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

by Jane McGonigal

  Of course, there are no good unnecessary obstacles without arbitrary restrictions. And for advanced Chore Wars players, that’s where the real fun comes in. You can make it harder to earn XP and gold by adding new rules to any adventure. For example, you can set target time limits: double XP if you can put away your laundry in under five minutes. Or you can add a stealth requirement: you must empty the trash without anyone seeing you. Or you can simply tack on absurd restrictions: this chore must be done while singing, loudly, for example, or while walking backward.

  It sounds ridiculous—why would making a chore harder make it more fun? But like any good game, the more interesting the restrictions, the more we enjoy playing. The Chore Wars management system makes it easy for players to dream up and try out new ways of doing the most ordinary things. Chores are, again by definition, routine—but they don’t have to be. Doing them in a game format makes it possible to experience fiero doing something as mundane as cleaning up a mess, simply by making it more challenging, or by requiring us to be more creative about how we do it.

  In real life, if you do your chores, there are visible results—a sparkling kitchen, or an organized garage. That’s one kind of feedback, and it can certainly be satisfying. But Chore Wars smartly augments this small, everyday satisfaction with a more intense kind of feedback: avatar improvements. As online role-playing gamers everywhere know, leveling up is one of the most satisfying kinds of feedback ever designed. Watching your avatar profile get more powerful and skillful with each chore makes the work feel personally satisfying in a way that a cleaner room just doesn’t. You are not just doing all this work for someone else. You are developing your own strengths as you play.

  Best of all, you are getting better and better all the time. Even as the laundry gets dirty again or the dust starts to sneak back in, your avatar is still getting stronger, smarter, swifter. In this way, Chore Wars brilliantly reverses the most demoralizing aspects of regular housework. The results of a chore well done may start to fade almost immediately, but no one can take away the XP you have earned.

  Individual success is always more rewarding when it happens in a multiplayer context, and this is part of Chore Wars’ successful design as well. The game connects all of my individual activities to a larger social experience: I’m never just doing “my” chores; I’m playing with and competing against others. I can see how I measure up to others and compare avatar strengths to learn more about what makes me unique. Meanwhile, as I’m working, I’m thinking about the positive social feedback I’ll get in the comments on my adventure, whether it’s friendly taunts from a rival or OMGs of amazement for getting such a herculean task done.

  Chore Wars isn’t the kind of game you’d want to play forever; like all good games, their destiny is to become boring eventually, the better you get at them. But even if household interest in the game dies down after a few weeks or months, a major feat has been accomplished: players have had a rather memorable, positive experience of doing chores together. And that should change the way they think about and approach chores for some time.

  So that’s how Chore Wars achieves the seemingly impossible. It turns routine housework into a collective adventure, by adding unnecessary obstacles and implementing more motivating feedback systems. And it’s the perfect example of our next reality fix:FIX # 7 : WHOLEHEARTED PARTICIPATION

  Compared with games, reality is hard to get into. Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever we’re doing.

  To participate wholeheartedly in something means to be self-motivated and self-directed, intensely interested and genuinely enthusiastic.

  If we’re forced to do something, or if we do it halfheartedly, we’re not really participating.

  If we don’t care how it all turns out, we’re not really participating.

  If we’re passively waiting it out, we’re not really participating.

  And the less we fully participate in our everyday lives, the fewer opportunities we have to be happy. It’s that plain and simple. The emotional and social rewards we really crave require active, enthusiastic, self-motivated participation. And helping players participate more fully in the moment, instead of trying to escape it or just get through it, is the signature hallmark of alternate reality projects—the focus of this and the following three chapters of this book.

  If “alternate reality” is an unfamiliar term for you, then you’re not alone. Alternate reality development is still a highly experimental field. The term “alternate reality game” has been in use as a technical industry term since 2002, but there are still plenty of gamers and game designers who know little about it, let alone people outside of the gaming world.

  As game developers are increasingly starting to push the limits of how much a game can affect our real lives, the concept of alternate reality is becoming more and more central to discussions about the future of games. It’s helping to promote the idea that game technologies can be used to organize real-world activity. Most importantly, it’s provoking innovative ideas about how to blend together what we love most about games and what we want most from our real lives.

  On a recent Saturday morning, I found myself on Twitter, trading possible definitions for “alternate reality game” back and forth with about fifty other alternate reality gamers and developers. We were trying to work out a short definition that would really capture the spirit of ARG design, if not necessarily describe all the possible technological and formal components.

  Collectively, we cobbled together a description of ARGs that seems to capture their spirit more effectively than any other definition I’ve seen: alternate realities are the antiescapist game.

