A few years ago, I was able to recognize that HDR photos were often prettier than reality. When reading Daryl Pranada’s brief on Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How we can Change the World, I was able to recognize that he found the reality that gaming provided was a very important space for many individuals. While he recognized that these individuals that gamed had a life outside of the virtual reality, he stated that
But as they devote more and more of their free time to game worlds, the real world increasingly feels like it’s missing something.
This began to make me realize that he was claiming that to some individuals, virtual reality was better than reality. He claims that in virtual reality, one is often alive and adventureous in every moment – something rarely found in reality.
With companies such as Zynga, OmgPop, Playdom with 100M-1B dollar evaluations, it is clear that gaming is a very strong industry. Daryl estimates this to be a 68Billion dollar industry by 2012, a figure that is fairly accurate.
I don’t see any problem in gamers finding a place of solace through virtual reality: personally, my solace comes from music and good television. There are other means to solace and other escapes from reality, but I do believe video games are a great one.
One statistic that got to me was his number on how many hours a week we spent gaming:
Collectively, the planet is now spending more than 3 billion hours a week gaming. We are starving, and our games are feeding us.
As technology grows, we find games representing a stronger sense of connection to reality: i.e. Kinect and Move are making users represent themselves through hand motion in an alternate reality setting.
He concludes by saying that he wants to provide gamers with a better reality, rather than a better virtual reality. I don’t know if I agree that gamers are a 100% with virtual reality because they find faults with reality: however, I do believe he is correct in the notion as to how far virtual reality has gone. He also claims that the knowledge gamers have gained can help augment reality, and reduce real issues like poverty in the world. I don’t believe gaming can find solutions to reality yet: simply because they do not represent the realities of this world and also because of the very specific settings & natures of video games: it would be difficult to find a setting which mirrored most large-scale video games and use the understanding and learnings of that to enhance reality.
I was also shocked to see the statistic about how much time people spend gaming. I think your idea that people find solace through other things, such as music or television is a good one, because I realize that I spend probably just as much time each week doing something that gives me solace as well. But one thing I find really interesting how quickly so many people’s solace became video games… What did they substitute out of their lives in the past decade to make room for so much gaming? I think an interesting study would be to examine if other aspects of people’s lives suffer from gaming.
As you mentioned, almost all people use some form of escapism in their lives. I as well do not see anything wrong with playing video games in order to relieve stress. However, I think a major problem with our society is that people do not know when to stop. This is clearly evident in SecondLife where people use real money to buy virtual real estate and objects. I personally think that problems in the world stem from excessive use of video games. There are simply too many experiences that people miss out on if they are constantly in a virtual world, that they do not give themselves the opportunity to grow. As you mentioned, I too was shocked to learn that Pranada “claims that the knowledge gamers have gained can help augment reality, and reduce real issues like poverty in the world”. I think if people want to help solve real problems in the world they need to go out and DO something about it; not sit at home playing video games.