Reality is Broken

"According to McGonigal, games are unnecessary obstacles that we create to make life more interesting and challenging. She explains how the mechanics of games can be re-applied to the real world to increase our engagement with it. Many gamers have thousands of hours experience playing games, which makes them experts at the things they do in their games, particularly at collaborating. This mastery of collaboration can allow gamers to come together to solve some of the worlds most pressing problems. <br/><br/>McGonigal's theories are well-supported through scientific research and many examples of games she has created. She has a strong grasp of positive psychology and uses it to make her games fun and rewarding, what she calls the foundation for a future economy of engagement, where people work for positive emotion.<br/><br/>Toward the end, some of the suggestions McGonigal includes from players in one of her games are a bit unrealistic (such as energy-harvesting clothes). Such suggestions show that the games are well structured to support brainstorming, but I'm not sure whether they also support acting upon those ideas.<br/><br/>Here are my notes for the book:<br/><spoiler><br/>[parts in square brackets are my own commentary rather than direct statements from the book]<br/>*McGonigal gives statistics for growing majority of people who are gamers (p. 11).<br/>*A stigma against games is ingrained in language (p. 20).<br/>*The four defining traits of a game are: goal, rules, feedback, and voluntary participation (p. 21).<br/>*One of the primary limitations of non-electronic games is that you have to learn to play before you can play (p. 26).<br/>*<i>Phasing</i> (changing the world of an MMO for each player to reflect the results of that player’s quests) allows players to see the impact of their actions on the world around them (p. 58-9). <br/>*As long as (1) failure is entertaining and (2) the game is fair, people feel compelled to try again (p. 64).<br/>*The hope for success is a more positive emotion than success (p. 68). [This could be a motivational foundation for a new education system using the top half of the bell curve (C to A). By making the baseline “average” the cycle of defeat for the lowest grades in the class could be eliminated, yet by avoiding grade inflation, students would still be motivated to learn.] Having to struggle for success [such as good grades] is more enjoyable [and perhaps thus more motivating?]<br/>*Social network games thrive on “prosocial emotions.” These include “love, compassion, admiration, and devotion” (p. 82-3) as well as:<br/>**<i>happy embarrassment</i> -- the joy of teasing others gently to show that you could hurt them but without actually hurting them (p 83-6).<br/>**<i>vicarious pride</i> (aka <i>naches</i>) -- the pride in mentoring others to succeed (p. 86-9)<br/>**<i>ambient sociability</i> or <i>playing alone together</i> -- the positive emotion of interacting with the same space as other people even when you’re not interacting with those people directly (p. 89-91).<br/>*By catering to people’s sense of awe, you can encourage them to enjoy contributing to something larger than themselves (p. 95-115).<br/>*The more time people spend playing games where they have to help each other, the more likely they are to help people in their real lives (p. 113-4).<br/>*School is harder for the current generation of kids because they have grown up with “sophisticated games...so they take high-intensity engagement and active participation for granted” and are thus bored and frustrated in other contexts (p. 127).<br/>*Quest to Learn is a public charter school that gamifies education. It has some voluntary “secret mission” assignments, a leveling-up system emphasized over traditional grades [which reminded me of an idea I had of treating students like RPG characters, where the goal is to level up yourself instead of your character], “boss level” challenges instead of exams, and “teachable agents” (computer programs that the student teaches to demonstrate learning, gaining a feeling of naches) instead of quizzes to assess learning (p. 127-32). [On standardized tests, students score well above average in English and below average in math (source: <a href="http://projects.nytimes.com/new-york-schools-test-scores/counties/new-york/districts/new-york-city-district-2/schools/quest-to-learn">New York Times</a>). The evidence is insufficient to determine whether this is a result of the form of education or the types of students admitted.]<br/>*Having a look-alike avatar that gets in better shape as you exercise motivates you to exercise more (p. 161). Seeing an avatar that looks like you run makes you more likely to run soon afterward (p. 162).<br/>*Self-help manuals recommend introspection, yet happiness is largely a result of social connection (p. 186).<br/>*People hesitate to perform random acts of kindness because they go against social norms, but by turning it into a game called Cruel 2 B Kind, people become enthusiastic about it and significantly raise the jen (social well-being) of public spaces (p. 190-7).<br/>*All of Wikipedia took about 0.1 billion hours of work. Because there are about 1.7 billion internet users, projects of that scale should be relatively easy to create if enough people got involved (p. 225). Crowdsourcing has the potential to be extraordinarily powerful, but to gather a large enough crowd an application must be designed like a game (p. 219-246).<br/>*A new, sustainable economy can be based in engagement with brain cycles as a resource and emotion as the currency (p. 245). Groundcrew is an app that allows the trading of wishes for “positive experience” currency for other wishes (p. 260).<br/>*Gamers have thousands of hours of practice collaborating (p. 267-8). This practice makes them collaboration superpowers, exceeding the experience of previous master collaborators and pushing back the bounds of what is possible in collaboration (p. 277).<br/>*Running a massively multiplayer game simulation of how people might react when the demand for oil outstrips the supply allowed game participants to think about the future and provided useful information on reactions for educators and policy makers (p. 304-5).<br/>*The Serious Games Summit is an annual two-day meeting “for people working on games designed to teach, train, and solve real problems” (p. 306).<br/></spoiler>"