  ARGs are designed to make it easier to generate the four intrinsic rewards we crave—more satisfying work, better hope of success, stronger social connectivity, and more meaning—whenever we can’t or don’t want to be in a virtual environment. They’re not meant to diminish the real rewards we get from playing traditional computer and video games. But they do make a strong argument that these rewards should be easier to get in real life.

  In other words, ARGs are games you play to get more out of your real life, as opposed to games you play to escape it. ARG developers want us to participate as fully in our everyday lives as we do in our game lives.

  Apart from this common mission, great alternate reality games can differ tremendously from one to another, in terms of style, scale, scope, and budget. Some ARGs, like Chore Wars, have relatively humble ambitions. They pick one very specific area of our personal lives and try to improve it. Others have quite audacious goals, involving entire communities or society at large: for example, to reinvent public education as we know it, to help players discover their true purpose in life, or even to improve our experience of death and dying.

  Of course, not all ARGs are designed explicitly to improve our lives. Historically, in fact, most ARGs, like most computer and videogames, have been designed simply to be fun and emotionally satisfying. But my research shows that because ARGs are played in real-world contexts, instead of in virtual spaces, they almost always have at least the side effect of improving our real lives.3 And so while others might distinguish between “serious” ARGs and “entertainment” ARGs, I prefer to look at all ARGs as having the potential to improve our quality of life. Indeed, a significantly higher percent of newer ARGs (created since 2007, compared with early ARGs created 2001-2006) are designed with explicit quality of life or world-changing goals. You’ll read about these “positive impact” ARGs in the chapters ahead.

  Some ARGs are invented and playtested on a shoestring budget, whether by artists, researchers, indie game developers, or nonprofit organizations. They’re often developed for relatively small groups: a few hundred or a few thousand players. Others are backed by multimillion-dollar investments, receive funding from major foundations, or are sponsored by Fortune 500 companies. These bigger games can attract tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even, in a few extremely successful cases, millio
ns of players.4

  Still, for the most part, alternate reality games today are small-scale probes of the future. They’re a showcase for new possibilities. No single ARG is changing the world yet. But taken together, they’re proving one at a time the myriad and important ways we could make our real lives better by playing more games.

  So let’s look at a few groundbreaking alternate reality projects. As we do, you’ll notice that there are two key qualities that every good ARG shares.

  First and foremost, like any good game, an ARG must always be optional. You can bet that if you required someone to play Chore Wars, it would lose a large part of its appeal and effectiveness. An alternate reality game has to remain a true “alternate” for it to work.

  It’s not enough, however, just to make something optional. Once the activity is under way, a good ARG, like any good game, also needs compelling goals, interesting obstacles, and well-designed feedback systems. These three elements encourage fuller participation by tapping into our natural desires to master challenges, to be creative, to push the limits of our abilities. And that’s where optimal experience design comes in. Without a doubt, some alternate realities are more fun and engaging than others, just as some traditional games are better than others. The best ARGs are the ones that, like the best traditional computer and video games, help us create more satisfying work for ourselves, cultivate better hopes of success, strengthen our social bonds and activate our social networks, and give us the chance to contribute to something bigger than ourselves.

  One ARG that achieves all of these goals is Quest to Learn—a bold new design for public schools that shows us how education can be transformed to engage students as wholeheartedly as their favorite video games.

  Quest to Learn—And Why Our Schools Should Work More Like a Game

  Today’s “born-digital” kids—the first generation to grow up with the Internet, born 1990 and later—crave gameplay in a way that older generations don’t.

  Most of them have had easy access to sophisticated games and virtual worlds their entire lives, and so they take high-intensity engagement and active participation for granted. They know what extreme, positive activation feels like, and when they’re not feeling it, they’re bored and frustrated.5 They have good reason to feel that way: it’s a lot harder to function in low-motivation, low-feedback, and low-challenge environments when you’ve grown up playing sophisticated games. And that’s why today’s born-digital kids are suffering more in traditional classrooms than any previous generation. School today for the most part is just one long series of necessary obstacles that produce negative stress. The work is mandatory and standardized, and failure goes on your permanent record. As a result, there’s a growing disconnect between virtual environments and the classroom.

  Marc Prensky, author of Teaching Digital Natives, describes the current educational crisis:“Engage me or enrage me,” today’s students demand. And believe me, they’re enraged. All the students we teach have something in their lives that’s really engaging—something that they do and that they are good at, something that has an engaging, creative component to it.... Video games are the epitome of this kind of total creative engagement. By comparison, school is so boring that kids, used to this other life, can’t stand it. And unlike previous generations of students, who grew up without games, they know what real engagement feels like. They know exactly what they’re missing.6

  To try to close this gap, educators have spent the past decade bringing more and more games into our schools. Educational games are a huge and growing industry, and they’re being developed to help teach pretty much any topic or skill you could imagine, from history to math to science to foreign languages. When these games work—when they marry good game design with strong educational content—they provide a welcome relief to students who otherwise feel underengaged in their daily school lives. But even then, these educational games are at best a temporary solution. The engagement gap is getting too wide for a handful of educational games to make a significant and lasting difference over the course of a student’s thirteen-year public education.

