February 13, 2011

Video games can be much more than “the temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose”: they can improve reality. This book shows how.

Jane McGonigal, a fake blonde with flabby hands, seen in the photo above, has participated in game design, and in research about video games for many years. She lives in the USA and has an optimistic, maybe naive, view that video games can also improve reality, not just destroy it. She has written a book about it, released  in January 2011, and I am reviewing it here.

Yes, it’s a strange anomaly: but she is, indeed, a woman interested in gaming and even researching it.

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The change is coming: more and more people are spending more and more time inside the virtual worlds of video games -  games, that satisfy needs that reality can’t. Over 100 million people in the USA are playing video games regularly and this number is rapidly increasing. Soon, almost everybody on this planet will be playing some video game.

In many science-fiction visions, virtual worlds are portrayed as a source of evil (in Caprica for example artificial intelligences created in video gaming world are transferred to robots, that in turn destroy humanity via massive nuclear attacks) or that are used to enslave mankind (in The Matrix artificial intelligences enslave mankind into virtual world to use humanity as power supply), but what if mankind could use virtual world to improve the real world?

Reality is broken compared with video games – claims this book – and this book not only shows how video games can improve this reality but also describes the mechanisms of how video game activities are influencing humans psychologically and physiologically.

The video and computer gaming industry is flourishing and has already exceeded the movie industry. So even if you are not interested in the betterment of mankind via video games, but are just interested in higher-level strategies for game development, this book may be of interest to you.

This book talks also a lot about positive psychology and how gaming is giving us a fix for reality.

I have the impression that Jane McGonigal is not claiming that playing a video game is the final destination for humanity, but rather she points out how video gaming is impacting us and how it can be used for the betterment of reality.

While only a few years ago claims from this book – like the one that games can improve people in real life – could be considered far fetched, nowadays such claims are very real: Xbox Kinect for example makes controller-less video gaming possible resulting in video game playing where people have to exercise heavily, sometimes so heavily that gamers are covered with sweat (in fact when I was writing this article my Xbox with Kinect was turned on and I was  playing Kinect games from time to time). Clearly this book was written before the release of Kinect (the best selling gadget in the history, better selling even than the iPad), but it shows that nowadays playing video games is rewarding not only on a psychological and physiological level – like described in this book, but also on physical levels. There is therefore no doubt whatsoever that playing video games can improve people in real life.

Conclusion: the overall  opinion of Jane McGonigal that computer games can improve the real world may be too optimistic and her psychological and physiological analysis may be wrong and mistaken (even though she has a Ph.D.), but one can’t blame her for trying. She actually dreams of seeing a game designer getting a Nobel Prize in her lifetime and I must say: I do think it’s realistic. After all any tool can be used for good or for bad. She gives hints how to use video gaming for good. This book may be extremely inspiring not just for game designers, but it may be of interest to anybody who is open-minded about video gaming. Also, if you have been ignoring video gaming up to now, this book can open your eyes on how stupid you were.

To get this book click one of the following links:

* audio book : Reality is Broken (USA only)
* Amazon Kindle eBook : Reality is Broken
* Apple iBooks eBook : Reality is Broken (USA only)
* paper book : Reality is Broken

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I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.

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