Reality is Broken (Jane McGonigal)

An intriguing book written by an ex-computer games designer / psychologist.  The premise is that modern computer games encourage cooperation amongst groups of people to succeed at the highest levels.  In addition it explains the underlying psychology of why such games can be so compelling (clear goals, clear feedback, difficulty constantly adjusted to be just stretching enough and most important of all - voluntary participation).
The most interesting part for me was looking at how these concepts could be applied to reality - which as the author says is (or should be) the most interesting game of all.
There were many references through the later chapters to novel group games (not played on computers) that encourage more social interaction - I'm sure some of them could be developed for team building activities.




Locn. 144-55 Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are opting out of reality for larger and larger chunks of time. In the United States alone, there are 183 million active gamers (individuals who, in surveys, report that they play computer or video games “regularly”—on average, thirteen hours a week).3 Globally, the online gamer community—including console, PC, and mobile phone gaming—counts more than 4 million gamers in the Middle East, 10 million in Russia, 105 million in India, 10 million in Vietnam, 10 million in Mexico, 13 million in Central and South America, 15 million in Australia, 17 million in South Korea, 100 million in Europe, and 200 million in China.4 Although a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than 6 million people in China who spend at least twenty-two hours a week gaming, the equivalent of a part-time job.5 More than 10 million “hardcore” gamers in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany spend at least twenty hours a week playing.6 And at the leading edge of this growth curve, more than 5 million “extreme” gamers in the United States play on average forty-five hours a week.
Locn. 167-70 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. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.
Locn. 212-14 Collectively, the planet is now spending more than 3 billion hours a week gaming. We are starving, and our games are feeding us.
Locn. 447-50 When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.
Locn. 462-66 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 a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.
Locn. 477 Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
Locn. 518-19 What makes Tetris so addictive, despite the impossibility of winning, is the intensity of the feedback it provides.
Locn. 529-33 In other words, in a good computer or video game you’re always playing on the very edge of your skill level, always on the brink of falling off. When you do fall off, you feel the urge to climb back on. That’s because there is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability—or what both game designers and psychologists call “flow”.4 When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes.
Locn. 597-98 Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work.
Locn. 601-2 Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”
Locn. 799-802 games become hits and make money in direct proportion to how much satisfaction they provide and how much positive emotion they provoke—in other words, how happy they make their players. As a result, game designers have been taught to relentlessly pursue happiness outcomes, including flow—and they’ve innovated a wide range of other happiness strategies along the way.
Locn. 819-20 Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.
Locn. 957-62 The Four Secrets to Making Our Own Happiness Many different competing theories of happiness have emerged from the field of positive psychology, but if there’s one thing virtually all positive psychologists agree on, it’s this: there are many ways to be happy, but we cannot find happiness. No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us. We have to make our own happiness—by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.15
Locn. 979-83 As long as we are regularly immersed in self-rewarding hard work, we will be happy more often than not—no matter what else is going on in our lives. This is one of the earliest hypotheses of positive psychology, and a fairly radical idea. It contradicts what so many of us have been taught to believe—that we need life to be a certain way in order for us to be happy, and that the easier life is the happier we are. But the relationship between hard work, intrinsic reward, and lasting happiness has been verified and confirmed through hundreds of studies and experiments.
Locn. 1010-12 from a neurological and physiological point of view, “intrinsic reward” is really just another way of describing the emotional payoffs we get by stimulating our internal happiness systems.
Locn. 1095-98 Playing World of Warcraft is such a satisfying job, gamers have collectively spent 5.93 million years doing it. It sounds impossible, but it’s true: if you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing
Locn. 1304-6 Part of me felt like I was accomplishing more in the Kingdom of Azeroth than I was in my real life. And that’s exactly the IV drip of productivity that World of Warcraft is so good at providing. It delivers a stream of work and reward as reliably as a morphine drip line.
Locn. 1468-71 Learning to stay urgently optimistic in the face of failure is an important emotional strength that we can learn in games and apply in our real lives. When we’re energized by failure, we develop emotional stamina. And emotional stamina makes it possible for us to hang in longer, to do much harder work, and to tackle more complex challenges. We need this kind of optimism in order to thrive as human beings.
Locn. 1638-40 If you know how to play Scrabble, then you already know how to play Lexulous—it’s just a slightly modified and unauthorized version of the classic board game, combined with online chat.1
Locn. 1666-69 Because you don’t have to be online playing at the same time, it’s easy to organize a game with anyone else, no matter where or how busy they are. You can easily keep up with the game by playing literally only a few minutes a day. And by keeping running games going with your real-life friends and family, you’re ensuring daily opportunities to actively connect with the people you care about most.
Locn. 1680-83 You’re motivated to act, but you have to wait for your Facebook friends to check back into the game. And because you often have no idea if your friends are still logged on or paying attention to the game, there’s an emotional buildup to waiting for their next moves. As one player puts it, “You have to be addicted AND patient.”10
Locn. 1693-95 Simply put, social network games make it both easier and more fun to maintain strong, active connections with people we care about but who we don’t see or speak to enough in our daily lives.
Locn. 1743-47 The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “prosocial emotions.” Prosocial emotions—including love, compassion, admiration, and devotion—are feel-good emotions that are directed toward others. They’re crucial to our long-term happiness because they help create lasting social bonds.
