In 2011, Jane McGonigal, a visionary game designer wrote the book entitled Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. This book ultimately reveals how we can exploit the power of games to boost global happiness. In this book she argues that the power of games can be used to fix what is wrong with our world i.e. real world issues such as poverty and global warming. She also gives examples of how some games have already changed the following sectors: business, education and non-profit organisations. This book was written not only for gamers, but also non-gamers alike and ultimately states that the future belongs to those amongst us who have the ability to understand, design and play games.
But is what McGonigal reveals in her book honestly true? Is reality really broken? And is gaming really going to “make us better”?
Firstly, I think the fact that globally we play around 3 billion hours of video games in a week speaks for itself. So many of us take a step back from reality and into the world of video gaming to seek some sort of happiness from all the problems that surround us on a daily basis. Not only this, but more human effort and attention is going into designing these artificial worlds just so that people can continue to lose themselves in a world that is nothing like our own. More time is going into creating new worlds than into trying to fix what is wrong with this one, and some may argue that this is the case because there is no solution to many of the major problems we face. Thus, it is easier to just create a new, virtual world where things aren’t so bad and we are happy. So in this sense yes, reality is broken because video games are what make us happier at the moment and there is more of them than there are solutions to world hunger!
McGonigal explains how games can change the way we approach things we know we should be doing to make a “better” life for ourselves. We crave, she argues, “satisfying work” that allows us to be “optimistic about our own chances for success”; that involves “social connection”; and that allows us to feel “curiosity, awe and wonder”.
Could gaming make us better? Well I think there is some element of truth in this. If nothing else, what gaming shows us is that we are capable of doing something. We spend so much time and effort into creating characters and doing things we probably wished we could do in reality; and this to us seems more meaningful than much of what we do in our everyday lives. However, if we put the same amount of effort into our daily lives as we do into creating a virtual world for ourselves then maybe reality wouldn’t be so bad. If you could do it in a game, I’m pretty sure you could also do something similar in reality. Thus, we would be happier with our own lives, not within a virtual world that is non-existent.
I don’t think we really need a virtual world to make us happy, but I do understand why some may think that gaming is a way to “global happiness”.
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