On The Paper Trail: Reality is Broken

Howdy partners welcome back to the Paper Trail and in this installment we are going to look at the popular book by Jane McGonigal called Reality is Broken. Jane has recently spoken at GDC, PAX East 2011, has had her TED Talk gain notoriety and been on the Colbert Report.

Jane has been a big proponent on getting more games into gamers hands. Yes she wants gaming to save the world, if you think about it we have been gaming for over 10,000 hours, thats about the same amount of time that we have been in school since the 5th grade (barring perfect attendance). We are master gamers and to think that it is a waste of time is nothing more of being closed minded to the world.

This book talks about games, even going as far as describing the gaming lexicon to people of non gamers. How do you go and explain the "epic win" to a non-gamer who does no understand gaming itself? Jane not only manages to do this, but also talk about various games she has created to go and fix reality.

Reality is boring, dull and has no real motivation to go and achieve something. Gaming allows us to go and achieve something great every single time we play something, why not make the games entertaining, fun, and be a cause of us trying to go and fix the problems with reality? By simply curtailing games to real world scenarios and leaving open ended answers we can collaborate with people all over the world to go and solve problems in our everyday lives.

I totally agree with this theory, however there is one big hurtle that she does not address, and that is the gamers willingness to go and participate in these ventures. Almost all of the examples she mention are ARGs (Alternative Reality Games) where by the game and reality have a common plane of existence to interact with one another. Now there have been ARGs in the past (see Perplex City) where it flopped due to the lack of participation from gamers as a whole. The fact is when something like Find the Future comes along and when I tell people about it I get an overwhelming "meh."

Gaming has many facets, some people like to stick to their FPS, RPGs, or even D&D campaigns. However to consider yourself a true gamer, you need to be willing to play ANY game of any capacity. Once you get to your gaming life as an elder game player then you can benefit from the things McGonigal talk about.

All in all this is a fascination book on where games need to go in order to change the lives of mankind. We have the technology and know the techniques to execute them, all we need to do now is remove the stereotype of games being nonproductive and actually a benefit to the society as a whole. Once we achieve this anything is possible to be solved in the context of the game.