Andrew Klavan on "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better" By Jane McGonigal | Hacker News Reader

Andrew Klavan on "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better" By Jane McGonigal

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25 pointsskmurphy9 comments

> "Meaning is the feeling that we're a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's the belief that our actions matter beyond our own individual lives." But no, actually, that's not what meaning is at all. Meaning is when those feelings and beliefs refer to something that is true.

How do you know if feelings associated with meaning refer to something true?

Is the meaning of life effort, of mother who singlehandedly raises two children who will live mediocre lives and die childless, really true or she just thinks it is?

Is the meaning of the sacrifice of a soldier at war true? Or just some people think it is while he is actually just meat for the grinder?

Much of life would be improved if it were more video-game-like. Work, school, and daily chores could all benefit from a structure that reliably rewards sustained effort in the way a video game does. On the other hand, I don't think video games can provide a useful solution to existential angst.

Merely rewarding "effort" is never failing anyone just because they tried. Sustained effort is even worse to reward because it doesn't indicate any progress. Sisyphean tasks are unfulfilling because they have no end, no matter how much effort, sustained or otherwise, you put into them.

The way video games reward sustained effort is through the ability to completely retry, from almost any random point, without penalty.

I wonder if there's a certain amount of reward inherent in the fact that the video game accomplishment is meaningless other than the amount of time and effort put into it. When you're done doing daily chores, the chores are done. Making that more rewarding might actually get more chores done, but you're still playing the chores game because it needs to be done, not because it's entertainment.

My school rewarded sustained effort on a letter scale, A through F, which I guess they must have borrowed from Dance Dance Revolution. I never did get the AA grade, myself.

Richard Feynman once wrote a great article called Cargo Cult Science[1], where he defined cargo cult science to be something that takes up the trappings of science (journals, jargon, lab-coats, &c) without taking up the thing that makes science what it is (the scientific method.) In a lot of these "videogamification" ideas, I feel like there's a kind of "cargo cult gaming" going on, where people focus more on the trappings of video games (levels, points, reward structures, &c) without getting at the real meat of what makes video games fun (which I would argue can be enhanced by the reward structure but broadly speaking is something apart from the rewards structure.) You can hand out points all you want, but my experience is that points won't make schools or chores into a game any more than adding big black spots will turn a sheep into a cow.

[1] http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

Recently there have been a number of experimental programs that actually do use experience points and leveling in lieu of normal grading procedures for younger students, with good results for all I've heard of so far. There was a TED talk that mentioned this last year, but I don't remember which one.

There's also at least one college prof doing this, Lee Sheldon at Bloomington's Indiana University. His course is related to computer games, though.

I would hypothesize wildly that younger students might respond well to this for the same reason that young children prefer the Kraft macaroni in the shapes of cartoon characters—it's a kind of association, "This is fun because it is like the video games I play!" I suspect both that a. it would become less effective as the students aged, especially towards the end of primary/elementary school, where students might see it as a kind of trick, and b. it would become far less effective if it became the standard way of running a school, because it's no longer "like a video game," it is "like a school." Which all is to say that it's not the experience points that are improving the experiences, it's the mental association with video games. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, though, and I don't think that the experiments with this shouldn't be done—I'm just skeptical.

Snippet from the article: > "The book's thesis is essentially that real life isn't as fun or rewarding as videogames, and so life should be "fixed" to be more like the games. This would be achieved by applying gaming scenarios and game logic to real-life interactions, ranging from doing the laundry to saving the world."

That idea is not new; the science fiction novel "Ender's Game", by Orson Scott Card, came out in 1985. It sounds like a similar concept to me.

I think the proposal to solve real problems during video game play is interesting, in any case. The article quotes McGonigal's book as saying large groups of video game players could be involved in > "a whole-planetary mission... to raise global quality of life... and to sustain our earth for the next millennium and beyond."

The reviewer responds: > "Sounds dreadful, I know, but I wouldn't worry about it."

Does this idea sound so dreadful? I don't think so. Hm.

While I certainly have nothing against computer games in general, I'd say that Ms McGonigal's idea that real life would be much better if only we could make it more like a computer game is sufficiently silly that I'm not sure what else I can say about it once I've pointed out its silliness.

I enjoy video games very much, but tend to agree with you.

Speaking purely from my own naive experience, for many in America life is simply great. Within the context of my day to day life I cannot say that there are any great struggles. When life is so good, one starts to question its purpose. But games are not the answer to this question imho. There is a great deal of purpose to be had in this world, one just has to get out and seek it.

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