Reality is Broken shows that games can teach us essential lessons about mass collaboration, creating emotional incentives, and increasing engagement that will be relevant to everyone. Game designers intuitively understand how to optimize human experience. Instead of futile handwringing about this exodus from reality, world-renowned game designer Jane McGonigal argues that we need to figure out how to make the real world - our homes, our businesses and our communities - engage us in the way that games do.ĭrawing on positive psychology and cognitive science, McGonigal reveals how game designers have hit on core truths about what makes us happy, from social connection to having satisfying work to do. Hundreds of millions of people globally - 174 million in the United States alone - regularly inhabit game worlds because they provide the rewards, stimulating challenges, and epic victories that are so often lacking in the real world. McGonigal’s narrative of Halo’s rise and incorporation of epic meaning from its player base and community-driven goals of 10 billion kills against the Covenant (a fictional enemy to Earth) provides the backdrop for her suggestion that the key to happiness is an investment in something with epic meaning, something that gives one awe in its pursuit. In today's society, games are fulfilling real human needs in ways that reality is not.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |