Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Jane McGonigal, Penguin, 2011

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
Tom Bissell, Pantheon, 2010

In his famous thought experiment, political philosopher Robert Nozick posed the following dilemma: Imagine a machine that could give you any and all desirable and pleasurable experiences you could ever want—and only those experiences—by stimulating your brain to induce feelings indistinguishable from real ones. Would you plug in?

The question is merely theoretical, yet there is a real corollary. By the age of twenty-one, the average American has spent more time playing computer and video games—over ten thousand hours—than they’ve spent in a classroom between kindergarten and college. Collectively, gamers worldwide have spent over 5.93 billion years playing World of Warcraft—about as long as humans have spent evolving as a species. In a way, we’ve already chosen the machine.

According to Reality is Broken, a new book by superstar game designer Jane McGonigal, our general eagerness to abandon reality for the comforts of the game is proof that reality no longer makes us happy. McGonigal, an alternate reality guru and director of game research at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future, argues that the genuine human needs being met on the luminous interstellar battlefields of Halo 3 are unachievable, or at least inconsistent, in the real world. “Gamers want to know,” she writes, “Where, in the real world, is that gamer sense of being fully alive, focused, and engaged in every moment? Where is the gamer feeling of power, heroic purpose, and community? Where are the bursts of exhilarating and creative game accomplishment? Where is the heart-expanding thrill of success and team victory?” The answer, apparently, is nowhere, with the result that “we’re fast on our way to becoming a society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing games, creates it best memories in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game worlds.”

This is not intended as a lament, however, as McGonigal is the self-proclaimed catalyst of “games for good,” a new movement using video games as a framework to create a “better and more immersive” reality. Gamers, she believes, can save the world, and Reality is Broken is her manifesto testifying to their power. It’s hard not to admire her idealism—indeed, by putting herself in the vanguard of the “super-empowered hopeful individuals,” McGonigal ensures that her critics will be seen, at the very least, as cynics.

According to Reality is Broken, good games share four traits: a goal to provide purpose; rules to provide positive stress, or “eustress,” fostering creative and strategic thinking; an immediate feedback system to provide motivation; and voluntary participation, allowing “stressful and challenging work [to be] experienced as a safe and pleasurable activity.” Reality would be better and people happier, McGonigal argues, if as games do our real lives offered “challenging, customizable missions and tasks, to do alone with friends or family, whenever and wherever…vivid, real-time reports of the progress they’re making and a clear view of the impact they’re having on the world around them.” Games, she believes, allow a faster and more predictable cycle of learning and reward than real life can. Games are “happiness engines,” productive of a higher quality of life. Accordingly, gamers aren’t escaping real life when they spend 40 plus hours a day attached to their consoles—they are making their real lives more rewarding.

Reality is Broken is heavily influenced by a self-help credo of the ‘make your own happiness’ variety. Italicized, bullet-pointed, and transposed into gamer jargon with a sort of Gladwellian pop-psychological twist, the book often operates on the brink of platitude: “We’re hardwired with neurochemical systems to make all the happiness we need. We just have to work hard at things that activate us.” Happiness consists of satisfying work, success or the hope thereof, social connection, and meaning, each of which are “ways of engaging deeply with the world around us—with our environment, with other people, and with causes and projects bigger than ourselves.” But as a way to reach happiness, McGonigal finds, reality pales beside its virtual alternative. Her book is full of aphoristic statements as to its failings: “Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy;” “Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.”

As a solution, McGonigal suggests transferring gaming mechanisms to the real world by means of “alternate realities” or “happiness hacks”—in effect, clever game-like tricks to make life more pleasant by appealing to the competitive spirit. Most of her game-solutions are a fusion of new-age psychology and comic book lingo (see chapter seven’s “Chore Wars,” in which brushing the dog is “Saving the dog-damsel in distress” and doing laundry is “conjuring clean clothes”), as though happy, gameful living required not only the qualities above but also a sci-fi vocabulary, secrets, and superhero avatars.

But if challenges, goals, and interactions are simulated, can rewards be real? McGonigal’s “happiness hack” systems require a kind of complicity, a willingness to accept an arbitrary reward system (+1 courage, for instance) as meaningful. McGonigal subscribes to physicist Lord Kelvin’s tenet, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” But not everything is quantifiable. McGonigal cites Halo 3 players’ feting their 10 billionth collective kill as an example of the kind of “meaning” games provide: “Meaning is the feeling that we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s the belief that our actions matter beyond our own individual lives.” It is this sense of scope or size (McGonical favors the modifier “epic”) that she feels games provide over and above the “trivial” nature of reality: “Awe is what we feel when we recognize that we’re in the presence of something bigger than ourselves. It’s closely related with feelings of spirituality, love, and gratitude—and more importantly, a desire to serve.” This runs into a contradiction: games have to be more trivial than reality—that’s the only reason they’re fun—and this trivial nature has to effect the quality of the emotional reward they provide. Furthermore, isn’t there is a difference between the transpositional, cathartic emotions we recognize from other arts like books and film and the kind of awe that arises when we see or do or love something real? But if so many gamers like MacGonigal fail to make this distinction, it is perhaps because unlike the story in a book, playing a video game feels so close to doing something real. As Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, writes, games are “experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories.”

