A look at how digital gaming may provide lessons for improving ourselves and the world - The Boston Globe

Accentuating the potential positive

As gaming and real life converge, Jane McGonigal’s “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World” is the right book at the right time. McGonigal proposes a fascinating and provocative, if troubling, manifesto that adds to our understanding of the appeal and potential power of digital games.

McGonigal’s central thesis is this: Reality is discouraging, unproductive, disconnected, and broken in about a dozen other ways. Meanwhile, electronic games are already “fulfilling genuine human needs,” she writes, in ways that our real lives often fail to. If lessons learned from Call of Duty or Wii boxing were applied to everyday life, could reality be “fixed”? Could day-to-day drudgery be slayed?

A look at how digital gaming may provide lessons for improving ourselves and the world - The Boston Globe