A Gameful Book Review of Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal
The very book that inspired me to view anything in life as if it were a game.
Ever since discovering the definitions of games in Jane McGonigal’s bestseller Reality is Broken and realizing how close anything in life and games in their traditional sense are, I like exploring various things in life through a gameful lens.
Recently, I published a book where I considered emotions, feelings, experiences, and other concepts along the core game components — goal, rules, feedback system, and voluntary participation — as Jane McGonigal defined them in the following quote:
“What defines a game are the goal, the rules, the feedback system, and voluntary participation. Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core elements.”
— Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Once, I suggested an unconventional form of writing book reviews: considering the book in focus along those four core game components.
After reading Reality Is Broken and finishing working on a large book project, I realized how fun and appropriate it would be to consider this book along the four core components of games.
Here is what I discovered.
Goal:
The goal in the game of the book titled Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, authored by one of the most renowned and well-known game designers and game advocates in the world, Jane McGonigal, is to show the tremendous value of games in our lives and how learning from them and their design can improve our perception of and approach to reality.
Rules:
The main rule of this book’s game is to present the advantages of games compared to reality, or, I would say, how we perceive reality. So, each good thing in games is presented as opposed to what is lacking in reality. The other rule is to show how games can fix reality.
Feedback system:
If you mention goals and rules to someone as part of games, they will nod, knowing what you are talking about. Feedback system might not be obvious if you mention the term but don’t go into details. Here is how Jane McGonigal defines feedback systems in games in her book Reality Is Broken:
“The feedback system tells players how close they are to achieving the goal. It can take the form of points, levels, a score, or a progress bar. Or, in its most basic form, the feedback system can be as simple as the players’ knowledge of an objective outcome: ‘The game is over when . . .’ Real-time feedback serves as a promise to the players that the goal is definitely achievable, and it provides motivation to keep playing.”
When reading a book, reaching its end is an obvious goal. You can see how far you are from it by seeing the number of pages or chapters you still have to read or the percentage indicator in your e-reader. Regarding Reality is Broken, there is another measuring system of your progress. It is the reality fixes that games provide. There are, in total, fourteen fixes to reality, and here is how the final one sounds:
“FIX #14: MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER FORESIGHT
“Reality is stuck in the present. Games help us imagine and invent the future together.”
— Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken
Of course, there is more text after that final fix, but if you reach it, you will grasp how multidimensional the benefits of games are for our lives.
And for me personally, the following quotation and awareness were the ultimate win in this book’s game:
“Reality Is Better”
— Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken
The letters in the quotation are capitalized because they are the title of the book's conclusion chapter. And these words say it all: Reality is better. Games are part of our reality, and they can enrich it and turn our perception from grim and tedious into rewarding, kind, fun, empowering, and so much more. However, games, in their traditional sense, are only a part of our reality, and to live life to the fullest, we need to live in reality. But we can enrich it through what humankind has achieved and continues to achieve with games.
Voluntary participation:
The fourth game component needs quotation here, too — because of its importance and because it might not be straightforward to understand its meaning:
“Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave the game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken
The best way to illustrate the engagement in this book’s game is to share mine with you. I must admit, this book was not a page-turner for me. But make no mistake, this fact does not diminish the quality of this book. Instead, it increases it. Here’s why.
This book has an enormous amount of food for thought. An interesting paradox is that it has a lot of information, but the reader does not feel hurried, and the book is not that voluminous, either. I read this book in parallel with others because I needed to stop occasionally and let my conscious and subconscious process what I had just read. I also needed to reflect on what I could observe around me both in reality and in games to see how it reflected or not what Jane McGonigal wrote in her book.
One of my favorite features of this book is the illustration and documentation of many inspiring games I have never heard of. It is a fantastic journey over the game and game design landscape.
I don’t think Jane McGonigal intended a page-turner for leisurely hours with this book. I think she intended to inform her readers about the value of games in any area of our lives and to motivate us to play more games and learn in the process. I think her goals were reached, also because even after almost thirteen years of publication, it hasn’t lost its value and is as current as ever.
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