Bissell’s book is a rambling mixture of memoir, reportage, theory, and game criticism. In large part, the appeal of the book, aside from its sheepish good humor, is Bissell’s ambivalence about his own deep, occasionally obsessive, love of gaming. “A good game attracts you with melodrama and hypnotizes you with elegant gameplay,” Bissell—a novelist by profession—writes. “In effect, this turns you into a galley slave who enjoys rowing.” Just such a slave himself, Bissell—who regretfully cops to missing the 2008 election thanks to Fallout 3, as well as a violent, simultaneous addiction to Grand Theft Auto and cocaine—is careful to distinguish what video games can do from what they should not. “I know that video games have enriched my life. Of that I have no doubt. They have also done damage to my life. Of that I have no doubt.” This caution leads to moments of sharp insight, but Bissell never quite arrives at an answer to the question posed by his book’s subtitle.

In fact, the “actual experiences” Bissell describes are not necessarily to be found in the game itself—rather, they are enabled by it. This is a subtle difference that his rambunctious prose goes a long way to confuse. In a series of essays each more or less focusing on a single game, Bissell often offers long descriptions of game-play:

I was still mostly blind, and my friend, despite having been released, was still under assault by at least a dozen rapacious normal zombies. Deciding that one of us making it was better than none of us making it, I stepped inside the safe house and closed the door… My downed friends failed to see it this way…“You dick!” one of my friends called out. He had just finished bleeding out, a skull appearing beside his onscreen name. My remaining friends were now seconds away from the same fate. I looked within, did not like what I saw, steeled myself, and fired several shotgun rounds through the door.

Narrated in this way, it is easy to see how a video game can feel like an experience. Bissell describes real feelings of shame—even his pronouns (“I steeled myself,” “I closed the door”) contribute to the sense of something happening to him. But as Bissell makes clear in the section on his Grand Theft Auto addiction, part of the feeling of awe—the real one—is the feeling of being out of control, of noticing the presence of forces superior to oneself. A game can reproduce these feelings outside its own narrative, but there is always, however shadowy, a hand controlling what is possible inside. The gaming experience, in other words, is always a curated one.

One of the more interesting sections of Bissell’s book highlights the gulf of difference separating a game’s “ludonarrative” (the story the player creates as they move through the game) and its framed-narrative, or overarching storyline: the first is there only to be fun, the second, to provide meaningful context for the fun. But because the presence of the ludonarrative so seldom affects the framed-narrative, Bissell writes, it only makes both absurd. “Once a game comes along that figures out a way around the technical challenges of allowing a large number of ludonarrative decisions to have framed-narrative-altering consequences,” he writes, “an altogether new form of narrative might be born: stories that, with your help, create themselves. There is, of course, another word for stories that, with your help, create themselves. That word is life.” Reality, as Extra Lives shows, is both our own story and a story that happens to us, the mixture of chance and intention that video games try, imperfectly, to replicate.

Conversely, the most ambitious of McGonigal’s future-making games, what she calls “The Long Game,” would have human existence replicating a game. As she envisions it, the theoretical game would last a thousand years and involve all of humankind:

If you played The Long Game your entire life, you would hope to experience a complete round at least once, if not twice. Every tenth move would represent a bigger and more significant occasion, to provide a kind of momentous leveling-up occasion each decade…What specifically would making a move entail? We envisioned a combination of events. Social rituals and circle games to build common ground. Crowd-sourced challenges and collective feats—in the style of a traditional barn raising—to focus the world’ energy and attention… The game would be a throughline for humanity, a tangible connection between our actions today and the world our descendants inherit tomorrow.

Reading this, I was struck by much it sounded like a description of the ways in which we already organize and make sense of our reality. In fact, all of the things McGonigal’s ideal game provides—education and rites of passage (“leveling up”), community, challenge, a throughline—already exist. Culture is another form of eustress (try reading a Wallace Stevens poem, or knitting an Irish fisherman’s sweater). A wedding or funeral builds common ground. And a barn raising is a barn raising still, in some places. McGonigal writes that part of being a futurist is looking back into the past, but she seems to have forgotten about our very, very recent past. A book, after all, is an “alternate reality” too. Preparing a meal, planting a garden, singing along to the radio—these are all ways into the very things McGonigal believes life is lacking. Games are undeniably part of culture, but they are not the sum total of it.

Nozick’s ultimate answer to the “experience machine” test is that we would not want to give up our less-than-perfect reality for a life of machine-induced bliss. He reasoned that human beings want to do things, not just experience doing them. We do not, furthermore, want to be limited to a man-made reality that includes only those experiences we can imagine. Although we can create meaningful rewards artificially, real rewards are meaningful for their unpredictability—in effect, reality’s value lies in its very brokenness. Bissell writes: “For designers who want to change and startle gamers, they as authors must relinquish the impulse not only to declare meaning but also to suggest meaning. They have to think of themselves as shopkeepers of many possible meanings—some of which may be sick, nihilistic, and disturbing.” McGonigal, by insisting that games be positive by default, refuses this challenge. But maybe that’s all for the best. Because there’s another word for something that means without trying do so, and that is life.

Extra Broken Real Lives

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