Reality is Broken - Chapter's 4&5

In chapter 4, Jane McGonigal speaks about “fun failure, and the chance for success”. What she is trying to establish in this chapter is the emotional reasoning behind why exactly millions of people play videogames on a regular basis. She states that with games, learning is the drug. She believes that, the thing that keeps people coming back, time and time again is the need for self-improvement. She believes that within everybody there is a desire to constantly be changing for the better. What Jane is suggesting is that games are doing just this; they are setting people up for failure. However she is not suggesting that this failure is discouraging at all, in fact she believes that it is the very thing which keeps people coming back time and time again. She states, “ fun will always morph to boredom, once we pass the critical point of being reliably successful. “. This statement could not be truer; when we look to the real world we see these points reinforced.  As Jane mentions we see people who work desk jobs finding their work quite boring and meaningless. Whereas when we look at the other side of the spectrum we see people in the trades for the most part enjoying what they are doing. They get to see direct results from their work and quite often they work on different tasks from week to week. She then talks about the drive for success specifically she speaks about Rockband. She discusses the correlation between the rock star dream and the user experience. She explains that within everyone there is a desire to fulfill this “American dream” and Rockband allows you to do just this. As well she speaks about the social benefits of games such as this. Such as stronger social skills, better relationship and interpersonal skills.

In Chapter 5, Jane talks about “Stronger Social Connectivity”. At the beginning, Jane is discussing the benefits to games held on social media sites. Specifically she is referring to Lexulous. She speaks about the benefits to asynchronous play (players can participate when they feel like it.). Saying that this type of play requires the user to be both addicted and patient, seemingly quite a daunting task however as she explains there are games out there which are able to make us feel both. These games however are usually found on social media sites or other websites where the main objective is to get you to log on daily or in some cases every 10 minutes. She then speaks about games that are able to give you the blissful productivity from WoW with the easygoing user participation of Lexulous, Games such as Farmville and Café-world. She speaks about these games seemingly overnight success and how one in seventy-five people all across the world are playing Farmville. She also speaks about how these games are beginning to bridge the gap between our virtual and real lives by telling you that your real friends need help in their virtual world. This gives us a sense of agency for these games; it brings our real lives further into the game, making it hard to distinguish what is fact from what is fiction.