Ours is the age of the video game. In the United States alone, 183 million people devote an average of 13 hours a week to video games. Americans are not alone: China boasts—if that’s the right word—200 million gamers; there are 105 million gamers in India; 100 million in Europe; and even 10 million in Vietnam. Collectively, according to one estimate, the planet spends more than three billion hours a week playing games.
This Exodus to the Virtual World—the title of a 2007 book by Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at the University of Indiana at Bloomington—will “create a change in social climate that makes global warming look like a tempest in a teacup,” he predicts. As Castronova sees it, “You can’t pull millions of person-hours out of a society without creating an atmospheric-level event.”
What would that entail? To critics of game culture, like Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute, the popularity of video games portends a bleak future in which people “find solace only in make-believe worlds where the persons they really are do not really exist.”
Jane McGonigal has another view. In her new book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press), McGonigal argues that gamers—"among the most collaborative people on earth"—are uniquely equipped to tackle big, real-world dilemmas, including poverty, climate change, a failed education system, the spread of disease, and much else. Game developers are expert at inspiring “extreme effort,” and the best-designed games, she insists, can push players to collaborate on a mass scale and imagine “previously unthinkable ideas.” Games, McGonigal writes, are “the best hope we have for solving the most complex problems of our time.”
She gives the example of World Without Oil, a multiplayer online game set in a future when the demand for oil has outpaced daily production capacity. How might such a crisis play out? The game was produced (with money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) by a team of designers that included McGonigal, who is director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank. Prelaunch marketing of World Without Oil attracted 1,900 players, who were shown fictional news stories about the oil shortage—rolling blackouts, flight cancellations, food shortages—and encouraged to imagine the impact on their own lives. An American soldier in Iraq, for instance, blogged about the challenges of waging war with an oil-starved military; another player, a farmer in Tennessee, instructed others on how to grow their own food and consume less.
Quality of life was monitored constantly on a “power meter": Positive forecasts and cooperative strategies pulled the meter in a favorable direction; pessimistic reports of misery, competition, and economic collapse had the opposite effect. Over 32 days, the players produced more than 2,000 “future-forecasting documents,” which included ideas on how architecture, parenting, and even professional car-racing might change in a world without enough oil. McGonigal describes these reports as a “survival guide for the future, a record of tremendous value for educators, policy makers, and organizations of all kinds.”
The experience convinced McGonigal that alternative-reality games can produce real-world results, and she’s convinced others. Her research has received support from the World Bank, the American Heart Association, the National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Now McGonigal’s goal is to see a game developer win a Nobel Prize.
If her ideas gain traction, it will be in no small part due to McGonigal’s talent for self-promotion. She has emerged as the Pied Piper of so-called “serious games,” the game culture’s ascendant intellectual, evangelist, and moralist. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review magazine named her one of the top innovators in science and technology under the age of 35; Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, O, placed her on its annual “power list,” an honor McGonigal shared with Julia Roberts, Diane Sawyer, and the designer Vera Wang.
McGonigal, who has a Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California at Berkeley, gives the lie to the conventional view of game enthusiasts as dour, socially awkward, pimply-faced teenaged boys. She is attractive, relentlessly upbeat, and media savvy. (Just watch her exuberant, buzzed-about TED talk from February.) Penguin reportedly paid in the high six figures for Reality Is Broken, McGonigal’s first book. (Penguin also signed up McGonigal’s twin sister, Kelly, a psychologist at Stanford University and editor of the International Journal of Yoga Therapy. She is at work on a book titled “The Science of Willpower,” due out this year.)
“We have this opportunity as a culture to do something meaningful with games,” Jane McGonigal says, softly, over the phone from her home in Berkeley. On the day we talk, she’s battling a cold. Coughing and sneezing, she continues: “We’re at a tipping point. We can’t afford to lose an entire generation of optimistic people who want to play games but also want to change the world.”
Part of McGonigal’s novelty is that her ideas turn the debate about video games on its head: “The problem isn’t games,” she tells me. “The problem is how we’ve designed our everyday lives.” Reality is failing to empower us and maximize our potential. Games, on the other hand, are helping us flourish. They are, she says, the “most efficient, cheap, and reliable way to get what we need to feel happy, successful, and fully engaged.”
Why are games so satisfying? “It does seem like an irrational activity,” McGonigal concedes. “Games are hard, you fail a lot when you play them, they don’t improve your status, and they don’t typically make you money.” An answer, she says, can be found in the literature of positive psychology. Games create “flow,” a sensation defined in 1975 by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as “the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning.”
McGonigal cites Csikszentmihalyi along with other figures in the field, including Martin Seligman, who blurbs Reality Is Broken. “It’s very significant that the psychology of game design is perfectly parallel to the latest findings in positive psychology,” she says. “Game designers need to wake up and realize that they are playing with powerful tools, and with that power comes a responsibility to make a meaningful difference in the world.”