Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

by Jane McGonigal

  Why does this matter? Why is it a good thing for introverts to be open to more social interaction, and to find shared experiences more rewarding?

  In study after study, positive-psychology researchers have shown that extroversion is highly correlated with greater happiness and life satisfaction. Extroverts are simply more likely to seek out the experiences that create social bonding and affection. As a result, they are better liked and better supported than introverts, two measures that factor heavily into quality of life. Introverts want to be liked and appreciated, and they need help just as much as anyone else; they’re just not as motivated to seek out opportunities to build up that kind of positive social feeling and exchange.35

  Fortunately, as many gamers are discovering, ambient sociability can play a key role in building up a desire for social interaction in the most introverted of people. Ambient sociability is hardly a substitute for real-world social interaction. But it can serve as a gateway to real-world socializing—and therefore greater quality of life—by helping introverts learn to view social engagement as more intrinsically rewarding than they are naturally predisposed to do.

  GAME DESIGNER Daniel Cookman writes that when gamers decide to play with strangers or with people they know in real life, they’re effectively choosing between “forging new relationships or strengthening old ones.... We can ask which the stronger draw is: strong, safe relationships with existing friends, or weak, ‘risky’ relationships with new people.” Cookman says that, in most circumstances, he (and most gamers) prefers to strengthen existing relationships. The payoff is simply greater, and more clearly connected to our everyday lives.

  Cookman is right that, on the whole, gamers make the choice to strengthen existing relationships—increasingly, online gamers report that they prefer to play online with people they know in real life. This is truer the younger a gamer you are. A recent three-year study of Internet use by young people in the United States revealed that gamers under eighteen spend 61 percent of their game time playing with real-life friends and family, rather than alone or with strangers.36

  But Cookman acknowledges that there is another factor to consider. Play with strangers or play with friends? “In order to answer this question in any meaningful fashion,” he writes, “you first need to answer a more personal question. ‘Are you lonely?’”37

  We can’t discuss the social rewards of gaming without mentioning the positive role they play in helping us combat our feelings of loneliness. As a general rule, we’d rather play with friends. But if that isn’t possible, we’ll take strangers any day over playing alone. Cookman sums up the prevailing sentiment: “I’m not sure if having a stranger yell at me in [a first-person shooter game] will result in any long-lasting friendships, but it is certainly better than being alone.”38

  The gamer website Pwn or Die, popular with an audience of teenagers and young adults, has a short manifesto on “Ways Video Games Actually Benefit ‘Real Life.’” At the top of the list is simply staving off loneliness. “When there are no kids in the neighborhood, it is late at night, or your best friend is miles away, video games give you an opportunity to interact with other people and be social.”39

  Would it be more rewarding to have a real-world space in which to have face-to-face interaction? Probably—there is significant evidence to suggest that social rewards are intensified by things like eye contact and touch. But face-to-face contact isn’t always possible. Moreover, if we’re feeling depressed or lonely, we might not have the emotional reserves to get up and get out, or to contact a real-life friend or family member. Playing a game online, like ambient sociability, can be a stepping-stone to a more positive emotional state and, with it, more positive social experiences.

  FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, political scientist Robert Putnam famously worried that the United States was turning into a nation of people who go “bowling alone.” In his hugely influential book about the collapse of extended community, he documented a worrying trend: that we are increasingly likely to hunker down and prefer the company of just a few people rather than participate in civic organizations or in a larger social context in general.

  Putnam considered the collapse of extended community in our everyday lives to be a major threat to our quality of life, and he made this point so persuasively that, for years since, experts have debated the best ways to reverse it. Public institutions have also tried everything possible to rebuild the traditional community infrastructure. But, as gamers are finding out, rebuilding traditional ways of connecting might not be the solution—reinvention might work better.

  Gamers, without a doubt, are reinventing what we think of as our daily community infrastructure. They’re experimenting with new ways to create social capital, and they’re developing habits that provide more social bonding and connectivity than any bowling league ever could.

  As a society, we may feel increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and neighbors—but, as gamers, we are adopting strategies to reverse the phenomenon. Games are increasingly a crucial social thread woven throughout our everyday lives. We’re using asynchronous social interaction in games like Lexulous and FarmVille to build stronger, stickier social connections. We’re spending more time teasing and mentoring each other in games like Smooth Moves and Braid, in order to build trust and intensify our social commitments. And we’re creating worlds of ambient sociability, as in World of Warcraft, where even the most introverted among us have opportunities to develop their social stamina and get more social connectivity in their lives.

  Gamers, emphatically, are not gaming alone.

  And the more we game together, the more we get the sense that we’re creating a global community with a purpose. Gamers aren’t just trying to win games anymore. They have a bigger mission.

  They’re on a mission to be a part of something epic.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Becoming a Part of Something Bigger Than Ourselves

  In April 2009, Halo 3 players celebrated a collective spine-tingling milestone: 10 billion kills against their virtual enemy, the Covenant. That’s roughly one and a half times the total number of every man, woman, and child on earth.

