Readalong: Reality is Broken
This series first appeared on Octalysis Prime and yukaichou.com.
Be sure to find my readalong notes relating to the chapter you’ve most recently read.
This is not a book summary, as you can easily find those elsewhere. Instead, I’ve tried to give analysis that goes beyond the book. This is one of the first readalongs I’ve written, inspired by what I’ve seen at Tor.com for fiction, so I intend to improve on this in future with your kind and critical feedback. (Leave a response to start a conversation with me.)
Introduction:
TL;DR Games and gameful design at scale can change the real world for the better.
Summary
“[Games] are clues to the future. And their serious cultivation now is perhaps our only salvation.”
-Bernard Suits, philosopher
“I see a hurricane coming…The exodus of these people from the real world, from our normal daily life, will create a change in social climate that makes global marking look like a tempest in a teacup.”
-Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World
(Note: Reality is Broken was published in 2011)
Gamers are spending more hours playing games than ever before.
“But as they devote more and more of their free time to game worlds, the real world increasingly feels like it’s missing something.”
Analysis
The real world lacks predictable reward structures and instant gratification (patience and hard work are required).
“Games want to know: Where, in the real world, is that gamer sense of being fully alive, focused, and engaged in every moment? Where is the gamer feeling of power, heroic purpose, and community (CD1/CD5)? Where are the bursts of exhilarating creative game accomplishment (CD2/3)? Where is the heart-expanding thrill of success and team victory (CD2/5)?”
Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.
But does happiness have to be the goal? McGonigal doesn’t discuss why this is a given Good. Happiness is seemingly always fleeting, whereas satisfaction or contentment (even when bored), can be an acquired skill through mindfulness and observed attention.
Reality is broken. Castronova notices the “mass exodus” of gamers to game spaces. In the US alone there are 183 million active gamers, over half the population, including 5 million “extreme” gamers playing 45+ hours per week.
In 2017, pro gaming leagues are already a thing. This is likely to continue, building on Starcraft and League of Legends and various sports games, not to mention Fantasy sports leagues.
A problem: “We are creating a massive virtual silo of cognitive effort, emotional energy, and collective attention lavished on game worlds instead of on the real world.”
Yes, games are addictive and there is a rush for industry expansion, BUT
“The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy.”
In Herodotus’s The Histories, there is a tale of the king of Lydia (in Asia Minor) who decrees the playing of games every 2nd day to ward off an 18-year famine.
Gameplay is both escapist and a purposeful escape, or even an extremely helpful escape.
Today’s hunger “is not a hunger for food — it is a hunger for more and better engagement from the world around us.”
The planet spends more than 3 billion hours a week gaming (again, 2011, probably more now).
What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality?
This is McGonigal’s call to action for the entire book, using epic meaning as an ignitor.
To develop this book, McGonigal helped build multiple mobile games and observed players and learned about their motivations and what they enjoyed about games, and also considered psychology, cognitive science, sociology, economics, political science, and performance theory (she wrote a 500-page dissertation “proposing how we could leverage the power of games to reinvent everything from government, health care, and education to traditional media, marketing, and entrepreneurship — even world peace”).
2008 Game Developer’s Conference Rant: McGonigal declared Reality is Broken, and we need to fix it.
2009 GDC, she gave the keynote, and many game designers led other talks like ‘games for personal and social change,’ ‘positive impact games,’ ‘social reality games,’ ‘serious games,’ ‘leveraging the play of the planet.’
Games can also “stoke our appetite for engagement, pushing and enabling us to make stronger connections–and bigger contributions–to the world around us.”
Rob Fahey in 2008: “It’s inevitable: soon we will all be gamers.”
Antoine de Sain Exupéry: “As for the future, your task is not to see it, but to enable it.”
Games, in the 21st century, will be a primary platform for enabling the future.
McGonigal calls for a better and more immersive reality.
Erik: McGonigal hasn’t yet mentioned Augmented Reality (but again, this is 2011)
“If we take everything game developers have learned about optimizing human experience and organizing collaborative communities and apply it to real life, I foresee games that make us wake up in the morning and feel thrilled to start our day. I foresee games that reduce our stress at work and dramatically increase our career satisfaction. I foresee games that fix our educational systems. I foresee games that treat depression, obesity, anxiety, and attention deficit disorder. I foresee games that help the elderly feel engaged and socially connected. I foresee games that raise rates of democratic participation. I foresee games that tackle global-scale problems like climate change and poverty. In short, I foresee games that augment our most essential human capabilities–to be happy, resilient, creative–and empower us to change the world in meaningful ways. Indeed, as you’ll see in the pages ahead, such games are already coming into existence.”
