Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (2 page)

The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.

And so, there is a growing perception in the gaming community:

Reality, compared to games, is broken.

In fact, it is more than a perception. It’s a phenomenon. Economist Edward Castronova calls it a “mass exodus” to game spaces, and you can see it already happening in the numbers. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are opting out of reality for larger and larger chunks of time. In the United States alone, there are 183 million
active gamers
(individuals who, in surveys, report that they play computer or video games “regularly”—on average, thirteen hours a week).
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Globally, the online gamer community—including console, PC, and mobile phone gaming—counts more than 4 million gamers in the Middle East, 10 million in Russia, 105 million in India, 10 million in Vietnam, 10 million in Mexico, 13 million in Central and South America, 15 million in Australia, 17 million in South Korea, 100 million in Europe, and 200 million in China.
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Although a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than 6 million people in China who spend at least twenty-two hours a week gaming, the equivalent of a part-time job.
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More than 10 million “hard-core” gamers in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany spend at least twenty hours a week playing.
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And at the leading edge of this growth curve, more than 5 million “extreme” gamers in the United States play on average forty-five hours a week.
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With all of this play, we have turned digital games—for our computers, for our mobile phones, and for our home entertainment systems—into what is expected to be a $68 billion industry annually by the year 2012.
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And we are creating a massive virtual silo of cognitive effort, emotional energy, and collective attention lavished on game worlds instead of on the real world.

The ever-skyrocketing amounts of time and money spent on games are being observed with alarm by some—concerned parents, teachers, and politicians—and eagerness by others—the many technology industries that expect to profit greatly from the game boom. Meanwhile, they are met with bewilderment and disdain by more than a few nongamers, who still make up nearly half of the U.S. population, although their numbers are rapidly decreasing. Many of them deem gaming a clear waste of time.

As we make these value judgments, hold moral debates over the addictive quality of games, and simultaneously rush to achieve massive industry expansion, a vital point is being missed. The fact that so many people of all ages, all over the world, are choosing to spend so much time in game worlds is a sign of something important, a truth that we urgently need to recognize.

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. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.

And unless something dramatic happens to reverse the resulting exodus, we’re fast on our way to becoming a society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing games, creates its best memories in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game worlds.

Maybe this sounds hard to believe. To a nongamer, this forecast might seem surreal, or like science fiction. Are huge swaths of civilization really disappearing into game worlds? Are we really rushing headlong into a future where the majority of us use games to satisfy many of our most important needs?

If so, it will not be the first time that such a mass exodus from reality to games has occurred. Indeed, the very first written history of human gameplay, Herodotus’
Histories
, the ancient Greek account of the Persian Wars—dating back more than three thousand years—describes a nearly identical scenario. While the oldest known game is the ancient counting game Mancala—evidence shows it was played during Egypt’s age of empires, or the fifteenth to the eleventh centuries BC—it was not until Herodotus that anyone thought to record the origins or cultural functions of these games. And from his ancient text, we can learn a great deal about what’s happening today—and what’s almost certainly coming next.

It’s a bit counterintuitive to think about the future in terms of the past. But as a research director at the Institute for the Future—a nonprofit think tank in Palo Alto, California, and the world’s oldest future-forecasting organization—I’ve learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. Technologies, cultures, and climates may change, but our basic human needs and desires—to survive, to care for our families, and to lead happy, purposeful lives—remain the same. So at IFTF we like to say, “To understand the future, you have to look back at least twice as far as you’re looking ahead.” Fortunately, when it comes to games, we can look even farther back than that. Games have been a fundamental part of human civilization for thousands of years.

In the opening book of
The Histories
, Herodotus writes:

What do ancient dice made from sheep’s knuckles have to do with the future of computer and video games? More than you might expect.

Herodotus invented history as we know it, and he has described the goal of history as uncovering moral problems and moral truths in the concrete data of experience. Whether Herodotus’ story of an eighteen-year famine survived through gameplay is true or, as some modern historians believe, apocryphal, its moral truths reveal something important about the essence of games.

We often think of immersive gameplay as “escapist,” a kind of passive retreat from reality. But through the lens of Herodotus’ history, we can see how games could be a
purposeful
escape, a thoughtful and active escape, and most importantly an extremely helpful escape. For the Lydians, playing together as a nearly full-time activity would have been a behavior highly adaptive to difficult conditions. Games made life bearable. Games gave a starving population a feeling of power in a powerless situation, a sense of structure in a chaotic environment. Games gave them a better way to live when their circumstances were otherwise completely unsupportive and uninhabitable.

