Reality is Broken - Chapter 2

As this chapter begins Jane Mcgonnigal is discussing flow "the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning" She discuses Csikszentmihalyi's observations on flow and how there is almost none in real life, yet in game worlds there is an abundance of this flow. Jane then goes on to talk about Gamifying the world. She thinks that, if there is such an abundance of flow in game worlds, why not make our world into one gigantic game and get rid of all the desperation and despair. She then goes on to talk about David Sudnow and too much flow. Here was a man who had his whole life ahead of him and yet here he was spending every waking moment playing a videogame, breakout too be exact. Sudnow sat as he played this game for three months until he had finally come as close as he ever would too beating the game. At that point he had experienced so much flow and so much fiero that he just stopped cold turkey. Finally, Jane goes on to talk about happiness and different ways in which we attain it. She speaks about both extrinsic rewards (money, material things) and intrinsic rewards (hard work, improving yourself). Jane suggests turning real life into a game,  while this sounds good, it would be too difficult time consuming and risky too pull off. Not only would we need to pull millions and millions of dollars out of our own pockets too see this idea come too fruition. But as well, who is too say it would even work. Sure there is some research to back up the claims, but who’s too say that after a year of living in this gameified world you wouldn't begin to become desensitized to it, leaving you right back where you left off a few million dollars ago. We could see extreme immersion like that of Sudnow's research but how long until they "beat" the game and completely disconnect. what if in this new gameified world there is such an abundance of feiro and flow that after a while you completely peak, and nothing is the same again. Of course this is all just negative speculation. we could see that if gameified, the world could greatly benefit, if people enjoyed what they were doing all the time we could see a definite correlation between the amount of work done and the time spent doing it. We would see many people hiking up their socks and increasing their overall productivity. Nobody truly knows how this idea would flourish if it was given the proper startup, there are two possible paths which this idea may wander. Down one of the paths, we see a future with a social disconnect, where the people of this world have experienced so much flow and so much fiero that nothing will ever be the same. They will never feel the same sense of joy and wonder again. Down the other path however is a new life, where the people of this reality are enjoying their lives too the fullest. This is a path down which games and gamification rule. Where even the most mundane and repetitive of tasks have become an enjoyable challenge. We don't know where these new and radical ideas will take us, all we know is that in our everyday lives we will soon be seeing the repercussions of these somewhat inspirational ideas.