Ian On The Red Dot

Jane McGonigal shares about why reality is broken and how we can fix it through games.

So right now, pretty much every one of our games works better than reality, because we are the best designers of human experience, and we’re applying all of our talent, all our insight to optimizing virtual experience.

My rant is about the fact that reality is fundamentally broken, and we have a responsibility as game designers to fix it, with better algorithms and better missions and better feedback and better stories and better community and everything else we know how to make.

We make the games, we have the knowledge, and we have the power. We can take what we’ve learned by making games and apply it to reality, to make real life work more like a game – not make our games more realistic and lifelike, but make our real life more game like – so that when people all over the world wake up every morning, they wake up with a mission, with allies, with a sense of being a part of a bigger story, part of a system that wants them to be happy.

As usual, it is another great post which really got me thinking about how I can apply gaming principles to my life. I remembered when I was younger, I would play KOEI games where at the start of the game, we were allocated points and had to decide how to allocate them to customize our character’s abilities - do I give the character more charisma so that I can win the loyalty of my enemy’s general, do I give my character more fighting ability …

Each turn, I would be having only a certain amount of resources like food and gold and would have to make agonizing decisions how to allocate them. Once a decision was made, I would be informed of the results and the impact to the game’s goals immediately or after the number of turns for the action to be completed. The feedback was important to gauge and tune the resource allocations.

In life, do we have such efficient and informative feedback systems regarding the allocation of our resources like time, money and energy? Feedback systems that let us know the impact of the decisions we take to the rest of our life. For example, each month an individual who has a credit card would most probably get a statement stating his or her expenditure for a certain period - we know where the money goes. Do we have a way to measure the impact of the money spent besides that on the balance sheet? Do we have a way to say X money was spent on transport, Y amount saved towards a goal? Do we have a way to say X amount was spent on activities that shorten our lives, Y amount on activities that enrich it? Do we have a way to gauge how far or near we are to a goal after each time we debit or credit our account? Do we have a way to reduce our life-bar when we spent money on smoking and drinking?

Some people do implement systems to help record and track their expenses. But the use of the system takes discipline - it isn’t fun like a game - which makes the consistent use of the system difficult. I think if we can do what Jane is saying, making our life more game-like, it would give people an incentive as well as a fun tool to make goals and attain them.