  What would make the difference? Increasingly, some education innovators, including Prensky, are calling for a more dramatic kind of game-based reform. Their ideal school doesn’t use games to teach students. Their ideal school is a game, from start to finish: every course, every activity, every assignment, every moment of instruction and assessment would be designed by borrowing key mechanics and participation strategies from the most engaging multiplayer games. And it’s not just an idea—the game-reform movement is well under way. And there’s already one new public school entirely dedicated to offering an alternate reality to students who want to game their way through to graduation.

  Quest to Learn is a public charter school in New York City for students in grades six through twelve. It’s the first game-based school in the world—but its founders hope it will serve as a model for schools worldwide.

  Quest opened its doors in the fall of 2009 after two years of curriculum design and strategic planning, directed by a joint team of educators and professional game developers, and made possible by funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s run by principal Aaron B. Schwartz, a graduate of Yale University and a ten-year veteran teacher and administrator in the New York City Department of Education. Meanwhile, the development of the school’s curriculum and schedule has been led by Katie Salen, a ten-year veteran of the game industry and a leading researcher of how kids learn by playing games.

  In many ways, the college-preparatory curriculum is like any other school’s—the students learn math, science, geography, English, history, foreign languages, computers, and arts in different blocks throughout the day. But it’s how they learn that’s different: students are engaged in gameful activities from the moment they wake up in the morning to the moment they finish up their final homework assignment at night. The schedule of a sixth-grader named Rai can help us better understand a day in the life of a Quest student.

  7:15 a.m. Rai is “questing” before she even gets to school. She’s working on a secret mission, a math assignment that yesterday she discovered hidden in one of the books in the school library. She exchanges text messages with her friends Joe and Celia as soon as she gets up in order to make plans to meet at school early. Their goal: break the mathematical code before any of the other students discover it.

  This isn’t a mandatory assignment—it’s a secret assignment, an opt-in learning quest. Not only do they not have to complete it, they actually have to earn the right to complete it, by discovering its secret location.

  Having a secret mission means you’re not learning and practicing fractions because you have to do it. You’re working toward a self-chosen goal, and an exciting one at that: decoding a secret message before anyone else. Obviously not all schoolwork can be special, secret missions. But when every book could contain a secret code, every room a clue, every handout a puzzle, who wouldn’t show up to school more likely to fully participate, in the hopes of being the first to find the secret challenges?

  9:00 a.m. In English class, Rai isn’t trying to earn a good grade today. Instead, she’s trying to level up. She’s working her way through a storytelling unit, and she already has five points. That makes her just seven points shy of a “master” storyteller status. She’s hoping to add another point to her total today by completing a creative writing mission. She might not be the first student in her class to become a storytelling master, but she doesn’t have to worry about missing her opportunity. As long as she’s willing to tackle more quests, she can work her way up to the top level and earn her equivalent of an A grade.

  Leveling up is a much more egalitarian model of success than a traditional letter grading system based on the bell curve. Everyone can level up, as long as they keep working hard. Leveling up can replace or complement traditional letter grades that students have just one shot at earning. And if you fail a quest, there�
�s no permanent damage done to your report card. You just have to try more quests to earn enough points to get the score you want. This system of “grading” replaces negative stress with positive stress, helping students focus more on learning and less on performing.

  11:45 a.m. Rai logs on to a school computer to update her profile in the “expertise exchange,” where all the students advertise their learning superpowers. She’s going to declare herself a master at mapmaking. She didn’t even realize mapmaking could count as an area of expertise. She does it for fun, outside of school, making maps of her favorite 3D virtual worlds to help other players navigate them better. Her geography teacher, Mr. Smiley, saw one of her maps and told her that eighth-graders were just about to start a group quest to locate “hidden histories” of Africa: they would look for clues about the past in everyday objects like trade beads, tapestries, and pots. They would need a good digital mapmaker to help them plot the stories about the objects according to where they were found, and to design a map that would be fun for other students to explore.

  The expertise exchange works just like video game social network profiles that advertise what games you’re good at and like to play, as well as the online matchmaking systems that help players find new teammates. These systems are designed to encourage and facilitate collaboration. By identifying your strengths and interests publicly, you increase the chances that you’ll be called on to do work that you’re good at. In the classroom, this means students are more likely to find ways to contribute successfully to team projects. And the chance to do something you’re good at as part of a larger project helps students build real esteem among their peers—not empty self-esteem based on nothing other than wanting to feel good about yourself, but actual respect and high regard based on contributions you’ve made.