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.
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