Fixing up First Life

GAMING: DAVIN O'DWYER Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the WorldBy Jane McGonigal Jonathan Cape, 388pp. £12.99

IN THE short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luis Borges writes about an imaginary planet invented by a secretive cabal, a planet that exists only in the exhaustive description of it found in the volumes of a hidden encyclopedia.

Though a fiction, this imagined world gradually begins to impinge on the real world as occasional volumes come to light, until one day in 1944, when the full collection of encyclopedias is discovered, detailing every facet of this wondrous land. At this point, the culture of Tlön begins to usurp the culture of the real world, its Berkleian form of reality proving impossible for people to resist. “Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account,” writes the narrator Borges. “The truth is it longed to yield . . . How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?”

The lure of an orderly reality, designed to motivate and challenge and entertain, is tempting hundreds of millions of people away from reality every week – 100 million in Europe alone – though the alternate reality is not an imaginary planet, but the realm of video games. From immersive role-playing games such as World of Warcraftand Second Lifeto titles such as Angry Birdsand Halo, video games are designed to hook us, reward us and emotionally satisfy us in ways that our regular humdrum daily life rarely does.

In Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that rather than bemoaning the three billion hours people spend gaming every week, we should acknowledge why people are turning away from reality. "Reality doesn't motivate us as effectively. Reality isn't engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn't designed from the bottom up to make us happy. And so, there is a growing perception in the gaming community: Reality, compared to games, is broken."

To the sceptical non-gamer, this might illustrate nothing so much as the breathtaking gratification-seeking of the gaming community, but McGonigal passionately contends that by leveraging the in-built motivational aspects of gaming into the real world, we can “fix” what’s “broken” about reality.

McGonigal is a game designer herself, as well as being a researcher at the Institute for the Future think tank, so she has invested a lot of time and energy analysing people’s interactions in gaming environments. The book serves as an ambitious call to arms to games designers to make the real world as satisfying as the virtual world of gaming, by more effectively utilising all that cognitive surplus, as Clay Shirky calls it.

McGonigal is most convincing when discussing the collaborative benefits of gaming, a trend that is exemplified in all those ads for the Wii and Kinect showing happy friends and families getting around the console for some quality time with one another. Her account of how she used gaming conventions to help her overcome a severe concussion also points to potential real-world applications, and we are already seeing health-focused gaming with the marketing of Wii Fitand Brain Games.

But McGonigal’s utopian idealism is occasionally undermined by the strength of her convictions – it is abundantly clear that she is already convinced of the wider social benefits of gaming, and not enough space is given to the obvious limitations of her theory.

For instance, soccer is another game that encourages teamwork and offers unique rewards unavailable in real life, but anybody who tried to argue that the game should serve as anything but the most metaphorical model for worldwide social improvement would be laughed at, and rightly so.

There are a number of astute observations here, with lots of big ideas that will undoubtedly come into focus over the coming years, and it serves as an effective antidote to the relentless dismissal of gaming culture. But perhaps the final judgment can be found in Borges’ short story. “Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men,” Borges concludes.

“Enchanted by its rigour, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigour of chess masters, not of angels.”

Davin O’Dwyer is a freelance journalist

There is a growing perception . . . reality, compared to games, is broken

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