Hunger for Games

Jane McGonigal has a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She researches games and their impact on society and has published many articles and a book on gaming. She has taught classes on game design and game theory at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute and also created games and game strategies in more than 30 countries.  In an excerpt from her bestselling book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, McGonigal proposes games are the solution to the problems of society and can create a greater amount of happiness in the world. She explains that there is a growing discernment that reality is broken; people lack motivation, rewards, challenges, and thrill in their lives. She proposes that taking the strategies behind video games and applying them to real life can change our world for the better.

The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy.

McGonigal explains that humans yearn for challenge, rewards, creativity, success, social interaction, and connectedness. She refers to these innate human desires as our “hunger” for success and growth. These “hungers” are not satisfied in the physical world, but are achieved in online gaming worlds all the time. Games are designed to motivate players to collaborate, work hard, persevere, and welcome challenge because great rewards are granted in return. McGonigal believes that game developers need to be the ones who develop a new system, in other words a large game, that all of society works and lives in.

Game developers know better than anyone else how to inspire extreme effort and reward hard work. They know how to facilitate cooperation and collaboration at previously unimaginable scales. And they are continuously innovating new ways to motivate players to stick with harder challenges.

The idea of using strategies developed for games in the real world is unique and new to most people. Is it possible to harness the motivation and energy in the gaming world and apply it to the real world? Perhaps it is. The characteristic of working together as a team to achieve a goal could result in more efficient work at a higher quality. However, the difference in the real world in comparison to the gaming world is the level of reward people are given for their work and accomplishments. In many games, team work and determination results in a reward of a large sum of money, new challenges and levels, and the unlocking of special treasures. Often times this is not the case in life. Hard work does pay off, just not to the extremes of games.

I believe that McGonigal is over zealous in her approach to applying game tactics to society. This alternate approach could possibly have a positive effect on society, but to say that it will solve the problems of the world such as health care, world hunger, and world peace is a stretch. In addition, McGonigal fails to address single player games where solidarity is an advantage and the goal is to beat all others in order to win the ultimate prize. In a TED talk given by McGonigal, she states that “when we are in game worlds we are the best versions of ourselves”. I question how the best version of ourselves is portrayed when we play violent and aggressive video games. How do the not-so-positive games influence our motivations and goals?

Overall, the strategy and reward systems from games could benefit our society by restructuring our approach to problem solving. However, in contrast to McGonigal, I do not believe that games can solve larger world problems-in the end, the reason people enjoy games in the first place is that they contrast reality so remarkably.