We can play any games we want. We can create any future we can imagine.
Let the games begin.
Chapter 1: What Exactly is a Game?
tl;dr Embrace high stakes work and instead of telling yourself this isn’t a game, say this could be a game.
Summary
McGonigal makes the point that gamers want to play games (and not “game” them) and uses the 4 traits of a game to establish some ground rules for the rest of her book.
Analysis
Gaming is part of our lexicon. “Gaming the system” or “You’d better start playing the game” are part of everyday speech.
This statement leads McGonigal into a discussion of what a game is…a game has:
- a goal players will work to achieve
- rules providing limitations
- a feedback system giving player progress
- voluntary participation
“This definition may surprise you for what it lacks: interactivity, graphics, narrative, rewards, competition, virtual environments, or the idea of “winning” — all traits we often think of when it comes to games today. True, these are common features of many games, but they are not defining features.”
Bernard Suits:
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unneccessary obstacles.
“Fix #1: Unnecessary Obstacles: Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use.”
Erik: I have to challenge this. In the intro, McGonigal talks about escapism and useful escapism to games, but here comments that reality is too easy. Obviously, it could be different for different players and different games, but in general I would argue that reality is more difficult than games. It’s way harder to be happy in real life than in an attention-fulfilling game.
McGonigal goes on to discuss several games, including golf and Tetris, which provides intense feedback (CD3). It gets harder as you improve, “creating a perfect balance between hard challenge and achievability” (Erik: this sounds like Czikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory.)
Limitations are put in play in a 2007 game called Portal, which is a single-player action/puzzle game beginning in a single 3D environment with very few available actions or instructions (CD7). (Erik: a game like Portal, or Myst, is fun because it is ambiguous and serves the explorative player, and also mirrors real life where what one should do at any moment isn’t always clear, and in fact is usually unclear.)
Games provoke positive emotion because they are “hard work we choose for ourselves.”
Brian Sutton-Smith:
The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.
The clinical definition of depression: a pessimistic sense of inadequacy and a despondent lack of activity.
Jane cleverly argues if we flip this, we get something like an optimistic sense of our own capabilities and an invigorating rush of activity.
The punch line: if we can make work meaningful for more people (through gameful design), we can improve the world.
McGonigal continues with a compelling discussion of high-stakes work (CD1/6/8), busywork (CD2/8), mental work (CD2/3), physical work (CD2/9-sensation), discovery work (CD7), teamwork (CD5) and creative work (CD3/4).
Noël Coward:
Work is more fun than fun.
“Virtually every activity that we would describe as a “relaxing” kind of fun–watching television, eating chocolate, window-shopping, or just chilling out–doesn’t make us feel better. In fact, we consistently report feeling worse afterward than when we started “having fun”: less motivated, less confident, and less engaged overall. But how can so many of us be wrong about what’s fun? Shouldn’t we have a better intuitive sense of what actually makes us feel better?”
^^^ I love this quote from McGonigal. It questions the cultural or marketed idea of fun. My challenge to readers: what would you do for fun if you could today? Why did you choose that activity? Where did that idea of fun come into your brain. Was it an intrinsic or extrinsic source?
When I think of this question, I wrote down: “I like reading, thinking, arguing, grappling with ideas, and writing.” (This weekend I met up with three friends and we argued about interesting ideas for 3 hours.)
McGonigal brings up eustress and its importance. Gree eu, for “well-being” and stress. Our frame of mind is positive when experienceing eustress. We often choose stressful situations on purpose, and that’s okay if they generate eustress.
I like McGonigal’s characterization of “fiero”. To sum,
…the more challenging the obstacle we overcome, the more intense the fiero.
Chapter 2, The Rise of the Happiness Engineers
tl;dr Autotelic activity is the most intrinsically motivating, giving satisfying work, a hope of being successful, social connections, and meaning.
Summary of Chapter
In this chapter, McGonigal makes the case that autotelic activity could be re-engineered into reality. The reason self-chosen activity is good is because it works within Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow theory to product intrinsic rewards like satisfying work, the hope of being successful, social connections, and meaning.
By marrying the science of happiness with emotional evolution of the gaming industry, we can engineer happiness.
This futurist vision stands in large contrast to the current American Dream story, which largely makes people more unhappy.
Analysis
I appreciate identifying the intersection of the science of happiness with the emotional evolution of the gaming industry. This is a clear foundation from which to build or engineer happiness.
