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

by Jane McGonigal

  The goal of all of these adaptations? To ensure, over time, that every young person on this planet receives an education in urgent problem solving and planet crafting—and has free and open access to a global network of potential world-changing collaborators, investors, and mentors.

  SO HOW MIGHT future-making games like World Without Oil, Superstruct, and EVOKE evolve in a best-case-scenario future?

  At the end of Superstruct, all of the IFTF game masters had an opportunity to select and honor their favorite superstructure during an online streaming Superstruct Honors broadcast. I chose a superstructure called The Long Game, proposed by player Ubik2019, one of Superstruct’s most active players. The Long Game represents, to me, what future-making games must aspire to become by the end of the twenty-first century: an epic collaboratory for our most awe-inspiring global development efforts.

  In real life, Ubik2019 is Gene Becker, formerly the worldwide director of product development for extreme performance and mobility at Hewlett-Packard, and now the founder and managing director of Lightning Laboratories, an emerging-technology consulting company that works with a range of Global 2000 companies and preinvestment start-ups. Becker brought to Superstruct a particularly keen sensibility about how to develop initiatives on a global scale, and how to leverage new network technologies for innovation. Here is Becker’s best idea for a new superstructure:

  THE LONG GAME

  Fostering a long-term mind-set by playing a game that lasts a thousand years.

  Who we need: SEHIs who believe that a long-term mind-set and a playful approach to life can help us to become a better people, make better choices about our actions and their consequences, potentially avoid the kind of supercrises we are facing here in 2019, and give every person on the planet the opportunity to create a meaningful legacy to the human race.

  What we can accomplish: If you put just one dollar into an investment today that has an average real return of 3 percent per year after inflation and taxes, in a thousand years it would be worth $7 trillion. Now think about what your descendents thirty generations in the future might be able to do with such capital—and think about how you might communicate your wishes to them about how they would spend it.

  Now consider how we might invest our nonfinancial capital—intellectual, natural, social, familial, genetic—in such a way that it compounded its value over time. Such a rich gift we could endow for the future of humanity . . .29

  A thousand-year game, combining financial and nonfinancial investment of our most important resources—how exactly would such a game work?

  During the Superstruct experiment, we brainstormed different ideas, focusing largely on structure rather than theme, story, or content. For example, we imagined the entire world setting aside one day each year to play the game, as a kind of global holiday. Of course, like all good games, participation would be optional. But the supergoal of the game would be, by the end of one thousand years, to engage virtually 100 percent of the human population in playing.

  Enthusiastic players could spend as much time as they wanted throughout the year preparing for the global game day. Casual players could simply show up to a game site (online or in the real world) and take part for a few minutes, a few hours, or even all twenty-four hours in the year’s game day.

  That entire global game day would represent one “move” in the game. And perhaps, we imagined, The Long Game would be played in rounds of fifty moves each. So if you played The Long Game your entire life, you would hope to be able to experience a complete round at least once, if not twice.

  Every tenth move would represent a bigger and more significant occasion, to provide a kind of momentous leveling-up occasion each decade. Each twenty-fifth and each fiftieth move, the halfway mark and the end of each round, would be an even more momentous occasion—each time the culmination of a quarter century of gamers’ efforts.

  What specifically would making a move in the game entail? We envisioned a combination of events. Social rituals and circle games to build common ground. Crowdsourced challenges and collective feats—in the style of a traditional barn raising—to focus the world’s energy and attention on a single problem and a single transformation. And forecasting exercises to create shared momentum for the future, and to collectively decide the challenges and themes of the next year’s set of games.

  No one would ever live to see both the start and the end of the game, of course—not even close. But the game would be a throughline for humanity, a tangible connection between our actions today and the world our descendants inherit tomorrow. It would create a sense of awe and wonder, inspiring us to imagine how this massively scaled adventure we are a part of could play out, and to make as meaningful an impact in the game as possible, so we can make a difference in our lifetime that lasts for many lifetimes more.

  It’s not that hard to imagine people spending their entire lives playing a single game. Many World of Warcraft gamers have now been playing their favorite game for nearly an entire decade already; so has the Halo community. Countless among us spend a lifetime mastering a game like chess, poker, or golf.

  And we already have a historical precedent for societies successfully keeping a game tradition alive for an entire millennium—the ancient Greeks ran their Olympiad every four years without interruption for roughly one thousand years.

  The Long Game doesn’t exist yet. But it just might be what the world needs now.

  Aspiring to engage every single human being on the planet in a single game isn’t an arbitrary goal. To accomplish that goal would mean transforming the planet and global society in key ways.

