Book Review: Reality is Broken

Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal

Review by: Chalkboard Dad

About the author:

World-renowned game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal, PhD. takes play seriously. McGonigal is the Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, where she earned Harvard Business Review honors for “Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas of 2008? for her work on the future of games. Her work has been featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times; and on MTV, CNN, BBC, and NPR. In 2009, BusinessWeek called her one of the 10 most important innovators to watch, and Fast Company hailed her as one of the 100 most creative people in business. She has given keynote addresses at TED, South by Southwest Interactive, the Game Developers Conference, ETech, and the Web 2.0 Summit, and has been a featured speaker at The New Yorker Conference. Born in Philadelphia in 1977 and raised in New York, Jane now lives in San Francisco with her husband.

About the book:

More than 174 million Americans are gamers, and the average young person in the United States will spend ten thousand hours gaming by the age of twenty-one. According to world-renowned game designer Jane McGonigal, the reason for this mass exodus to virtual worlds is that videogames are increasingly fulfilling genuine human needs. In this groundbreaking exploration of the power and future of gaming, McGonigal reveals how we can use the lessons of game design to fix what is wrong with the real world.

Drawing on positive psychology, cognitive science, and sociology, Reality Is Broken uncovers how game designers have hit on core truths about what makes us happy and utilized these discoveriesto astonishing effect in virtual environments. Videogames consistently provide the exhilarating rewards, stimulating challenges, and epic victories that are so often lacking in the real world. But why, McGonigal asks, should we use the power of games for escapist entertainment alone? Her research suggests that gamers are expert problem solvers and collaborators because they regularly cooperate with other players to overcome daunting virtual challenges, and she helped pioneer a fast-growing genre of games that aims to turn gameplay to socially positive ends.

In Reality Is Broken, she reveals how these new alternate reality games are already improving the quality of our daily lives, fighting social problems such as depression and obesity, and addressing vital twenty-first-century challenges-and she forecasts the thrilling possibilities that lie ahead. She introduces us to games like World Without Oil, a simulation designed to brainstorm-and therefore avert- the challenges of a worldwide oil shortage, and Evoke, a game commissioned by the World Bank Institute that sends players on missions to address issues from poverty to climate change.

McGonigal persuasively argues that those who continue to dismiss games will be at a major disadvantage in the coming years. Gamers, on the other hand, will be able to leverage the collaborative and motivational power of games in their own lives, communities, and businesses. Written for gamers and nongamers alike, Reality Is Brokenshows us that the future will belong to those who can understand, design, and play games.

My take on the book:

I am a child of the late seventies and early eighties. This means that my elementary school pictures are laden with atrociously checkered pants, painfully bright striped shirts, and horribly vexing hair styles. It has another meaning as well. I am a proud member of the alpha video game generation.

I can still close my eyes and clearly recall Christmas, circa 1981. Rarely in my adult life have I reached such heights of euphoria as I did when my young hands ripped away the wrapping paper to reveal the Atari 2600 box underneath. The rest of that Christmas day, in fact a good portion of many days afterward, was spent protecting my tiny space craft from the weirdly shaped aliens of my very first video game. Space Invaders. The “first kiss” where my long love of console gaming began. Other titles from those glorious early days revisit me like long lost friends. Adventure, Outlaw, Atlantis, Missile Command, Asteroids, Demon Attack, Berzerk, River Raid, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Video Pinball, and of course, the Godfather of all the 2600 titles, Pitfall.

My love of video games has traveled with me through the fiery armageddon of adolescence, the hazy fog of college, and it stays with me today in the unchartered waters of adulthood. I waited with eager anticipation for the day Jane McGonigal’s new book Reality is Broken would come to my door. The thought that my love of games is not just some silly childish holdover that I should have thrown away years ago, that it is in fact shared by over one hundred seventy-four million Americans, and that we can use the lessons of game design to possibly fix the problems we experience in the real world, is a thought that intrigued me greatly.

When the book arrived I jumped in with all the fervor of Pitfall Harry himself…and I was not disappointed. In the introduction McGonigal makes the point that the growth of gaming as a global activity, participated in by well over four hundred million people worldwide, says that in today’s society computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. This presents us with three possible paths forward. One path is to stay the course we are now on, as people continue to flea reality in ever increasing numbers. Another alternative is to reverse course, end the mass exodus from reality by shutting down or restricting the gaming industry. The third option is to “throw ourselves off the scale” as McGonigal puts it, and try something else entirely.

This third option is where the book takes us. The author asks, “What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality? What if we started to live our real lives like gamers, lead our businesses and communities like game designers, and think about solving real-world problems like computer and video game theorists?” Each of the book’s fourteen chapters addresses a different fix for reality with these questions in mind. The ideas are presented with established research and excellent insight.

Whether you consider yourself a “gamer” or not, this book is a fascinating read. The author does a superb job of communicating her ideas in a clear and accessible manner. I have been a devoted fan of video games since that Christmas day back when Ronald Reagan was still a fairly new president. The ideas set forth by McGonigal in Reality is Broken are certainly worthy of consideration. They will cause you to look at the time you spend gaming or watching your children while they are gaming in a different way. This is a good thing. Time to go fire up the XBox…