I could take issue with the underlying thesis that happiness, loosely defined, is the goal, but if we alter the wording to something like well being then I can follow the argument without complaints.
Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow theory is useful but only up to a point. It does involve the Golden Corner of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback and some post-hoc Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment. But Flow by itself doesn’t cover the motivational landscape that I think will help create better outcomes, what Yu-kai terms human-focused design.
I like that McGonigal mentions the field of Positive Psychology and makes a call for games that “focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.”
McGonigal proceeds to invoke David Sudnow’s Breakout, a video game memoir about his experience with the game of the same name, to illuminate autotelic activity. Sudnow’s attention is pulled into the game even when he is not playing. But then he masters the game and is done. McGonigal misses an opportunity here to mention how important Endgame design is in building human experiences. Sudnow sure played a lot of Breakout, but then he quit forever (fortunately he wrote this video game memoir so we knew how enthralled he was by attempting to master it).
Interestingly, McGonigal is enthused by “a seemingly free and endless supply of invigorating activity and every reason in the world to feel optimistic about [one’s] own abilities.”
I’m not so sure on this point. I think there is value in moderate stimulation and getting comfortable with being bored from time to time.
“Too much flow can lead to happiness burnout,” say McGonigal. Allan Reiss, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford (and recently mentioned in the Octalysis Prime video Office Hours), studied gamer addiction and fiero. Understanding the balance between what Yu-kai would call White Hat and Black Hat design is important to creating long-term users or gamers.
In the case of the game industry, this is an important point: As McGonigal puts it, “the industry wants to create lifelong gamers: people who can balance their favorite games with full and active lives.”
I can appreciate this point. Gamer regret is real.
McGonigal then uses World of Warcraft’s “resting bonuses” as an example of a good design for this balanced lifestyle, but I’m not so sure. I feel these resting bonuses can as easily create a habit as deter one.
The test then, from McGonigal’s worldview, is to create a experiences with renewable sources of pleasure and accomplishment and flow.
From here, she builds a case for autotelic activity and the intrinsic rewards they bring along:
- satisfying work: being immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impact of our efforts (CD3)
- the experience, or at least the hope, of being successful (CD2)
- social connection (CD5)
- meaning (CD1)
McGonigal concludes that the scientific research backs up that “self-motivated, self-rewarding activity really does make us happier.”
What do you think?
Chapter 3 — More Satisfying Work
tl;dr Both serious and casual games bring blissful productivity, one key element of more satisfying work.
Summary
“Playing World of Warcraft is such a stisfying job, gamers have collectively spent 5.93 million years doing it.”
Erik: This is impressive, and only accounts for playtime between its release in 2004 and 2011, when this book was published.
McGonigal goes on to describe and test her hypothesis of satisfying work (recall the 4 internal or intrinsic motivators in Ch2, one of which was ‘more satisfying work’).
“Blissful productivity is the sense of being deeeply immersed in work that produces immediate o and obvious results. The clearer the results, and the faster we achieve them, the more blissfully productive we feel. And no game gives us a better sense of getting work done than WoW. ”
McGonigal describes Alain de Botton’s take on work (The Pleasures of Sorrow and Work) and Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft, and finally Martin Seligman, the founding father of positive psychology. to cement her argument.
Analysis
From a n Octalysis perspective, we can examin blissful productivity as follows. In the case of WoW, which includes an avatar, jobs, the desire for more exeperience, abilities, armor, skills, and talant/reputation, we see clear inclusion of CD4 and CD5 motivators.
McGonigal describes this as a ‘virtuous circle’ of productivity, and cites Edward Castronova: ‘there is zero unemployment in World of Warcraft.’
True, there is always something to do in WoW, but so is there in life, if you view it a certain way. Part of what ails many people in, life (Erik), is there inability to view it as an exploration of this incredible landscape of experiences and curiosity and relationships.
McGonigal’s next point about high-stakes work is key, too. The game designers have made the raids with friends (CD5) feel like high-stakes quests (‘drops for this boss are rare, etc.’), but the same approach can be taken in life. (‘You only live once’ is a good start.)
There is something to be said about these MMOs though, such that games like Age of Conan were ridiculed by serious gamers for its ‘paltry’ 250 hours of gameplay to reach the high est level . Only 250. Here we see the necessity of designing for endgame players, too, since a comment from a serious or expert gamer before the launch of a product can influence others not to purchase it at all.
Jane’s Fix #3: More Satisfying Work says:
Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, a hands-on work.
Again, I differ a little with McGonigal here. I think people are quite clever and maybe to the point of delusional about creating productive work for themselves. Some people actually do become addicted to stimulation and work and moving things forward in their businesses.