  It would require every single village in the world to have some level of access to the Internet, via personal computers or mobile phones, so that truly everyone could contribute to the game. Universal Internet access is in its own right a significant and worthy goal. Today, roughly one in four people on the planet has reliable, daily Internet access.30 When every family in the remote villages of Africa, or in what today are the slums of India, or throughout Nicaragua—when they and everyone else in the world has access to The Long Game, that will mean greater access to education, culture, and economic opportunity as well.

  Furthermore, for every person on the planet to play the same game, there would need to be free communications across all geopolitical borders. What would it take before every citizen of North Korea, for example, could play The Long Game?

  The Long Game, if we have the will to design it, and if we create the means for universal participation, could be the good game that humanity plays to collectively take us to the next level, achieving a new scale of cooperation, coordination, and cocreation. As Kathi Vian urged in her introduction to the Superstruct Ten-Year Forecast:Zoom out. Look at the coming decade from the perspective of millennia of change. Focus on the progress of the universe from the breakthrough structures of the atom to the living cell, the biota, the community of nations, the global economy. This is how the future will be new, by continuing the incredible experiment of reorganization for greater complexity, by creating the next astonishing structural forms in this long evolutionary path.

  It seems clear to me that games are the most likely candidate to serve as the next great breakthrough structure for life on earth.

  There’s no guarantee, of course, that evolution will continue along any given path, other than the path of improved survivability in a given environment. But all of the historic evidence seems to suggest that collaboration improves human survivability, and will continue to do so, as long as we can innovate new ways of working together.

  First humans invented language. Then farming, and cities; trade and democratic forms of government and the Internet—all ways of supporting human life and collaboration at bigger and more complex scales.

  We have been playing good games for nearly as long as we have been human. It is now time to play them on extreme scales.

  Together, we can tackle what may be the most worthwhile, most epic obstacle of all: a who
le-planetary mission, to use games to raise global quality of life, to prepare ourselves for the future, and to sustain our earth for the next millennium and beyond.

  CONCLUSION

  Reality Is Better

  If I’m going to be happy anywhere,

  Or achieve greatness anywhere,

  Or learn true secrets anywhere,

  Or save the world anywhere,

  Or feel strongly anywhere,

  Or help people anywhere,

  I may as well do it in reality.

  —FUTURIST ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY 1

  We can play any games we want.

  We can create any future we can imagine.

  W That is the big idea we started with, fourteen chapters ago, as we set off to investigate why good games make us better, and how they can help us change the world.

  Along the way, we’ve gleaned industry secrets—more than thirty years’ worth—from some of the most successful computer and video game developers in the world. We’ve compared these secrets alongside the most important scientific findings of the past decade, from the field of positive-psychology research. We’ve identified key innovations in the emerging landscape of alternate reality design. And we’ve tracked how game design is creating new ways for us to work together at extreme scales, and to solve bigger real-world problems.

  We have thoroughly assessed all the ways that games optimize human experience, how they help us do amazing things together, and why they enable lasting engagement. As a result, we’re now equipped with fourteen ways to fix reality—fourteen ways we can use games to be happier in our everyday lives, to stay better connected to people we care about, to feel more rewarded for making our best effort, and to discover new ways to make a difference in the real world.

  We’ve learned that a good game is simply an unnecessary obstacle—and that unnecessary obstacles increase self-motivation, provoke interest and creativity, and help us work at the very edge of our abilities (Fix #1: Tackle unnecessary obstacles).

  We’ve learned that gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression: it’s an invigorating rush of activity, combined with an optimistic sense of our own capability (Fix #2: Activate extreme positive emotions). That’s why games can put us in a positive mood when everything else fails—when we’re angry, when we’re bored, when we’re anxious, when we’re lonely, when we’re hopeless, or when we’re aimless.

  We’ve discovered how game designers help us achieve a state of blissful productivity: with clear, actionable goals and vivid results (Fix #3: Do more satisfying work). We’ve seen how games make failure fun and train us to focus our time and energy on truly attainable goals (Fix #4: Find better hope of success ). We’ve seen how they build up our social stamina and provoke us to act in ways that make us more likeable (Fix #5: Strengthen your social connectivity) , and how they make our hardest efforts feel truly meaningful, by putting them in a much bigger context (Fix #6: Immerse yourself in epic scale).

  If we want to keep learning about how to improve our real quality of life, we need to continue mining the commercial game industry for these kinds of insights. The industry has consistently proven itself, and it will continue to be, our single best research laboratory for discovering new ways to reliably and efficiently engineer optimal human happiness.

  WE’VE ALSO EXPLORED how alternate reality games are reinventing our real-life experience of everything from commercial flying to public education, from health care to housework, from our fitness routines to our social lives.

