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

by Jane McGonigal

  Not every game feels like a larger cause. For a game to feel like a cause, two things need to happen. First, the game’s story needs to become a collective context for action—shared by other players, not just an individual experience. That’s why truly epic games are always attached to large, online player communities—hundreds of thousands or millions of players acting in the same context together, and talking to each other on forums and wikis about the actions they’re taking. And second, the actions that players take inside the collective context need to feel like service: every effort by one player must ultimately benefit all the other players. In other words, every individual act of gameplay has to eventually add up to something bigger.

  Halo is probably the best game in the world at turning a story into a collective context and making personal achievement feel like service.

  Like many other blockbuster video games, Halo has extensive online community features: discussion forums, wikis, and file sharing (so that players can upload and share videos of their finest gameplay moments). But Bungie and Xbox have taken it much further than these traditional context-building tools. They’ve given players groundbreaking tools for tracking the magnitude of their collective effort and unprecedented opportunities to reflect on the epic scale of their collective service.

  Every Halo player has their own story of making a difference, and it’s documented online in their “personal service record.” It’s an exhaustive record and analysis of their individual contributions to the Halo community and to the Great War effort—or as Bungie calls it, “Your entire Halo career.”

  The service record is stored on the official Bungie website, and it’s fully viewable by other players. It lists all the campaign levels you’ve completed, the medals you’ve earned, and the achievements you’ve unlocked. It also includes a minute-by-minute, play-by-play breakdown of every single Halo level or match you’ve ever played online. For many Halo players, that means thousands of games over the past six years—ever since the Halo series first went online in 2004—all laid out and perfectly documented in one place.

  And it’s more than just statistics. There are data visualizations of every possible kind: interactive charts, graphs, heat maps. They help you learn about your own strengths and weaknesses: where you make the most mistakes, and where you consistently score your biggest victories; which weapons you’re most proficient with, and which you’re weakest with; even which teammates help you play better, and which don’t.

  Thanks to Bungie’s exhaustive data collection and sharing, everything you do in Halo adds up to something bigger: a multiyear history of your own personal service to the Great War.

  But it’s not just your history—it’s much bigger than that. You’re contributing to the Great War effort alongside millions of other players, who also have service records online. And service really is a crucial concept here. A personal service record isn’t just a profile. It’s a history of a player’s contributions to a larger organization. The fact that your profile is called a “service record” is a constant reminder. When you play Halo online, rack up kills, and accomplish your missions, you’re contributing. You’re actively creating new moments in the history of the Great War.15

  The moments all add up. The millions of individual personal service records taken together tell the real story of Halo, a collective history of the Great War. They connect all the individual gamers into a community, a network of people fighting for the same cause. And the unprecedented scale of data collected and shared in these service records underscores just how epic the players’ collective story is. Bungie recently announced to players that its personal-service-record servers handled more than 1.4 quadrillion bytes of data requests from players in the past nine months. That’s 1.4 petabytes in computer science terms.

  To put that number in perspective, experts have estimated that the entire written works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, adds up to about 50 petabytes of data.16 Halo players aren’t quite there yet—but it’s not a bad start, considering that they’ve been playing together online for only six short years, compared to all of recorded human history.

  One of the best examples of innovative collective context building is the Halo Museum of Humanity, an online museum that purports to be from the twenty-seventh century, dedicated to “all who fought bravely in the Great War.” Of course, it’s not a real museum; it was developed by the Xbox marketing group to build a more meaningful context for Halo 3.

  The museum features a series of videos done in the classic style of Ken Burns’ Civil War series: interviews with Great War veterans and historians, images from Covenant battles, all set to a hymnal score. As one blogger wrote, “The videos in the Halo Museum of Humanity seem like they could have been pulled straight from The History Channel.... It’s nice to see video game lore treated with this kind of reverence.”17

  Reverence—the expression of profound awe, respect and love, or veneration—is usually an emotion we reserve for very big, very serious things. But that was precisely the point of the Halo Museum of Humanity: to acknowledge how seriously Halo players take their favorite game, and to inspire the kind of epic emotions that have always been the best part of playing it.

  It’s worked. The video series packs a real emotional wallop, despite the fact that, in the words of one player, “it’s meant to honor heroes that never existed.” 18 Brian Crecente, a leading games journalist, wrote, “It left me with chills.”19 And online forums and blogs were full of comments expressing heart-felt emotion. One player put it best when he wrote, “Really poignant. They’ve made something real out of fiction.”20

  It’s not that the museum is such a believable artifact from the future. It’s that the emotions it provokes are believable. The online Museum of Humanity is a place to reflect on the extreme scale of the Halo experience: the years of service, the millions of players involved. The Great War isn’t real, but you really do feel awe when you think about the scale of the effort so many different people have made to fight it.

