Essay 4 - Book Club - Reality is Broken: Why Video Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

Dillon Waugh

Hayes

English 100 – 9:10

5/5/2013

Word Count: 1,771

Book Club Response – Review Draft

         Entertainment media is a silly thing, or so it’s considered – a frivolity, a way to shift one’s mood or blow off a bit of steam. Nonetheless, real quality entertainment is inherently elegantly and complexly produced. To entertain, after all, one must understand the directions in which human thought moves. To entertain, an entertainer needs to give their audience what they want and strike the right buttons. A game developer like Jane McGonigal would know, especially as an interactive medium such as video gaming is obliged to draw a particular investment and engagement from players.  In her book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, she explains simplistically what it is that a gamer seeks from a game – and steps forward to pose ways in which the insight into human happiness psychology provided by observing games can enhance real life.

         McGonigal’s divides her argument into three parts, or rather layers – the first of which centers on the profound appeal of video games to their players, the second and third sections proceeding through describing and proffering examples of the application of knowledge of what makes a game fun to enhancing and developing real-life tasks. To read through all three sections with the Toulmin Model of Argumentation in mind keeps their unity undeniable; the first introduces the author’s claim with the potential rebuttal or naysayer in mind, the proverbial “They” in the title of Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say, the acknowledgement of whom in defining an argument’s context and significance the two claim is essential in academic study and writing. As the author describes, video games are not appealing as an excuse to detach from life and laze as is a non-gamer misconception – in fact, they are appealing because of the fantastic sense of productivity that, in by her reasoning, they instill through inclusion and particulars of what McGonigal presents as “the  four defining traits of a game”: firstly, all video games have goals to which progress is measureable and never impossible and that provide a sense of meaning; for a task to be a game, it must present challenges and rules (often arbitrary – McGonigal points out that Scrabble would be less of a game if participants couldn’t only use seven tiles or weren’t required to build off of words already on the board); a feedback system acknowledges success and progress, ideally encouraging the player to apply themselves to a game’s tasks and explorable worlds and old scores to beat keep them further and fantastically busy; finally, games remain enjoyable by the voluntary nature of their participation – an activity that a person partakes in due to obligation and not choice is oppressive, not recreational. A good video game (or any other sort of game, for that matter) may, therefore, be considered “work” – she steps back to neatly display her own “warrant”, all-important logic behind the trail of thought that proves the sense of its use: that a human being craves work over so-called relaxation, something to challenge and demand application of skill and testing of limits, as long as it is “theirs.”

         This insight into the psychology of fun is, at many points, bemusing and liable to set one’s figurative lightbulbs sparking. It’s true that a game that allows its player to do absolutely anything that they want is hardly a game at all, and McGonigal quotes psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith in that “The opposite of play isn’t work – it’s depression” – both playing a game and performing intense work stoke the spirit and feeling of productivity. She provides the backing that Toulmin’s model includes as essential for proving that a warrant’s logic is indeed logical, pointing to corroboration with psychologists, studies indicating the chemical rewards of blissful success and other situations that induce them – for example, she early introduces the concept of “fiero”, an Italian word for “pride” used among game designers to name the feeling of triumph a well-designed task should provide and which, “according to researchers at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research … is the emotion that first created the desire to

leave the cave and conquer the world” [McGonigal, 33]. She contrasts true “fun” with relaxation. However, fairly enough, McGonigal’s theories on what draws a human into wanting work are supported by the arguably classic theories of others. Parallels stand between her defining features of games and workplace theories Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Frederick Herzberg’s motivational vs. hygiene theory: the first suggests that a person whose survival demands are satisfied will seek out action that brings them friendship and belonging, self-affirmation, and growth; video games provide a platform for bonding, including with those a player may never have met on their own in person, and the quests to mark off and old scores to beat that account for feedback systems praises one’s performance while encouraging self-one-upping, so to speak. The second  states that a job must meet certain requirements to content a worker in such areas as pay rate and workplace safety, but that job satisfaction comes from variety, challenge, independence, and clarity of a job’s efficacy and purpose; McGonigal claims that video games provide a satisfaction that general real life does not, and that it does so through presenting surmountable obstacles for a challenge, independence afforded through choice in participation and approach, and feedback through score, milestones, or environment to show players their performance’s quality and impact. The bottom line is that humans are happiest and most engaged when performing work that they want – think of middle-schoolers wheezing laps around a football field before picturing teams of volunteers training enthusiastically for a marathon. Voluntary exertion, whether of mind or body, is fun, and fun is voluntary exertion.

