Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Jane McGonigal
Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
More than 31 million people in the UK are gamers. The average young person in the UK will spend 10,000 hours gaming by the age of twenty-one. According to game designer Jane McGonigal the answer is simple: videogames are fulfilling genuine human needs. Drawing on positive psychology, cognitive science and sociology, Reality is Broken shows how game designers have hit on core truths about what makes us happy, and utilized these discoveries to astonishing effect in virtual environments. But why, McGonigal asks, should we use the power of games for escapist entertainment alone?
3.1 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Sports, Hobbies & Games |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
320 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
February 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0224089258 |
| Publisher |
Jonathan Cape |
| |
More than 31 million people in the UK are gamers. The average young person in the UK will spend 10,000 hours gaming by the age of twenty-one. According to game designer Jane McGonigal the answer is simple: videogames are fulfilling genuine human needs. Drawing on positive psychology, cognitive science and sociology, Reality is Broken shows how game designers have hit on core truths about what makes us happy, and utilized these discoveries to astonishing effect in virtual environments. But why, McGonigal asks, should we use the power of games for escapist entertainment alone?
Reviews
The Independent
Pat Kane
"... the most powerful justification yet for computer games as one of our central literacies ... McGonigal makes the claim that the huge rush towards gameplay is a kind of exodus from what Theodor Adorno called "damaged life" — work that doesn't satisfy, relationships that don't persist, societies that don't find a place for hope or ambition. She brilliantly links the growing scholarship on happiness to the gimmicks and tricks that commercial game designers devise to engage their febrile audiences."
25/02/2011
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The New Statesman
Helen Lewis-Hasteley
"… it takes little account of the innate resistance that many people have to the notion of games being anything other than the time-wasting obsession of socially awkward saddos … Overall, however, this is an intriguing and thought-provoking book."
10/02/2011
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The Times
Jonathan Bate
"She bangs the drum for game developers because they “know better than anyone else how to inspire extreme effort and reward hard work”. Better than Sir Alex Ferguson, would that be, or Andy Flower, England’s triumphant cricket coach? The book’s argument is at its most convincing when it makes the case for the importance of games in general, not digital ones in particular."
29/01/2011
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The New York Times
William Saletan
"McGonigal points to studies suggesting that games that reward socially constructive behavior promote such behavior in real life. But the only outputs measured by these studies are self-reported values, self-reported behavior in the real world, and objectively measured behavior in games. Where’s the reliable evidence that this data translates to people’s doing more real work?"
11/02/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Julian Hall
"Such are the extremes of opinion in my mind that I am awed by the idealism while also believing that Reality is Broken could be an hour-long comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The latter view is fuelled by games such as McGonigal's own Cruel 2 B Kind, which uses mobiles and social networking to reward random acts of kindness with points — behaviour that is supposed to spill over outside the game's boundaries. Other shiny, happy examples also provoke snorts of derisory laughter, but the underlying message is clear: gaming is good and gamers are benevolent."
30/01/2011
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