Today I read an excerpt of ‘Reality is Broken‘ by Jane McGonigal, a game developer who works to create alternate reality games games that help to solve real world problems. In her book, she talks about how gaming has become a replacement for reality for millions of people. Many people now spend many hours a week playing video games, often at the expense of their real-life relationships, due to the games being more intense and exciting then real life – escapist entertainment. This trend is found worrying by many people because of the immense social ramifications – our society is not built for people who want to escape reality. Gaming has become such a huge part of society because they provide a place where people can be themselves without many of the limitations of real life, can experience much more exciting things then reality, and can devote their talents which are not used in their real-life work environments. The argument has come up that society must decide if it will allow gaming to continue to grow as it has as an escapist entertainment, or if it must fight gaming to prevent being overpowered. Jane McGonigal presents a third idea in her text, the idea that games can be used to help solve real-life problem and find a way to get people to view reality in a similiar way they view gaming. She as spoken about such an idea at Game Developers Conference and it was greeted with great interest- many of the great minds and leaders of the industry have begun moving in that direction. Should be interesting to see what happens from that.

This article as of particular interest to me as I am a gamer and I’ve worried about how much time I spend gaming. It can be difficult to balance real-world relations and work with the constant desire to be in the virtual world. I do agree that something has to be done about the gaming culture to prevent it from growing out of control and becoming the escape from reality that everyone runs to immediately from work. However, there is no good, clean way of cutting it down without causing more problems. The idea of using games is a very interesting idea, one that I would like to hear much more about. I have some difficulty in conceptualizing how that would be done, or how we would work to have people shift their efforts in games to being in reality. But the idea has merit. Games already are used as education tools and as ways for interactions with other cultures (Second Life, among others), and many games are attempting to have people exercise as well. I feel that as a culture, we need to learn moderation: a balanced way of life that western cultures have been struggling to do for centuries.