Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World Read Online Free Page B

when we’re playing our favorite video games. If you’ve never heard of ARGs before, you may be shocked to discover how many people are already making and playing them. Hundreds of start-up companies and independent designers have devoted themselves to applying leading-edge game design and technologies to improving our everyday lives. And millions of gamers have already discovered the benefits of ARGs firsthand. In this section, you’ll find out how ARGs are already starting to raise our quality of life at home and at school, in our neighborhoods and our workplaces.
    Finally, in Part III: How Very Big Games Can Change the World , you’ll get a glimpse of the future. You’ll discover ten games designed to help ordinary people achieve the world’s most urgent goals: curing cancer, stopping climate change, spreading peace, ending poverty. You’ll find out how new participation platforms and collaboration environments are making it possible for anyone to help invent a better future, just by playing a game.
    Ultimately, the people who understand the power and potential of games to both make us happy and change reality will be the people who invent our future. By the time you finish reading this book, you will be an expert on how good games work. With that knowledge, you’ll make better choices about which games to play and when. More importantly, you’ll be ready to start inventing your own new games. You’ll be prepared to create powerful, alternate realities for yourself and for your family; for your school, your business, your neighborhood, or any other community you care about; for your favorite cause, for an entire industry, or for an entirely new movement.
    We can play any games we want. We can create any future we can imagine.
    Let the games begin.

PART ONE
    Why Games Make Us Happy
    One way or another, if human evolution is to go on, we shall have to learn to enjoy life more thoroughly.
     
—MIHÁLY CSÍKSZENTMIHÁLYI 1

CHAPTER ONE
    What Exactly Is a Game?
    A lmost all of us are biased against games today—even gamers. We can’t help it. This bias is part of our culture, part of our language, and it’s even woven into the way we use the words “game” and “player” in everyday conversation.
    Consider the popular expression “gaming the system.” If I say that you’re gaming the system, what I mean is that you’re exploiting it for your own personal gain. Sure, you’re technically following the rules, but you’re playing in ways you’re not meant to play. Generally speaking, we don’t admire this kind of behavior. Yet paradoxically, we often give people this advice: “You’d better start playing the game.” What we mean is, just do whatever it takes to get ahead. When we talk about “playing the game” in this way, we’re really talking about potentially abandoning our own morals and ethics in favor of someone else’s rules.
    Meanwhile, we frequently use the term “player” to describe someone who manipulates others to get what they want. We don’t really trust players. We have to be on our guard around people who play games—and that’s why we might warn someone, “Don’t play games with me.” We don’t like to feel that someone is using strategy against us, or manipulating us for their personal amusement. We don’t like to be played with. And when we say, “This isn’t a game!,” what we mean is that someone is behaving recklessly or not taking a situation seriously. This admonishment implies that games encourage and train people to act in ways that aren’t appropriate for real life.
    When you start to pay attention, you realize how collectively suspicious we are of games. Just by looking at the language we use, you can see we’re wary of how games encourage us to act and who we are liable to become if we play them.
    But these metaphors don’t accurately reflect what it really means to play a well-designed game. They’re just a reflection of our worst fears about games.