Part of the beauty of WoW, perhaps, is its ‘guarantee of productivity’, clear action to follow the clear goal, whereas life doesn’t always offer that.
To my view, the exploration of possibilities (CD7) inherent in most of life’s biggest questions down through career and into ‘what should Ieat for lunch today?’ involve exciting choices. This meaningful choice (CD3), is important to me and energizing.
This could be a personality thing, a desire to have some freedom, but it also might explain why I like games like Portal (which Mcgonigal mentions) and Myst, with slightly more ambiguous goals and very unclear actions steps. Minecraft’s open world comes to mind, too.
This varies considerably from the WoW player who said: “When accepting a quest, you rarely have to question if you can complete it; you just need to figure out when you can fit it into your jam-packed hero schedule” This endless series of goals and actionable steps, McGonigal claims, is what makes World of Warcraft so invigorating…I think, for me, this style of game becomes boring quite quickly, but I may not be in the norm here.
By invoking Alain de Botton’s The Pleasure of Sorrow an Work, McGonigal emphasizes that work is “meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted umber of actors and therefore where particular workers can make and imagine a connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.” (Botton’s quotation)
Matthew Crawford echoes this, but from a hands-on lens: “Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. ” Rather, ‘real agency’ can be seen in places like shop class, where the results of your labor are plain to see.
Jane’s next argument, that casual games, in short doses, can give workers a boost of productive feeling, echoes these thinkers. As Alain de Botton puts it: “In casual games, there is no greater purpose to our actions–we are simply enjoying our ability to make something happen.
Perhaps it is this reminder that can then translate back into the real world
What do you think?
How does blissful productivity apply to your work and days? Do you play casual games to remind yourself that productivity is possible?
What do you think?
Chapter 4 — Fun Failure and Better Odds of Success
tl;dr Both serious and casual games bring blissful productivity, one key element of more satisfying work.
Summary
McGonigal explores research from the M.I.N.D. Lab and Nicole Lazzarro, Raph Koster, and and Randolph Nesse to investigate why failure, fun failure specifically keeps us playing games, and how its relationship to better odds of success actually improves our enjoyment of a game (both individually and with others) and gives us hope of better outcomes.
Analysis
This short chapter kicks off with game researcher Nicole Lazzaro’sfindings that gamers both spend more time failing than succeeding in games AND that they enjoy doing so.
If you examine your own experience, you’ll notice this to be true. When I was first learning to play Starcraft, I lost many of my games on Battlenet before mastering some build orders with Zerg which gave me a fighting chance. Same with Chewss and Go, which I am now just learning.
Super Monkey Ball 2 (which in 2005 was researched by Helsinki’s M.I.N.D. Lab was the focus of the specatcular failures of this action puzzle game. The finding was simple, when players are shown ‘agency’ in the failure to complete a puzzle (by sending the monkey spiinning into space), they feel ownership and control and the prospect of improving the seuquenece on the next effort feels achievable. The game can also draw a laugh, which doesn’t hurt.
I’ve played Super Monkey Ball 2 and can echo this feeling. My brothers and I had a lot of fun exchanging the controller when we fell off the map into outer space, laughing, and then laughing again when our brothers failed, too. We got a lot of CD5 collaboration from helping each other find ways through the obstacles and mazes.
The sense of difficulty matters. The documentary about solo game developers comes to mind, about Super Meat Boy, Indie Game, spends tieme delving into the game design which highlights spectacular failures but also teaches the player new skills in-game.
One other note to take away from Indie Game: The Movie, is that making games and motivationally powerful experiences is hard work. There is a reason great experience designers and game designers can get paid top dollar. But it is also a reminder to us, designers of at minimum our own lives, should give ourselves a break once in a while and realize that our lifestyle design efforts may have some bugs in them
Fix #4: Better Hope of Success
Compared with games, reality is hopeless. Games eliminate our fear of failure and improve our chances for success.
Even in games which eliminate progress on failure, the player can always still start the game over. This isn’t true in life, or is it?
Here again I must differ slightly in the delivery from McGonigal. While she does invoke Raph Koster’s concept of games being “fun as long as we haven’t master them,” I feel McGonigal is a bit to overt in her depiction of reality as a nearly insurmountable adversity.
Again, I should mention I’ve met McGonigal in person and she was wonderful to speak with. Also, let’s remember that this book, Reality is Broken is in its conclusions precisely about learning from games and applying their design strategies to the real world.
Next up, hope.
