My interest in gaming has always gone beyond just playing; there are several unique things about games that you don't get in any other media. Interactivity is an obvious one but there are others. From a political point of view, gaming is often a testbed for censorship or filtering issues(See Australia's "banning" of 18-rated games) because of it's perceived lack of value compared to film.

This post is based on the presentation I was going to give at Gist Play which is further based on the book I've just finished reading. It's called Reality is Broken written by Jane McGonigal, a game designer who works at a think-tank called the Institute of the Future. The basic idea of the book is that something must be wrong with reality if so many of us spend so much time in game worlds, what do games offer that reality can't and how can we use that to make reality better. In game-friendly countries, the average 21 year old has spent 10,000 hours of their life gaming. It is said that to be an expert in something you need 10,000 hours of time. So we have all these expert gamers(roughly 500 million worldwide), how do we use their skills and abilities to improve the world? (My favourite crazy statistic, if you add up all the hours spent playing World of Warcraft, it comes to 5.93 million years. My mind is blown)

First of all, what is a game? The book states that a game must have 4 central characteristics. There must be a goal, not only in a "save-the-princess" sense but smaller goals such as "get from one side of the room to the other". There must be rules, restrictions on how we can achieve the goal. These are things such as health, ammo, gravity. Participation must be voluntary, nobody liked being forced to play otherwise that feels like work. Finally there must be a feedback system so players know how they are working towards the goal and track their progress. Levelling up, power ups or high scores.

So we know what a game is. Pretty simple, but what's the draw? Sticking with this theme of fours, McGonigal says that games fill 4 intrinsic desires. Humans crave satisfying work; the reason so many of us hate work is not because it is hard or strenuous, but because it is boring. Games with their constant goals and feedback mean that we feel that we are always working towards something. We also crave social connections. 70% of the time someone plays World of Warcraft is solo, despite being a massively multiplayer game. It's a lovely idea called "playing alone together", even though you may be playing alone you are comforted by seeing other people sharing the world with you. There have been many times I've logged into WoW and spent hours just chatting away to my guild rather than actually playing. Multiplayer is where modern gaming is really going.

We want to experience success, but at the same time we are happy when we fail. We are happy when we fail if it gives us a chance to try again, making the success so much sweeter when it comes. Games are not made to be impossible and the best games craft the difficulty in such a way that players crave just "one more go". Linked to this a little is the fourth desire, being part of something greater. The example used in the book is Halo 3 players going for 10 billion kills. The number of players involved was greater than the top 25 armies combined. Yep, Halo players are the biggest army on Earth. WoWWiki is the second largest wiki in existence. We all want to contribute to something and share in the successes.

So reality then. McGonigal proposes several "fixes" for reality, way too many to go into detail to here. My favourite example is a game called World Without Oil. Players were given a website that showed a reality where peak oil was in severe demand and there were massive shortages, the website had news stories and videos based on the hypothetical senario and gamers were basically asked to make videoblogs about how their lives would change in this world. Years later, most of the players had carried forward the skills from this game to how they use oil products in their lives. If you tell someone to do something, that's work. Make it into a game and it changes the world.

There is way more to the book than I have described. The author's TED talk is very interesting(here). Shameless plug: check out my GoodReads profile!