  To reach this monumental milestone, Halo 3 players spent 565 days fighting the third and final campaign in the fictional Great War, protecting earth from an alliance of malevolent aliens seeking to destroy the human race. Together, they averaged 17.5 million Covenant kills a day, 730,000 kills per hour, 12,000 kills a minute.

  Along the way, they’d assembled the largest army on earth, virtual or otherwise. More than 15 million people had fought on behalf of the science fiction game’s United Nations Space Command. That’s roughly the total number of active personnel of all twenty-five of the largest armed forces in the real world, combined.1

  Ten billion kills wasn’t an incidental achievement, stumbled onto blindly by the gaming masses. Halo players made a concerted effort to get there. They embraced 10 billion kills as a symbol of just how much the Halo community could accomplish—and they wanted it to be something bigger than anything any other game community had achieved before. So they worked hard to make every single player as good at Halo 3 as possible. Players shared tips and strategies with each other and organized round-the-clock “co-op,” or cooperative, campaign shifts. They called on every registered member of Halo online to pitch in: “This could be something big, but we will need YOU to get it done.”2 They treated their mission like an urgent duty. “We know we’ll be doing our part,” one game blog declared. “Will you?”3

  It’s no wonder London Telegraph reporter Sam Leith observed in his coverage of the Halo 3 community that “a big shift has taken place, in recent years, in the way video games are played. What was once generally a solitary activity is now . . . overwhelmingly a communal one.”4 More and more, gamers aren’t just in it for themselves. They’re in it for each other—and for the thrill of being a part of something bigger.

  When Halo players finally reached their goal, they flooded online forums to co
ngratulate each other and claim their contributions. “I just did some math and with my 32,388 kills I have .00032% of the 10 billion kills,” one player wrote. “I feel like I could have contributed more . . . well, on to 100 billion then!”5 This reaction was typical, and the new 100 billion goal was repeated widely on Halo forums. Fresh off one collective achievement, Halo players were ready to tackle an even more monumental goal. And they were fully prepared to recruit an even bigger community to do it. As one gamer proposed: “We did that with just a few million gamers. Imagine what we could do with the full force of six billion humans!!”6

  Halo’s creators, a Seattle, Washington-based game studio called Bungie, joined in the celebration. They issued a major press release and an open letter to the Halo community, emphasizing the teamwork it had taken to get to 10 billion kills: “We’ve hit the Covenant where it hurts. Made them pay a price for setting foot on our soil. We’re glad we’ve got you by our side, soldier. Mighty fine work. Here’s to ten billion more.”7

  Perhaps you’re thinking to yourself right now: So? What’s the point? The Covenant isn’t real. It’s just a game. What have the players actually done that’s worth celebrating?

  On one hand, nothing. There’s no value to a Covenant kill, whether you score one, 10 billion, or even 100 billion of them. Value is a measure of importance and consequence. And even the most die-hard Halo fan knows that there’s no real importance or consequence to saving the human race from a fictional alien invasion. There’s no actual danger being averted. There are no real lives being saved.

  But on the other hand, just because the kills don’t have value doesn’t mean they don’t have meaning.

  Meaning is the feeling that we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s the belief that our actions matter beyond our own individual lives. When something is meaningful, it has significance and worth not just to ourselves, or even to our closest friends and family, but to a much larger group: to a community, an organization, or even the entire human species.

  Meaning is something we’re all looking for more of: more ways to make a difference in the bigger picture, more chances to leave a lasting mark on the world, more moments of awe and wonder at the scale of the projects and communities we’re a part of.

  How do we get more meaning in our lives? It’s actually quite simple. Philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders agree: the single best way to add meaning to our lives is to connect our daily actions to something bigger than ourselves—and the bigger, the better. As Martin Seligman says, “The self is a very poor site for meaning.” We can’t matter outside of a large-scale social context. “The larger the entity you can attach yourself to,” Seligman advises, “the more meaning you can derive.”8

  And that’s exactly the point of working together in a game like Halo 3. It’s not that the Covenant kills have value. It’s that pursuing a massive goal alongside millions of other people feels good. It feels meaningful. When players dedicate themselves to a goal like 10 billion Covenant kills, they’re attaching themselves to a cause, and they’re making a significant contribution to it. As the popular gamer site Joystiq reported on the day Halo players celebrated their 10 billionth kill: “Now we know for sure.... Every kill you get in Halo 3’s campaign actually means something.”9

  To experience real meaning, we don’t have to contribute something of real value. We just have to be given the opportunity to contribute at all. We need a way to connect with others who care about the same massively scaled goal we do, no matter how arbitrary the goal. And we need a chance to reflect on the truly epic scale of what we’re doing together.

  Which gives us our sixth fix for our broken reality:FIX #6: EPIC SCALE

  Compared with games, reality is trivial. Games make us a part of something bigger and give epic meaning to our actions.