We all hope to if not flourish, then live up to our potential, to be our best self. Here I tend to align with McGonigal’s attention to Randoph Nesse’s research on the evolutionary origins of depression.
She jumps from this research to a claim that ‘today’s best games help us realistically believe in our chances for success.
Games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero are tough to master, and require allies like WoW raids to successfully complete songs.
Rock Band specifically gives players CD5 collaboration, CD2 sense of progress, and CD3 empowerment of creativity and feedback (“let me play the drums this time!”).
Again, I love that McGonigal discusses the 2008 study showing that among the 7,000 players in the study, 67% said they were likely to try learning an instrument. It is this merging between games and reality that is exciting. And it is the difficulty of mastery, the failing toward a goal, and the hope of success that prompted this movement.
What do you think?
Have you ever been inspired to do something in the real world because of a game?
How do you think of failure? Does it scare you? Deter you? Or do you embrace it?
What do you think?
Chapter 5 — Stronger Social Connectivity
tl;dr Gamers aren’t gaming alone.
Summary
Stronger social connectivity was first ballooned by Facebook games like Lexulous, then Farmville, which combined Lexulous’s ease of gameplay and social connectivity with the blissful productivity of World of Warcraft.
According to Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of bliss:
Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors….Happiness is not a noun or verb. It’s a conjunction. Connective tissue.
Students of Yu-kai’s Octalysis framework will recognize this connective tissue as Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness.
From Yu-kai’s Actionable Gamification:
Social Influence and Relatedness is the fifth core drive within my Gamification Framework Octalysis, which is related to activities inspired by what other people think, do, or say. This Core Drive is the engine behind themes like mentorship, competition, envy, group quests, social treasures and companionship.
This Core Drive also includes the “Relatedness” part, which deals with things like attachment to emotional associations and the feeling of nostalgia. For instance, if you see a product that reminds you of your childhood, you have a higher chance of buying that product. Similarly if you meet someone from your hometown, you would also be more inclined to sign up a deal with this person.
Analysis
McGonigal makes some solid comments about why Farmville was successful and how it not only used Core Drive 5, but also incorporated asynchronous behaviors and mechanics like Gifting to provide boosts of CD7, too.
Fix #5: Stronger Social Connectivity
“Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions knowns as “prosocial emotions”.
I’m quite taken to this concept of prosocial emotions, and agree with McGonigal’s next discussions of happy embarrassment and vicarious pride.
In particular, I’m quite interested by Naches, a Yiddish word for “the bursting of pride we feel when someone we’ve taught or mentored succeeds, ranked just below surprise and fiero.”
Yu-kai has discussed mentorship in OP Leadership, but also as a game technique within Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness. Paul Ekman’s research and anecdotes from fathers teaching mothers how to play Jonathan Blow’s “notoriously difficult puzzle game”, Braid, are convincing evidence of McGonigal’s argument.
McGonigal’s final pages on ambient sociability are quite intriguing. She tries to answer the question, Why do players of World of Warcraft spend on average 70% of their time on individual missions when there are hundreds of thousands of players online with them?
The answer: Even when we are doing something solitary, it feels good to know others are doing the same.
I felt this same emotion while studying for exams or while writing my novel or while participating in Nanowrimo: I could persist in part because I knew others were doing the same.
What do you think?
Do you play games with friends? How often? Have you ever tried to convince people to play a game with you? Have you ever taught someone a new game?
What do you think?
Chapter 6 — Becoming a Part of Something Bigger Than Ourselves
tl;dr The key to happiness is reducing a focus on oneself and investing effort and attention into something larger than oneself, something of epic proportions, something that gives you awe.
Summary
McGonigal’s narrative of Halo’s rise and incorporation of epic meaning from its player base and community-driven goals of 10 billion kills against the Covenant (a fictional enemy to Earth) provides the backdrop for her suggestion that the key to happiness is an investment in something with epic meaning, something that gives one awe in its pursuit.
Analysis
Most of McGonigal’s narrative and explanation is convincing in this chapter. I like her tale of Halo 3’s community-driven pursuit and the seemingly endless stream of games and movies which now stake the survival of planet Earth at the center of their stories. There is something in epic scale and proportions that attracts our attention.
Halo 3’s community used narrative with collective context for shared experience by players and then placed this context in a service lens: anything a player does in service of that context which will benefit the group and the larger collective. An online museum was even built to commemorate achievements.
Later, McGonigal builds the motivational and psychological viewpoint further.
As Martin Seligman puts it: “The self is a very poor site for meaning.”