Make no mistake: we are no different from the ancient Lydians. Today, many of us are suffering from a vast and primal hunger. But it is not a hunger for food—it is a hunger for more and better engagement from the world around us.

Like the ancient Lydians, many gamers have already figured out how to use the immersive power of play to distract themselves from their hunger: a hunger for more satisfying work, for a stronger sense of community, and for a more engaging and meaningful life.

Collectively, the planet is now spending more than 3 billion hours a week gaming.

We are starving, and our games are feeding us.

AND SO,
in 2011, we find ourselves at a major tipping point.

We can stay on the same course. We can keep feeding our appetites with games. And we can watch the game industry continue to create bigger, better, and more immersive virtual worlds that provide increasingly compelling alternatives to reality.

If we stay this course, we will almost certainly see the exodus from reality continue. Indeed, we are already well on our way to a world in which many of us, like the ancient Lydians, spend half our time gaming. Given all the problems in the world, would it really be so bad to pass the coming decades as the Lydians did?

Or we could try to reverse course. We could try to block gamers’ exit from reality—perhaps by culturally shaming them into spending more time in reality, or by trying to keep video games out of the hands of kids, or, as some U.S. politicians have already proposed, by heavily taxing them so that gaming becomes an unaffordable lifestyle.
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To be honest, none of those options sounds like a future I’d want to live in.

Why would we want to waste the power of games on escapist entertainment?

Why would we want to waste the power of games by trying to squelch the phenomenon altogether?

Perhaps we should consider a third idea. Instead of teetering on the tipping point between games and reality, what if we threw ourselves off the scale and tried something else entirely?

What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality? What if we started to live our real lives like gamers, lead our real businesses and communities like game designers, and think about solving real-world problems like computer and video game theorists?

Imagine a near future in which most of the real world works more like a game. But is it even possible to create this future? Would it be a reality we would be happier to live in? Would it make the world a better place?

When I consider this potential future, it’s not just a hypothetical idea. I’ve already posed it as a very real challenge to the one community who can truly help launch this transformation: the people who make games for a living. I’m one of them—I’ve been designing games professionally for the past decade. And I’ve come to believe that people who know how to make games need to start focusing on the task of making real life better for as many people as possible.

I haven’t always been so sure of this mission. It has taken a good ten years of research and a series of increasingly ambitious game projects to get to this point.

Back in 2001, I started my career by working on the fringes of the game-design industry, at tiny start-up companies and experimental design labs. More often than not, I was working for free, designing puzzles and missions for low-budget computer and mobile phone games. I was happy when they were played by a few hundred people, or—when I was really lucky—a few thousand. I studied those players as closely as possible. I watched them while they played, and I interviewed them afterward. I was just starting to learn what gives games their power.

During those early years, I was also a “starving” graduate student—earning a PhD in performance studies from the University of California at Berkeley. I was the first in my department to study computer and video games, and I had to make it up as I went along, bringing together different findings from psychology, cognitive science, sociology, economics, political science, and performance theory in order to try to figure out exactly what makes a good game work. I was particularly interested in how games could change the way we think and act in everyday life—a question that, back then, few, if any, researchers were looking at.

Eventually, as a result of my research, I published several academic papers (and eventually a five-hundred-page dissertation) proposing how we could leverage the power of games to reinvent everything from government, health care, and education to traditional media, marketing, and entrepreneurship—even world peace. And increasingly, I found myself called on to help large companies and organizations adopt game design as an innovation strategy—from the World Bank, the American Heart Association, the National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Department of Defense to McDonald’s, Intel, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the International Olympic Committee. You’ll read about many of the games I created with these organizations in this book—and for the first time, I’ll be sharing my design motivations and strategies.

The inspiration for this book came in the spring of 2008, when I was invited to deliver the annual “rant” at the Game Developers Conference, the most important industry gathering of the year. The rant is supposed to be a wake-up call, a demand to shake up the industry. It’s always one of the most popular sessions at the conference. That year, the room was packed to standing-room capacity with more than a thousand of the world’s leading game designers and developers. And in my rant, they heard the same argument you’re reading here: that reality is broken, and we need to start making games to fix it.