         The second and third sections of the book, meanwhile, proceed through describing and proffering examples of the application of knowledge of what makes a game fun to enhancing and developing real-life tasks, from helping flight-shy passengers stomach plane rides to “crowdsourcing” anti-cancer research with protein-folding puzzle games. It is here that the sixth component of Stephen Toulmin’s conception of a complete argument, the qualifier that specifies necessities for and limitations of an argument’s applicability, is found; Timothy Crusius and Carolyn Channell’s Aims of Argument offers, as examples of Toulmin-style qualifiers, “on the whole,” and “usually,” while McGonigal’s are “provided that” and “bearing in mind” – what game elements work, and combined with what, for what reaction? Any insight, needless to say, has its practical uses, especially where the feeling of human fulfillment is concerned – although the ARGs (“Alternate Reality Games” – games played on the set of the real world) that she presents, while intriguing in their right, seem like slow steps into turning reality into a fantastic and fulfilling game. Would a person think to sign up for the adventures-in-chores game Chore Wars if they didn’t derive some enjoyment from – or at least maintain a commitment to – their chores even without having their motions described in fantasy euphemisms and receiving abstract points for their completion? Meanwhile, the “productive games” such as Foldit given are repetitive and formulaic with little incentive or reward for commitment, leaving wonder that whether their drawing in players proves that playing games for the greater good is as fun as playing ordinary ones or that people will happily perform easily-accessible volunteer work. On the other hand, a museum found a level of success in creating and presenting a plotted ARG to members that prompted them to design works of art and museum exhibits along the path to solving a mystery story, and frivolous ARGs such as the infamous Ben Drowned, beginning as a short story of a man haunted by a ghost that had been possessing an Nintendo 64 cartridge and evolving into a game inviting the story’s fans to help him banish the ghost by blending the game’s rules with reality’s, also held attention by sending players on or at least tasking them to assist on an adventure. This would, however, tie back to McGonigal’s description of the importance of the concept of “epicness” to gamer culture: the greater the scale, the greater the meaning; beating one’s old score in a game of Tetris in the car is triumphant, while slaying beast after rampaging beast culminating in banishing their dreaded god in an RPG is much more so. Although McGonigal does not herself include this among her qualifiers, tucked all around media are tiny games fitted for bits and pieces of real life – it would be quite a thing to imagine it all woven together into one big, truly “epic” game (or two, or three) running through reality to chase.

         While McGonigal’s examples may be proof of potential rather than fact, her arguments are clear, her language is easily digestible, and her quotations by psychologists and other such figures draw their fingers over pressure points and drive their keys home. She makes her case in a way that isn’t difficult to grasp by any means – except, perhaps, to those unfamiliar with game lingo and titles. World of Warcraft certainly can’t be painted well in broad strokes, and her use of the term “achievement” is nonsensical out of terms of gaming (it refers to a merit badge of sorts awarded for completing certain specific tasks in a game, for those out of the know). In addition, on a sheerly technical level, her section formatting is inconsistent – yet her argument continues to read smoothly.

         Overall, Reality is Broken comes highly recommended as a sufficiently thought-provoking book, and is well-structured and intelligently-argumentative enough for value as academic reading – but not for just any classroom’s setting. Once again, McGonigal’s book is an easy read, and ease of reading may be best compensated for with ease of discussion; as its subject in popular culture grows increasingly close to home for most, one of its greatest strengths in an academic contest is the ease with which it is respondable. McGonigall’s “I Say” becomes will easily become a group of gamers’ “They Say” in a small-scale step in furthering the ongoing proverbial discussion. Meanwhile, a group consisting partially of gamers may likewise generate respectable amounts of discussion after explanations of terms; strict non-gamers may read dispassionately and with too little context to make connections and speak freely, and as McGonigal herself reminds, what good comes out of involuntary work irrelevant to one’s interests? Accordingly, however, even those less familiar with gaming, however, may get a bit out of indulging any curiosity by making it into a subject of pleasure reading, as might anyone else, for a take on the psychology of happiness and invitation to introspection on why we enjoy what we enjoy.

Works Cited

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

Crusius, Timothy W. and Carolyn E. Channell. The Aims of Argument: A Brief Guide. 7th Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. 2011. Print.

Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. 2nd Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2012.