Furthermore, archeological findings like the Gobekli Tepe (predating Stone Henge by 6,000 years) demonstrate our ancestors’ desire for epic environments. These Neolithic (New Stone Age) giant stone circles may have been a spiritual construction which brought people together, and may have been a place where early villages and cities grew up around.
If you haven’t read Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’, I highly recommend it.
Finally, McGonigal urges us to notice that there is something about reducing the self and thrusting efforts towards higher meaning that brings us happiness, and that we should look to not only do this in games, but in the real world.
What do you think?
What epic environments or stories or missions have pulled you into their keeping?
What do you think? Is the key to happiness pulling away from oneself and into a larger meaning?
Chapter 7 — The Benefits of Alternate Realities
tl;dr Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) [not to be confused with Augmented Reality AR], are games designed to be played in the real world, which make difficult activities more rewarding, build up new real-world communities, and help us adopt the daily habits of the world’s happiest people in our own everyday lives.
Summary
McGonigal moves into the promising area of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), with great examples like Chore Wars, Quest to Learn, and SuperBetter, which helped her recover from a traumatic brain injury.
Different to standard games, ARGs offer the opportunity to make real differences in the real world, in real lives.
Analysis
McGonigal’s opening anecdote made me smile:
And it just so happens that ridding our real-world kingdom of toilet stains is worth more experience points, or XP, than any other chore in the Land of the 41st-Floor Ninjas.
McGonigal once again shows how immersed she has been in testing and creating all sorts of games throughout her life.
McGonigal moves into the depths of Chore Wars with anecdotes from other users around the world. Basically, Chore Wars brings out competitive spirit and collaboration with a steady does of accomplishment.
What’s more, Chore Wars is “a game that you win even if you lose. Kiyash has the satisfaction of being the best ninja on the forty-first floor, and I have the pleasure of doing fewer chores than my husband–at least until my competitive spirit kicks back in. Not to mention, it’s more enjoyable to be partners in crime when it comes to housework, instead of nagging each other about chores.
Fix #7: Wholehearted Participation
Compared with games, reality is hard to get into. Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever we’re doing.
McGonigal reminds us that “to participate wholeheartedly in something means to be self-motivatedand self-directed, intensely interested and genuinely enthusiastic.
- If we’re forced to do something, or if we do it halfheartedly, we’re not really participating.
- If we don’t care how it all turns out, we’re not really participating.
- If we’re passively waiting it out, we’re not really participating.
Along with other ARG designers one day on Twitter, McGonigal came upon another definition capturing the spirit of ARGs: alternate realities are the antiescapist game.
This is a cool way to think of them. Instead of retreating to games, we are bringing the best of design and experience design and motivation and mechanics to real-world situations.
Quest to Learn is the next big example, which combines various game mechanics and techniques and overall design into the classroom. This isn’t Khan Academy or Montesorri, but some mix of characteristics that make learning engaging for students with the right amount of challenge, encouraging them through missions, quests, and collaborative exploration and problem-solving.
I might Katie Salen, author of Rules of Play and researcher of how kids learn by playing games, at a discussion at Target in 2012. She led the Quest to Learn curriculum design.
Quest to Learn, in effect, is the precursor to ClassDojo and other gameful design (including digital systems) in the classroom.
SuperBetter was the game McGonigal designed to help herself battle and defeat a traumatic brain injury.
Either I’m going to kill myself or I’m going to turn this into a game.
SuperBetter’s story is well-known, but it centers on turning recovery into a multiplayer experience in 5 steps:
- Create your SuperBetter secret identity
- Recruit your allies
- Find the bad guys
- Identify your power-ups
- Create your superhero to-do list
By baking cookies for neighbors and many other tasks, McGonigal “suffered a great deal less duringthe recovery as a direct result of the game.”
Next, McGonigal moves into a recap of types of ARGs discussed in the chapter.
Life-management ARG: like Chore Wars
Organizational ARG: like Quest to Learn
Concept ARG: Like SuperBetter
They are also live event ARGs which gather players at physical locations and narrative ARGs which use multimedia storytelling (like McGonigal’s New York Public Library game, combining both).
Finally, McGonigal’s reminder of the critical essay, “Creating the Play Community” by Bernie DeKoven in The New Games Book is a reminder of her design ethos.
I’ve read McGonigal’s 500-page thesis about performative play, and it is a useful viewpoint because it brings a different lens than most game designers and experience designers currently in the business.
What do you think?
Have you played any Alternate Reality Games? (Does Pokemon Go count? Maybe. It is definitely an augmented reality game that gets you walking around and talking to people in the real world, so sure!)
