming is becoming more and more individuated. It seems counterintuitive given the massively multiplayer games like Fortnite where you’re forced onto a team. My question would be how much collaboration games like this really need. It seems to me that everyone has their own role to play, but do they talk? Do they strategize together? Even the fact that people select their own avatars with particular abilities suggests a particular role to play, rather than everyone having similar abilities. I also think that playing with strangers for a match and never seeing them again does not contribute to long-term community. Also, people don’t openly talk about games and what they’ve learned from them; I think there’s still some stigma there that prevents us from actually engaging meaningfully in a more broad sense.

In short, I’m not entirely convinced that our current framework for mass gaming is going to mobilize us towards mass change. Perhaps it will lead us there eventually, but making change is hard—even in gaming. While McGonigal notes that gamers actually like failure, it is still questionable of how much novel failure we can take if we’re striving for real-world outcomes. McGonigal writes, for example, “within the limits of our own endurance, we would rather work hard than be entertained. Perhaps that’s why gamers spend less time watching television than anyone else on the planet. [...] We’re much happier enlivening time, rather than killing time.” I find that claim particularly interesting and persuasive. I do think there’s a propensity of feeling good by taking action and that gaming provides more of a means of doing so. 

One of the strengths of McGonigal’s work is proving the value of games. Whether it’s the discussion of providing meaningful, purposeful work, for example, or the discussion of fiero, an emotional high from overcoming adversity, McGonigal identifies that games have the capacity for these qualities. Some of the statistics that she draws from are particularly incredible in this respect. While some of the games she has talked about have fallen out of favour and some of these statistics would need to be updated, you can imagine how these have gotten even more dramatic. For instance, in gathering the posts on Halo wikis and forums, there are almost as many petrabytes or more of data than the written word from ancient times to now. And, McGonigal notes,

"If you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing World of Warcraft since the massively multiplayer online (MMO) role playing game (RPG) first launched in 2004, you get grand total of just over 50 billion collective hours, or, 5.93 million years. To put that number in perspective, 5.93 million years ago is almost exactly the moment in history that our earliest human ancestors first stood upright. By that measure, we’ve spent as much time playing World of Warcraft as we’ve spent evolving as a species." 

That is incredible to me. Just imagine how much we could do if we spent the same amount of time on real-world problems. It’s a matter of figuring out how to incentivize taking action in a similar way. McGonigal addresses that, as well, in talking about the rates at which players game. She talks about how “many of the most addictive online games have implemented a ‘fatigue system’”. She notes that “these systems are most commonly used in online games in South Korea and China, where the rates of online gaming for men can average up to 40 hours a week.” To combat this gamer fatigue, these games will take measures like this: “After 3 hours of consecutive online play, gamers receive 50% fewer rewards and half the fiero for accomplishing the same amount of work. After 5 hours, it becomes impossible to earn any rewards. In the United States, a softer touch is most commonly employed. World of Warcraft players, for example, accumulate resting bonuses for every hour they spend not playing the game. When they log back in, their avatar can earn up to double rewards until it’s time to rest again.” I find these attempts to engineer human behaviour to keep everyone focused on their own well-being and balance are fascinating. These kinds of details really help to illustrate just how impactful games are on our lives.

McGonigal’s writing is clear and sufficient for conveying information. The focus of the book is not on artfulness, but rather providing an outline of an argument for how to fix reality. I still think there needs to be some more real-world proof of how games can be leveraged into real-world action beyond a general suggestion that we have more collaboration towards climate change. To me, it’s the scale. It always comes back to scale. How do we make the massive numbers of players on Fortnite and get them to stop real-world war? How is it that we can get all of the Counterstrike players to collaborate to solve climate change? We still need a roadmap for making that leap—or perhaps the entire structure of where and when people are able to make leaps needs to be revised.

Ultimately, it’s time to level up. Happy reading!