  In the end, as one player sums it up, “Halo proves that you can have a shooter game with a story that really means something. It draws you in and makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger.”21

  But Halo isn’t just a bigger story. It’s also a bigger environment—and this brings us to our next strategy for connecting players to something bigger: built epic environments, or highly immersive spaces that are intentionally designed to bring out the best in us.

  Epic Environments—Or How to Build a Better Place

  An epic environment is a space that, by virtue of its extreme scale, provokes a profound sense of awe and wonder.

  There are plenty of natural epic environments in the world: Mount Everest, the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, the Great Barrier Reef, for example. These spaces humble us; they remind us of the power and grandeur of nature, and make us feel small by comparison.

  A built epic environment is different: it’s not the work of nature, but rather a feat of design and engineering. It’s a human accomplishment. And that makes it both humbling and empowering at the same time. It makes us feel smaller as individuals, but it also makes us feel capable of much bigger things, together. That’s because a built epic environment—like the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, or Machu Picchu—is the result of extreme-scale collaboration. It’s proof of the extraordinary scale of things humans can accomplish together.

  Halo 3 is, without a doubt, such an environment.

  The game consists of thirty-four different playing environments spanning more than two hundred thousand light-years of virtual space. From one level to the next, you might find yourself traveling from the crowded market city of Voi, Kenya, to the Ark, a desert far, far beyond the limits of our own Milky Way galaxy.

  It’s not just how big the Halo playing field is; it’s also how diverse and carefully rendered the environments are. As Sam Leith observes, “The building of a game like Halo 3 is a work of electronic engine
ering comparable in scale to the building of a medieval cathedral.” It took Bungie three years to craft this gaming cathedral, with a team of more than 250 artists, designers, writers, programmers, and engineers collaborating together. “You get a sense of the scale and intricacy of the task,” Leith continues, “by considering the sound effects alone: The game contains 54,000 pieces of audio and 40,000 lines of dialogue. There are 2,700 different noises for footsteps alone, depending on whose foot is stepping on what.”22

  And that’s what players are appreciating when they get goose bumps from Halo: the unprecedented achievement it represents as a work of computer design and engineering. Gamers aren’t so much in awe of the environment itself as they are in awe of the work and dedication and vision required to create it. In this regard, Halo players join a long tradition in human culture of feeling awe, wonder, and gratitude toward the builders of epic environments.

  THE VERY FIRST epic environments were constructed more than eleven thousand years ago, during the Neolithic period, or the New Stone Age. In other words, six thousand years before humans first used the written word, they were already building physical spaces to inspire awe and cooperation.

  The world’s oldest known example of an epic built environment is the Gobekli Tepe. Discovered less than two decades ago in southeastern Turkey, it’s believed to predate Stonehenge by a staggering six thousand years. It’s a twenty-five-acre arrangement of at least twenty stone circles, between ten and thirty meters in diameter each, made from monolithic pillars three meters high.

  In comparison with other stone houses, tombs, and temples from the same period and location, this building was constructed on an extreme scale: it was much, much bigger, taller, and more formidable in its design than anything archaeologists had seen before at the time of its discovery. One archaeologist on the scene described it as “a place of worship on an unprecedented scale—humanity’s first ‘cathedral on a hill.’”23

  And it wasn’t just the scale of the building—it was its particular winding design. The Gobekli Tepe features an intricate series of passageways that would lead visitors through the dark to a cross-shaped inner sanctum, almost like a labyrinth. This particular architecture seems designed intentionally to trigger interest and curiosity, alongside a kind of trembling wonder. What would be around the next corner? Where would the path take them? They would need to hold on to other visitors for support, feeling their way through the darkness.

  Crucially, the Gobekli Tepe wasn’t an isolated example. As researchers have discovered since, epic stone cathedrals were common across the Neolithic landscape. Most recently, in August 2009, archaeologists working in northern Scotland unearthed the ruins of a 5,330-square-foot stone structure with twenty-foot ceilings and sixteen-foot-thick walls, also of a labyrinthine design, and also dating back to the New Stone Age.24 “A building of this scale and complexity was here to amaze, to create a sense of awe in the people who saw this place,” Nick Card, director of the archaeological dig, said to reporters when the ancient cathedral was first unearthed.

  In the wake of unearthing these types of structures all over the planet, archaeologists have recently proposed a startling theory: that these stone cathedrals served an important purpose in the evolution of human civilization. They actually inspired and enabled human society to become dramatically more cooperative, completely reinventing civilization as it once existed. In an in-depth report in Smithsonian magazine on these Neolithic cathedrals, Andrew Curry wrote:Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But . . . [perhaps] it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.25

  In fact, as Curry quotes one scientist in his article, “You can make a good case these constructs are the real origin of complex Neolithic societies.”26

  No wonder epic environments inspire gamers today to collective efforts. They have been inspiring humans to work together to do amazing things for eleven thousand years and counting.

