The?thirtieth book that I’ve finished reading this year is Jane McGonigal’s “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World”. I first heard of this book when I was listening to a talk by a game producer; he recommended this book as it offers some new perspectives about how gaming can create positive influences on reality, so I ordered it and had a read myself.

Other than the fact that it was written around a decade earlier and is therefore outdated in certain aspects, this book offers some insightful suggestions for readers to reflect upon. To first define a game (not necessarily one played on computer), it is an activity that entails unnecessary obstacles that are endorsed by a community of players, who join together to strive for success and immerse in an epic scale of euphoria. While effort does not always translate into reward in reality, it is often clearly displayed in games where experience points build up to unlock visible achievements, providing gamers with a sense of gratification and further incentives to work towards long-term goals. Outside of the game, gamers also collaborate to build wikis and teach each other gaming strategies, creating a cooperative community that work together to achieve a larger goal. It is this central quality that McGonigal wishes to promote in reality, for the entire human race to bond together and collectively ?devise solutions to the world-threatening problems that we are to face: pandemics, food shortages, environmental depletion, and the like. Through creating games like “World Without Oil” and “Superstruct”, she encourages people from all walks of life to consider creative solutions to these problems without actually stressing about their immediacy under the safe cocoon of virtual simulation.

Before becoming a gamer myself, I often thought computer games to be a waste of time that tear people away from reality. However, after playing Genshin Impact for more than a year, sometimes with my friends and family, I began to understand what McGonigal means by the gaming community. A decade after her book, this community has extended from patching up wikis and sharing gaming strategies to producing a variety of fan fiction, including but not limited to cosplays, illustrations, comics, animation, miku miku dance videos, music arrangements, written stories and even new merchandise. If games are able to inspire such a wide range of creative work from their players, just imagine how much can be generated if applied to reality! However, I do think that McGonigal is a bit optimistic about the cooperation quality that she claims gaming facilitates. Although humans do show the tendency to cooperate at a young age compared to other animals (as Tomasello has found in his research; yes, this familiar name again), there are deep-rooted selfish priorities that may be over and above their wishes to collaborate across races and identities, as Harari suggested in his books; these priorities may be insufficient to overcome by packaging the act of collaboration as a game. At the end of McGonigal’s book, she expressed hope for the whole world to play a game together one day each year, proposing that such an activity will bond people together to remind them of their global identities. Though this sounds very optimistic, the logistics of administering this event is simply unrealistic; so many people are living in miserable conditions across the world, why would they stop trying to survive just to play a game? In essence, gaming seems to be a privilege for many people, especially when it is considered as entertainment.

Nonetheless, I do think some application of gaming to real-world situations can be beneficial. One concept that really triggered my reflection was the Quest to Learn project, which is truly a revolutionary turn on education. Instead of setting assignments and giving grades on them, Quest to Learn is a public charter school that offers students different quests to complete, embedding secret missions and experience points in the process of learning, where everyone can level up. Students even have the opportunity to create their own expertise exchange profiles, where they can exchange their unique skills (often what they do for fun) for experience points and earn respect from their peers. Tests and exams are coined “boss levels”, where students can collaborate with peers and play to each of their own strengths. After school, students interact with virtual characters who are teachable agents to pass on their knowledge and consolidate their understanding, at the same time gaining naches, the happiness gained from mentoring others. This is an education model that I’ve never heard of and would like to learn more about in the future, though I am quite curious how results from “boss levels” are considered in university applications. Perhaps a revolution in university admissions may also be evoked as a result of the new skills demanded of citizens in the ever-evolving 21st century.

All in all, I would recommend this book to both gamers and non-gamers. In the 21st century, the gaming industry is becoming ever more prominent, for obvious reasons: people feel stimulated and fulfilled after playing a good game. How can we apply these feelings to reality, then? Perhaps this is a question for all of us to ponder upon.