  “Epic” is the key word here. Blockbuster video games like Halo—the kind of games that have a production budget of thirty, forty or even fifty million dollars—aren’t just “something bigger.” They’re big enough to be epic.

  Epic is one of the most important concepts in gamer culture today. It’s how players describe their most memorable, gratifying game experiences. As one game critic writes, “Halo 3 is epic. It empowers you the way no other game can. It doesn’t have moments, but events. Experiences that tickle the soul, sending shivers down the spine.”10

  A good working definition for “epic” is something that far surpasses the ordinary, especially in size, scale, and intensity. Something epic is of heroic proportions. Blockbuster video games do epic scale better than any other medium of our time, and they’re epic in three key ways:They create epic contexts for action: collective stories that help us connect our individual gameplay to a much bigger mission.

  They immerse us in epic environments: vast, interactive spaces that provoke feelings of curiosity and wonder.

  And they engage us in epic projects: cooperative efforts carried out by players on massive scales, over months or even years.

  There’s a reason why gamers love epic games. It’s not just that bigger is better. It’s that bigger is more awe-inspiring.

  Awe is a unique emotion. According to many positive psychologists, it’s the single most overwhelming and gratifying positive emotion we can feel. In fact, neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall calls awe “the orgasm of positive emotions.”11

  Awe is what we feel when we recognize that we’re in the presence of something bigger than ourselves. It’s closely linked with feelings of spirituality, love, and gratitude—and more importantly, a desire to serve.

  In Born to Be Good, Dacher Keltner explains, “The experience of awe is about finding your place in the larger scheme of things. It is about quieting the press of self-interest. It is about folding into social collectives. It is about feeling reverential toward participating in some expansive process that unites us all and that ennobles our life’s endeavors.”12

  In other words, awe doesn’t just feel good; it inspires us to do good.

  Without a doubt, it’s awe that a Halo 3 player is feeling when he says that the game sends “shivers down the spine.” Spine tingling is one of the classic physiological symptoms of awe—along with chills, goose bumps, and that choked-up feeling in the throat.

  Our ability to feel awe in the form of chills, goose bumps, or choking up serves as a kind of emotional radar for detecting meaningful activity. Whenever we feel awe, we know we’ve found a potential source of meaning. We’ve discovered a real opportunity to be of service, to band together, to contribute to a larger cause.

  In short, awe is a call to collective action.

  So it’s no accident that Halo players are so inclined toward collective efforts. It’s the direct result of the game’s epic, and awe-inspiring, aesthetic. Today’s best game designers are experts at giving individuals the chance to be a part of something bigger—and no one is better at it than the creators of Halo. Everything about the Halo games—from the plot and the sound track to the marketing and the way the community is organized online—is intentionally crafted to make players feel that their gameplay really means something. And the one simple trick used over and over again is this: always connect the individual to something bigger.

  Let’s take a closer look at exactly how Halo does it.

  Epic Context for Heroic Action

  It’s five hundred years in the future. The Covenant, a hostile alliance of alien species, is hell-bent on destroying humanity. You are Master Chief Petty Officer John 117—once an ordinary person, now a supersoldier, augmented with biological technologies that give you superhuman speed, strength, intelligence, vision, and reflexes. Your job is to stop the Covenant and save the world.

  That’s the basic Halo story. It’s not that different from many other blockbuster video games. As veteran game developer Trent Polack puts it, “To look at the majority of games today, one might think that gamers care only about saving the world.” He would know: some of Polack’s previous games have asked playe
rs to save the galaxy from malevolent aliens (Galactic Civilizations II), save the universe from evil deities (Demigod), and save the world from marauding Titans (Elemental: War of Magic).

  Why are so many games about saving the world? In an industry article about the rise of “epic scale” narratives in video games, Polack suggests, “When games give players the epic scope of saving the galaxy, destroying some reawakened ancient evil, or any other classical portrayal of good versus evil on a grand scale, they’re fulfilling gamers’ power fantasies.”13

  I agree with Polack, but it’s important that we be clear on exactly what kind of power fantasy is being fulfilled by these save-the-world stories.

  Any video game that features a slew of high-powered weapons and game-play that consists largely of shooting and blowing things up is, at one level, about the aesthetic pleasures of destruction and the positive feelings we get from exerting control over a situation.14 This is true of any shooter game on the market today. But we don’t need an epic story about saving the world to get those pleasures. We can get them quite effectively, and more efficiently, from a simple, plotless game like Atari’s Breakout. Games that come with epic, save-the-world narratives are using them to help players get a taste of a different kind of power. It’s the power to act with meaning: to do something that matters in a bigger picture. The story is the bigger picture; the player’s actions are what matters.

  As Polack explains, “Story sets the stage for meaning. It frames the player’s actions. We, as designers, are not telling, we’re not showing, we’re informing the doing—the actions that players engage in and the feats they undergo.” These feats make up the player’s story, and the story is ultimately what has meaning.