Reality is broken - Chapter's 12&13

Chapter 12 of Reality is Broken speaks about missions impossible.  Specifically, Jane begins speaking about epic wins and the strive for gamers to achieve them. She compares and epic win in a virtual world to an epic win in real life an came to the conclusion that an epic win in a virtual world is much more attainable because in real life we are too afraid to take chances. She then goes on to say that for every individual, an epic win means something slightly different. For one person an epic win may be the visual appeal of a particular virtual world. However another person may not relate to an epic win until they have a 10:1 kill death ratio in CoD. Jane then goes on to discuss how she believes we can bring these epic wins into real life; she begins talking about the Extraordinarines, a mobile phone app.  This is a game that employs its users to create a map of all available defibrillators. While this doesn’t sound fun on its own, this game has taken many queues from Hollywood games such as CoD or WoW. Much like in WoW this game takes a simple task and makes it sound important, in this case, the game makes you believe that you are saving lives as you play. The game makes you believe that every time you track down one of these defibrillators that you have just saved a persons real life, quite the epic win. Although I do agree with her about bringing epic wins into real life, outside of the medical and scientific fields it would be quite hard to make people fell as if what they were doing matter.  It seems that with binging an epic win into the real world it strongly relies on the narrative of the “quest”. We are doing little more then tricking ourselves into thinking we are doing something more then we actually are.  What happens when we see someone in need in real life, a burning building an elderly person being robbed, would we then simply check our mobile devices to see if this “quest” is “active” or do we get up and do something about it. Although I have no problem with what Jane is trying to do, I believe that her methods make us as a society far too reliant on technology, that’s not to say that we aren’t already, but what she is imposing is to blur the line between what is real and what is fake, but it leads to the question of if we achieve this how will we know what is real and what isn’t?

Chapter 13 of Reality is Broken talks about collaboration super powers. As Jane puts it we all have the super power of collaboration because by the time we hit 21 we spend 10 thousand hours playing and collaborating in video games. While I do agree that I have spent this much time, if not more playing video games, I do not believe that they have all had me collaborating with one another. In fact for most of my life I have been playing games where the sole objective was to level up my own character, look out for myself, and not for anyone else. So in that respect I believe that Mc Gonnigal is wrong. Also she believes that every game is teaching you the exact same skill set for that 10 thousand hours you have been playing. This is couldn’t be further from the truth; different games and specifically different genres will end up teaching you different things. While a FPS may tech you how to work on a team and collaborate with one another an RPG doesn’t do any of that. In an RPG you are strictly looking out for your own characters self-interest. There are also games that fall neatly into the middle ground, such as a RTS game. It can put you in a position where you must look out for your self or it could put you in a position where you have to work well with your team, its really up to how you want to play the game. The only problem that I seem to be facing in this chapter is that Jane is speaking far too broadly, none of her points are narrowed or focused in on any one particular genre or game. How can you expect to paint all of these games with the same brush when it is so obvious that they each have something very deferent and very unique to offer?

Reality is broken - Chapter's 10&11

Chapter 10 of Reality is Broken, speaks about happiness hacking, “how alternate realities can help us adopt the daily habits of the world’s happiest people”. In this chapter Jane gives three examples of alternate reality games that is designed to make you happier.  The first game which she discusses is C2BK, this is an alternate reality game where the gamer is pressures to go outside and “spread kindness” it is yet another game where the user has no basis for determining who is playing an who is not. The main objective of this game is to either compliment, wink or smile at someone. It is a game that is strongly based off the popular rock paper scissor concept where a wink beats a smile, a smile beats a compliment, and a compliment beats a wink. Although this game is designed to make you and the people around you happier, it does have some drawbacks that you can immediately see. If you were to be playing the game and you smile at a suspected player and they smile back at you, what the game tells you to do is to stare at the other person and run away for 30 seconds. But what if this other person wasn’t playing the game; you just made their day that much worse. All they would know is that some guy looked at them and was so shocked when they saw your smile they ran away. What’s worse, is every thirty seconds you see this guy peering around a corner smiling and winking at you.  The second alternate reality game that Jane suggests in this chapter is a game called tombstone hold’em. This is a game that the players are competing to see who can make up the better poker hand. The only catch being that instead of cards there are tombstones and it is up to the player to decide which cards are best for him. With  this game, Jane is encouraging people to go and play in graveyards. While this may seem all good and harmless, the last thing you want to see when you are visiting a loved one is a bunch of people crawling all over the graves of the deceased. The problem with some of these games is that she is crossing some of the social norms which, when we were brought up we were told not to cross.

Chapter 11 of Reality is Broken talks about The Engagement Economy. She talks about how large-scale games can be used to improve the world. She begins by speaking about an example in Brittan where the government enlisted the help of its citizens to help track the expenses of Government officials. This was a job which was just on too large of a scale for a single government to handle so what they did was Crowd-source their work. This is a term coined by Jeff Howe, which essentially means outsourcing a job to a crowd. This, if done correctly is the means for some of the most productive work achievable. These are people who are not doing this as a form of payment; they are not doing it because they have to. But rather they do it because they are having fun, they are enjoying what they are doing and are intrigued. We see this type of collaboration happening in virtual space all the time; we see it in Wikipedia, WoW, and many other events that have a mass gathering of minds. What Jane is proposing is that we think about these gathering of minds, and we put them to use. Not towards some form of fictional goal like three billion kills on WoW. But rather she is looking for something bigger, she is looking for a game that tackles the big issues like the energy crisis or global warming. When we look at what we have accomplished so far with our collective intelligence, we see that we are not to far off from some of her ideas.