  We’ve seen how these games can help us enjoy our real lives more, instead of feeling like we want to escape from them (Fix #7: Participate wholeheartedly wherever, whenever we can). We’ve considered how points, levels, and achievements can motivate us to get through the toughest situations and inspire us to work harder to excel at things we already love (Fix #8: Seek meaning ful rewards for making a better effort). We’ve looked at how games can be a springboard for community and build our capacity for social participation, connecting us in spaces as diverse as museums, senior centers, and busy city sidewalks (Fix #9: Have more fun with strangers). We’ve even looked at ways that big crowd games can make it easier for us to adopt scientific advice for living a good life—to think about death every day, for example, or to dance more (Fix #10: Invent and adopt new happiness hacks).

  These early alternate realities may not represent full, complete, or scalable solutions to the problems they’re attempting to solve. But they’re vivid demonstrations of what’s just now becoming possible. And as more and more of the world’s leading organizations and most promising start-up companies begin to test the alternate reality waters, this experimental design space will become an increasingly important wellspring of both technological and social innovation.

  FINALLY, WE’VE EXPLORED how playing very big games can help save the real world—by helping to generate more participation bandwidth for our most important collective efforts.

  We’ve looked at crowdsourcing games that successfully engage tens of thousands of players in tackling real-world problems for free—from curing cancer to investigating political scandals (Fix #11: Contribute to a sustainable engagement economy).

  We’ve looked at social participation games that help players save real lives and grant real wishes, by creating real-world volunteer tasks that feel as heroic, as satisfying, and as readily achievable as online game quests (Fix #12: Seek out more epic wins).

  We’ve learned that young people are spending more and more time playing computer and video games—on average, ten thousand hours by the time they turn twenty-one. And we’ve learned that these ten thousand hours are just enough time to become extraordinary at the one thing all games make us good at: cooperating, coordinating, and creating something new together (Fix #13: Spend ten thousand hours collaborating).

  And we’ve seen how forecasting games can turn ordinary people into super-empowered hopeful individuals—by training us to take a longer view, to practice ecosystems thinking, and to pilot massively multiple strategies for solving planetary-scale problems (Fix #14: Develop massively multiplayer foresight).

  Very big games represent the future of collaboration. They are, quite simply, the best hope we have for solving the most complex problems of our time. They are giving more people than ever before in human history the opportunity to do work that really matters, and to participate directly in changing the whole world.

  ALONG THE WAY to crafting these fourteen fixes, we’ve inventoried fourteen ways that, compared with our very best games, reality is broken.

  Reality is too easy. Reality is depressing. It’s unproductive, and hopeless. It’s disconnected, and trivial. It’s hard to get into. It’s pointless, unrewarding, lonely, and isolating. It’s hard to swallow. It’s unsustainable. It’s unambitious. It’s disorganized and divided. It’s stuck in the present.

  Reality is all of these things. But in at least one crucially important way, reality is also better: reality is our destiny.

  We are hardwired to care about reality—with every cell in our bodies and every neuron in our brains. We are the result of five million years’ worth of genetic adaptations, each and every one designed to help us survive our natural environment and thrive in our real, physical world.2

  That’s why our single most urgent mission in life—the mission of every human being on the planet—is to engage with reality, as fully and as deeply as we can, every waking moment of our lives.

  That doesn’t mean we can’t play games.

  It simply means that we have to stop thinking of games as only escapist entertainment.

  So how should we think of games, if not as escapist entertainment?

  We should think of them the same way the ancient Lydians did.

  Let’s turn back one more time to the provocative history that Herodotus told of why the ancient Lydians invented dice games: so that they could band together to survive an eighteen-year famine, by playing dice games on alternate days and eating on the others. />
  There are three key values we share in common with the ancient Lydians when it comes to how and why we play games today.

  For the starving and suffering Lydians, games were a way to raise real quality of life. This was their primary function: to provide real positive emotions, real positive experiences, and real social connections during a difficult time.

  This is still the primary function of games for us today. They serve to make our real lives better. And they serve this purpose beautifully, better than any other tool we have. No one is immune to boredom or anxiety, loneliness or depression. Games solve these problems, quickly, cheaply, and dramatically.

  Life is hard, and games make it better.

  ORGANIZING LARGE GROUPS of people is also hard—and games make it easier.

  Dice games provided the Lydians with new rules of engagement. The rules of engagement were simple: play on these days, eat on those days. But these two simple rules, at least as Herodotus imagined it, supported the Lydians’ kingdom-wide efforts to coordinate scarce resources and to cooperate together for the entire duration of the famine—eighteen long years.