Super Better

Jane McGonigal is a visionary game designer. She wrote a book, “Reality Broken” in 2011 talking about how to harness the power of games to boost global happiness. In this one, she further expanded the topic into individual talking about how could you live gamefully in your everyday life? She pointed out 8 rules reader could follow to design a gameful life. They are 1) Challenge yourself, 2) Use power-ups, 3) Identify bad guys, 4) Design quest, 5) Recruit allies, 6) Create secret identity, 7) Achieve epic win, 8) Keep score. She also give three game examples for reader to try. The idea of living gamefully sounds unpractical but McGonial actually provides many rigorous academic researches to back up her proposal.

I found this book very useful for prototyping practice in daily life. By leveraging this game rules, I could design games for participants to explore the possibility of living more sustainably. Many previous approaches for
co-designing practice is to provide instructions with guidelines for people to reflect their daily practice and then ask people to experiment by themselves. By using game as context, I believe that it could provide more immersive and self-motivated experience for experimenting sustainabel practice.