  SO VIDEO GAMES didn’t invent epic environment design. They inherited the tradition from some of our earliest ancestors. But they are making epic environments remarkably more accessible, to vastly more people, on a daily basis.

  Archaeologists say that worshippers would have traveled more than a hundred miles by foot to visit the Gobekli Tepe, and they may have visited it just once in a lifetime. Today, however, it’s easy to immerse ourselves in epic environments whenever we want. Instead of traveling great distances for a single encounter with a physical cathedral, we can instantly transport ourselves there from anywhere in the world, simply by loading up a blockbuster video game.

  Our experience of these epic game environments isn’t physical, but it is real in one crucial sense. The engineering of the virtual environment represents, today, a collaborative feat on an extreme scale. It takes an extraordinary collective and coordinated effort to create these virtual worlds—years of full-time, painstaking work by hundreds of artists and programmers—and the first time a gamer enters one of these massive environments, they are experiencing real awe at the ability of ordinary people, when they band together, to create extraordinary spaces.

  Meanwhile, video game developers have evolved the art of epic built environments in another key way: they have added a layer of awe-inspiring sound.

  The sound track isn’t just part of the background of playing; it’s a major component of the gaming experience—particularly in the case of Halo and its famously spine-tingling score. Tracks on the Halo 3 sound track have names like “Honorable Intentions,” “This Is the Hour,” and “Never Forget.” Perhaps my favorite track is called simply “Ambient Wonder,” a name that perfectly sums up the purpose of an epic environment: to create a space that completely absorbs and envelops the player in a sense of awe and wonder.

  Halo’s audio director, Martin O’Donnell, describes his goal in creating the score: “The music should give a feeling of importance, weight, and sense of the ‘ancient’ to the visuals of Halo.” The score includes Gregorian chanting, a string orchestra, percussion, and Qawwali vocals, a Sufi devotional style of music intended to produce an ecstatic state in the listener.27 These are timeless musical techniques for provoking our bodies’ epic emotions—and video games increasingly make use of them. As one Halo player explains, “A great video game will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Goose pimples will erupt. That tingly sensation overtakes your gut. It happens to me whenever I hear the Halo sound track.”28

  SO WHAT DO all of these extreme visual and audio environments add up to? Epic projects: collaborative efforts to tell stories and accomplish missions at extreme scales.

  Epic environments inspire us to undertake epic projects, because they are a tangible demonstration of what is humanly possible when we all work together. Indeed, they expand our notion of what is humanly possible. And that’s why exploring an epic environment like Halo 3 inspires the kind of emotions that lead to large-scale cooperation, an epic achievement in and of itself.

  Games journalist Margaret Robertson reflects, “Halo has always been a place where I feel good. I don’t mean that in a James Brown sense. I mean it’s a place where I feel virtuous.... [It] engenders a sense of honour and duty which actually make you feel like a better person.... What’s the point of going to a better place if you aren’t going to be a better person?”29

  Epic Projects

  While reaching the 10 billion kill milestone was a significant community achievement, Halo players have actually spent more time working on two other epic projects—both collaborative knowledge projects. The first epic project involves documenting the Halo world on wikis and discussion forums. The other is a project to build up each other’s collective ability to fight the Covenant and play a better game with each other. Both projects take place largely o
n discussion forums and wikis.

  To give you an indication of the scale of the collective effort to document the Halo world and improve player ability within it, players have written more than 21 million discussion forum posts on the official Bungie Halo forums alone. Meanwhile, the largest Halo wiki has just under six thousand different articles, created and edited by 1.5 million registered users.

  Halo players are also sharing knowledge to make each other better gamers. While the Halopedia wiki helps players construct the epic saga of the Halo series, the Halowiki (which describes itself as a “sister site” to Halopedia) focuses exclusively on multiplayer strategy and techniques. Its “values” statement sets the tone for epic knowledge sharing:This site serves one purpose: Halowiki.net shall help players at all skill levels improve and/or find even more enjoyment in their Halo 3 online experience. Share what you know. Let others share what they know with you. We must get even the most skilled players to share their knowledge. The end result shall be that we all raise our skills and fun together. Let’s try to visit the limits of our abilities!30

  The scope of Halowiki is as staggering as its sister site. Under the tips section alone, there is an A to Z catalog of more than 150 different categories of tips, from “Bad habits to avoid in team games” and “Communication tips,” to “How to use vehicles effectively” and “Last-resort tips when all else fails.” Each individual category of tips contains hundreds of specific pieces of advice, contributed by different gamers.

  The strategy section, on the other hand, contains more complex advice, sorted into roughly one hundred different categories, from “Close-range weapon mastery” and “Using ancient practices—advice from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War,” to one of my personal favorites: “Retraining your brain to not be afraid to die in the game.”