Locn. 1782-86 Teasing each other, recent scientific research has shown, is one of the fastest and most effective ways to intensify our positive feelings for each other. Dacher Keltner, a leading researcher of prosocial emotions at the University of California, has conducted experiments on the psychological benefits of teasing, and he believes that teasing plays an invaluable role in helping us form and maintain positive relationships.19
Locn. 1790-93 Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really would, hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being.
Locn. 2036-37 on the other hand, just because the kills don’t have value doesn’t mean they don’t have meaning.
Locn. 2043-48 How do we get more meaning in our lives? It’s actually quite simple. Philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders agree: the single best way to add meaning to our lives is to connect our daily actions to something bigger than ourselves—and the bigger, the better. As Martin Seligman says, “The self is a very poor site for meaning.” We can’t matter outside of a large-scale social context. “The larger the entity you can attach yourself to,” Seligman advises, “the more meaning you can derive.”8
Locn. 2243-46 The world’s oldest known example of an epic built environment is the Gobekli Tepe. Discovered less than two decades ago in southeastern Turkey, it’s believed to predate Stonehenge by a staggering six thousand years. It’s a twenty-five-acre arrangement of at least twenty stone circles, between ten and thirty meters in diameter each, made from monolithic pillars three meters high.
Locn. 2410-15 Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology and the author of Generation Me, has persuasively argued that the youngest generations today—particularly anyone born after 1980—are, in her words, “more miserable than ever before.” Why? Because of our increased cultural emphasis on “self-esteem” and “self-fulfillment.” But real fulfillment, as countless psychologists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have shown, comes from fulfilling commitments to others. We want to be esteemed in the eyes of others, not for “who we are,” but rather for what we’ve done that really matters.
Locn. 2513-14 We’re not alone. Chore Wars is one of the best reviewed and most beloved, if little known, secrets on the Internet.
Locn. 3503-6 Because a critical mass is so important to games like the Comfort of Strangers, in 2008 Evans and Johnson cofounded an annual Bristol-based festival called Interesting Games, or Igfest, for innovative outdoor games. The festival is meant to provide support for and exposure to other game developers who are working to make cities more interesting and friendlier spaces.
Locn. 3848-52 The two most frequently recommended happiness activities across the scientific literature are to express gratitude and practice acts of kindness. Recent research has shown that we don’t even have to know someone to experience the benefits of thanking and being nice to them. Even fleeting acts of gratitude and kindness toward strangers can have a profound impact on our happiness. And positive gestures from strangers can make a big difference in how rich and satisfying our everyday lives feel.
Locn. 4028-33 Tombstone Hold ’Em is meant to make remembering death easier and more rewarding, by taking advantage of the largely underutilized social and recreational potential of cemeteries. The central activity of Tombstone Hold ’Em poker is learning how to “see” a playing card in any tombstone, based on its shape (the suit) and the names and date of death (the face value). Once you can read stones as cards, you can spot “hands” all around you. The game works in any cemetery, as long as there are clearly marked tombstones. Here’s how it plays out:
Locn. 4714-19 Free Rice; together, according to the game’s FAQ, their efforts add up to enough rice to feed an average of seven thousand people per day. Why is Free Rice able to capture so much engagement? It isn’t just that it is a force for good; it’s also classically good game design. It takes just seconds to complete a task, meaning you can get a lot of work done quickly. You get instant visual feedback: grains of rice stacking up in a bowl, with a constantly rising total of grains that you’ve earned. Because the game gets easier when you make mistakes and harder when you answer correctly, it’s easy to experience flow: you’re always playing at the limits of your ability.
Locn. 4914-22 these four principles all serve the ultimate goal of building a compelling game world, satisfying game mechanics, and an inspiring game community. The Player Investment Design Lead will design the mechanics that drive in-game player reward and incentives: • So players feel invested in the world and their character. • So players have long-term goals. • So players can’t grief or exploit them, or each other. • So that content are rewards in and of themselves.
Locn. 5009-11 The game’s motto is “Got two minutes? Be extraordinary!” Players can log in to the game from wherever they are and browse a list of “microvolunteer” missions that they can start and finish in literally just a few minutes. Each mission helps a real nonprofit organization accomplish one of its goals.
Locn. 5365-71 Collaboration is a special way of working together. It requires three distinct kinds of concerted effort: cooperating (acting purposefully toward a common goal), coordinating (synchronizing efforts and sharing resources), and cocreating (producing a novel outcome together). This third element, cocreation, is what sets collaboration apart from other collective efforts: it is a fundamentally generative act. Collaboration isn’t just about achieving a goal or joining forces; it’s about creating something together that it would be impossible to create alone.
Locn. 6927-34 We can create any future we can imagine. That is the big idea we started with, fourteen chapters ago, as we set off to investigate why good games make us better, and how they can help us change the world. Along the way, we’ve gleaned industry secrets—more than thirty years’ worth—from some of the most successful computer and video game developers in the world. We’ve compared these secrets alongside the most important scientific findings of the past decade, from the field of positive-psychology research. We’ve identified key innovations in the emerging landscape of alternate reality design. And we’ve tracked how game design is creating new ways for us to work together at extreme scales, and to solve bigger real-world problems.
Locn. 7182-83 visit the website for this book, www.realityisbroken.org.
Locn. 7186-87 world—join the social network Gameful, at www.gameful.org.