What do you think? What Alternate Reality Game should we create together?
Chapter 8 — Leveling Up in Life
tl;dr Games that add value to life are worth creating.
Summary
In this chapter, McGonigal introduces us to games that accompany real life activities, explaining how their inclusion of intrinsic motivation alleviates boredom (JetSetter), stems anxiety (Day in the Clouds), makes us run harder (Nike+), and hang out with friends more in new places (Foursquare).
It is a great survey of the underlying studies and behavioral psychology.
Analysis
The examples in this chapter won’t surprise anyone reading in 2017, but I was drawn into a reflection on Foursquare, a popular app that is no longer high on the App Store charts.
McGonigal rightly points out that instead of instead of a game that rewards you for what you’re already doing, like Nike+, Foursquare “it’s a game that rewards you for doing new things, and making a better effort to be social.”
Designers will notice a problem here, however. Once I ‘rediscover’ (if I ever forgot) that hanging out with friends is a fun and healthy activity, I can stop using the app. If I take this undesired action (for Foursquare), all I lose is a digital ‘Mayorship’, which, unless you are someone who gets really attached to things that don’t exist, is easy to give let go.
Creating Endgames is one of the most challenging elements of behavior design in any experience.
What do you think?
What games are adding value to your life?
Chapter 9 — Fun with Strangers
tl;dr Use collaboration, creation, and contribution to create alternate reality games to create new real-world communities.
Summary
McGonigal explores how alternate reality games can create new real-world communities by looking into Comfort of Strangers (helping people learn how to offer and receive comfort), Ghosts of Chance (a game to reinvent membership), and Bounce (a game to bridge the generation gap between people).
Analysis
The most interesting part of this chapter for me are the consistent drives inherent to making each of these games work.
Comfort of Strangers works primarily through Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity, because you don’t know who is a lover or a dancer (good or bad guy) in the game.
Ghosts of Chance works through building intrigue around a cause (helping a museum gain membership), through Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling.
Finally, Bounce uses Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness to connect people of differing ages.
I really like McGonigal’s attention to overriding themes in each of these games, primarily collaboration, creation, and contribution. She wants to help people imagine how behavior design can impact our real world spaces and interactions and relationships.
What do you think?
Which real-world communities could benefit from additional intrinsic motivational design?
Chapter 10 — Happiness Hacking
tl;dr Use games in physical places to form habits.
Summary
This chapter is about how alternate realities can help us adopt the daily habits of the world’s happiest people. McGonigal provides explanations of 3 games she helped design.
She also relays the trouble of thinking about positive psychology as ‘self-help’, and poses strategies to overcoming this cynical psychological barrier and actually implementing gameful design in our lives.
Analysis
In describing Cruel 2 Be Kind (a game about using random acts of kindness to eliminate opponents and inspire ‘victims’ in crowds), and Tombstone Hold’em (a real-life spatial poker game played in cemeteries requiring creative movement, and Top Secret Dance Off (a formal creative dance competition on a YouTube-esque online site), McGonigal stresses the concept of sneaking up on happiness. She draws this from John Stuart Mill’s observation that when approaching happiness directly, it is often elusive.
In succession, the games mentioned above provide a “dopamine hit” (when others smile first), a grateful physiological state known as “posttraumatic bliss” in appreciating the present moment, and euphoria through dance and movement.
Creating habits is easy, but breaking habits isn’t. The trick, then, to creating new habits, is in part about reducing the number of bad habits so as to create space for new ones.
Ultimately, these games are ways to actually practice good advice (being kind to others, reflecting on death/mortality, and moving to music.
More interestingly, none of these require an app.
What do you think?
What games have you played in real life without technology?
Chapter 11 — The Engagement Economy
tl;dr More people than ever are online; how can we get some of their participation bandwidth into large-scale projects for good?
Summary
McGonigal makes the case that if we divert attention to large-scale projects like Wikipedia, Investigate your MP’s Expenses, FoldIt, and Free Rice, essentially projects for large-scale or global good for an extended period of time (through long-term design), we can collectively make the world a better place.
Analysis
McGonigal correctly finds potential in success stories like Wikipedia, Investigate your MP’s Expenses, FoldIt, and Free Rice for political activism, scientific problem solving, and fundraising.
She draws attention to the problem of attention. How can we convince people to play a little less World of Warcraft or a little less time on Facebook (both autotelic activities) and a bit more of their participation bandwidth on these crowd-sourced efforts?
