A Peak at a Broken Reality

Throughout this week, I have been listening to the audio recording of a book called Reality is Broken Why Games Make Us Better And How they Can Change The World written by Jane McGoniagal PhD, who is a world-renowned  alternate reality game designer and creator of several award winning games in more than 30 countries. She has made many interesting points on how playing games can help save the world. (Coincidentally, I just happened to see an interview of McGonigal in the CNN program The Next List as I began to write this blog entry).  McGonigal’s ideas are backed up by quite a bit of scientific evidence as she describes how games can lead us to a better future.
 One of the book’s initial stories talks about the Lydians who may have survived 18 years of famine with the help of games.  Lydians, led by their leader Herodotus, created the dice and would spend an entire day devoted to creating and playing games so as to ignore the pains of hunger.  McGonigal’s point is not that playing games made the Lydians survive, but that the bonding and collaboration skills that came with playing games helped the Lydians succeed with their struggle. This is told as an example of how games could help a civilization survive and prosper, and as the Lydians, we must look to games as the answer of many world problems.

Gaming has become an irremovable part of millions upon millions of people's lives. Some spend small amounts of time and others 40 hours a week. It is a mass exodus from reality because, according to McGonigal, people are beginning to find reality less interesting, and the excitement of playing games isn't in the real world. What is the solution? Eradicating games? Letting this game playing exodus continue? McGonigal envisions a better idea. How about taking a challenge in life and turning it into a game. Many gamers already spend hours collaborating in intense missions and hone in on their adaptive skills when playing games. Make a problem into a game and people will solve it. After all, gamers get addicted to a game because they want to learn about the problem or the objective of the game and become a master at solving it, which brings out the topic of the science behind video games.
 McGonigal is passionate about the emotional side of gaming, and explains scientific behaviors through her own investigations of  the game industry's experiments. She talks about why games deliver such a happy feeling and get gamers in a state of “flow,” a concept created by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (chick-SENT-me-hi).  According to Csikszentmihalyi, “the flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.”
Many game designers are hiring researchers in positive psychology, who study the science of happiness, to discover what makes humans happy so as to put those findings to work in a game. Brain scans also reveal strong emotion while playing a game.
 McGonigal shares an anecdote in the book. It reveals that games have always brought the state of flow in people even without high tech graphics and huge story lines. It also reveals that too much flow can end up to what is referred as flow burnout. Players who have mastered a game, for the most part, stop playing the game. The challenge is over! Game developers don't want players to burn out because they want life-long players. A lot of playing may also lead to gamers' regret (something that I personally along with many other players have experienced). It is the thought that you could have been doing something else instead of playing so many hours of your favorite games.  However, McGonigal continues to inspire gamers to continue playing games because they can indeed help
 Nobody enjoys failing in whatever we are trying to accomplish. I fail, you fail, professors fail, and that failing hurts. Then, why is it that people who play games and fail an average of 80 percent during playing time still enjoy playing? Surprise, surprise, gamers actually enjoy failing.  According to a study developed at M.I.N.D. Lab in Helsinki, Finland, positive emotional stimulation peaks when the player has failed. The book uses a game called Super Monkey Ball 2 as an example. When the player loses, the monkey goes flying into space. There are rules and reasons for these happenings. For example, if failing is fun, like seeing a monkey fly into space, then gamers may be fine with failing.  Another reason may be the fairness of the game.  A term coined as “justifiable optimism” is being happy playing a game because you know that the game is beatable. This includes that no matter how many times you die in the game, it is fun so long as the death is fair.   Failing in a game is also more fun when in a group of friends. McGonigal thinks that this failing actually creates a stronger skin metaphorically, of course, and make gamers more adept to handling failure by replacing it with justifiable optimism.
 Optimism is powerful and it fuels the reasons for games. McGonigal talks about Randolph Nesse’s theories of depression. Nesse believed that because so many people are depressed, the size of depression in the gene pool means that depression must be an evolutionary way to survive. He hypothesized that depression set in to make someone avoid a situation where the outcome wouldn’t end well. In today's society she, McGonigal, discusses how many are raised with the ideology that anyone can become "big" if they dream "big", many believe we can do anything we want. This thinking is created instead of focusing on the skills we do have and making them better.  Games help fill the void of being someone we dreamed to be.  Take the game Rock Band 2 for example, not many people become rock stars, but the game allows the player to become a rock star. This optimism filled with fantasy is an example of how games could help players feel better with themselves. Games have actually shown to improve mildly depressed patients better than other methods.
 The book goes on to talk about really cool topics like developers' secrets and how games can improve reality. McGonigal has 14 fixes to help reality that she learned from games (from games to real life) but I won’t go into more detail. They are focused on in the book. After the fourteen fixes be sure to watch the  TED talk video (her TED video was awarded 16th place out of 835 of most engaging talks as of 2010) from her website or go directly to her website. Links will be posted at the bottom.
“[#1 tackling unnecessary obstacles; #2 Activate extreme positive emotions; #3 do more satisfying work;
#4 Find or obtain better hope for success; #5 Strengthen social conductivity (like multiplayer games) by making things more meaningful by putting them in a bigger context; #6 Immerse yourself in epic scale; #7 Participate whole heartedly whenever we can (levels motivate us); #8 Seek meaningful rewards with better efforts; #9 Have more fun with strangers (Big crowd games/advice for a good life); # 10 Invent and adopt new happiness acts; # 11 Contribute to a sustainable economy ( social participation that saves lives and gives heroic feelings just like a game does); #12 Seek out more epic wins (with so much game time, people can plan and cooperate more) #13 Spend 10,000 hours collaborating (refers to forecast games  which will be discussed next week) #14 Have one long epic game where people can compound knowledge and ideas to solve problems  in one place or game encompassing the creation of work that really matters and where everyone has a role in the game.
 
McGonigal, J. M. (2011). Reality is broken: Why game make us better and how they can change the worlds. Grand Haven, Michigan: Brilliance Audio.  

McGonigal's website is http://janemcgonigal.com/ , and to go straight to the video, click video.Before this blog entry comes to an end, I want to inform you that several specific games discussed in the book that exemplify games working for a greater purpose. Those games will be blogged about next week so stay tune!
Let's keep playing!