Two comments. The first is about Facebook. In 2011, when this book was published, Facebook wasn’t as powerful as it is today. Its algorithms are stronger and more convincing, perhaps more addictive. I’d argue that Facebook is still autotelic. In my personal case, my Facebook feed doesn’t offer that much world-changing interest. Facebook’s advertising system is a lot stronger now, so my feed includes ads I didn’t ask for
If spending time on Facebook is an increasing waste of time, this actually may work to the benefit of projects competing for “brain cycles and heartshare” and “better or more competitive engagement.”
Even so, there are better distractions online than ever before. In my view, movements toward a more altruistic and productive and well-being approach (like timewellspent.io) represent the future I want to live in.
What do you think?
What crowd-sourced online initiatives have you participated in this year?
Chapter 12 — Missions Impossible
tl;dr We need to create more moments and chances for epic wins.
Summary
Experimental games like The Extraordinaries, Groundcrew, and Lost Joules give players the chance to experience epic wins in their daily lives. Compared with games, reality is unambitious. Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together.
Analysis
The Extraordinaries was a great example of a micro-task on-demand app for non-profits. It hasn’t taken off since its launch in 2009, though the company did raise a seed round of funding in 2011. My guess is that Kickstarter and Patreon are filling this void.
Groundcrew was an early version of Fiver or TaskRabbit for the real world. Players can ask for help in the real world, even for something as basic as a latté, and another player can bring it to her.
I agree with McGonigal’s focus on designing social participation tasks as well as human intelligence tasks.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk seems to have grown into the lasting and scalable version for human intelligence tasks.
Lost Joules doesn’t seem to have a successor, except that many smart environmental devices come equipped with their own usage data interfaces (think Nest).
Overall, McGonigal was right about the scalability of seemingly impossible missions, but some areas, like climate change, global economic crises, food insecurity, geopolitical instability, and rising rates of depression are still open to gameful design at a large scale social level.
One quip I have with this chapter is its focus on the large scale. I doubt McGonigal intends to suggest that small wins in our daily social lives don’t matter, but by focusing only on the large scale she does suggest that many things need to be bigger and better to draw our motivational attention. In my personal life, there are many small things I do to contribute to progress on a social level in my community (like small talk, volunteerism).
What do you think?
What social movements could benefit from a more focused behavioral design?
Chapter 13 — Collaboration Superpowers
tl;dr When we work together, we win.
Summary
McGonigal describes three aspects of concerted effort:
- cooperating — acting purposefully toward a common goal
- coordinating — synchronizing efforts and sharing resources
- cocreating — producing a novel outcome together
These elements help lead to shared concentration, synchronized engagement, mutual regard, collective commitment, and reciprocal rewards.
Analysis
McGonigal opens the chapter with statistics about how much kids game vs how much they read, and develops this argument to encourage us as a society to use our collective ability to play games well for good.
(Off topic: I think we’d do well also to increase literacy and reading, since reading often leads to better critical thinking and the ability to reason and create arguments, a valuable tool in conflict resolution and problem solving…maybe games can teach us how to read and debate!)
Game designers and developers today are working within contexts where massive real-time coordination tools, collaborative creation systems, and lightweight, asynchronous collaboration are possible.
I like McGonigal’s collaboration superpowers:
- high ping quotient: extraordinary collaborators have no qualms about pinging or reaching out via electronic means to others for participation
- collaboration radar: extraordinary collaborators develop a kind of sixth sense about who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission
- emergensight: the ability to thrive in a chaotic collaborative environment
What do you think?
What collaboratories are you a part of? (Besides Octalysis Prime of course!)
Chapter 14 — Saving the Real World Together
tl;dr By taking a long view and using game design now, we can save the real world together.
Summary
Will Wright shared that he believes one of the largest skills to be gained from playing games is a better imagination. Why? For the survival of humanity.
Survival is present in many games from the Sims to Black and White to Civilization.
World without Oil was a collaborative forecasting and problem-solving game which helped people expand their imaginations through fictional obstacles.
Superstruct Ten Year Forecast was yet another collaborative game created and run by McGonigal’s Institute for the Future, which developed 550 superstructs, or combinations of structural solutions to problems.
Analysis
This final chapter is largely example driven and uncontroversial. Essentially, it is a rallying call for Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning and Calling.
Together, we can tackle what may be the most worthwhile, most epic obstacle of all: a whole-planetary mission, to use games to raise global quality of life, to prepare ourselves for the future, and to sustain our earth for the next millennium and beyond.
What’s next?
Congratulations! You completed the Reality is Broken readalong!
Which book should we read together next?
Thank you for reading with me. See you again soon! Some of my other writing is situated at erikvanmechelen.com
