Print List Price: | $20.00 |
Kindle Price: | $12.99 Save $7.01 (35%) |
Sold by: | Penguin Group (USA) LLC Price set by seller. |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
“Powerful and provocative . . . McGonigal makes a persuasive case that games have a lot to teach us about how to make our lives, and the world, better.” —San Jose Mercury News
“Jane McGonigal's insights have the elegant, compact, deadly simplicity of plutonium, and the same explosive force.” —Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother
A visionary game designer reveals how we can harness the power of games to boost global happiness.
With 174 million gamers in the United States alone, we now live in a world where every generation will be a gamer generation. But why, Jane McGonigal asks, should games be used for escapist entertainment alone? In this groundbreaking book, she shows how we can leverage the power of games to fix what is wrong with the real world-from social problems like depression and obesity to global issues like poverty and climate change-and introduces us to cutting-edge games that are already changing the business, education, and nonprofit worlds. Written for gamers and non-gamers alike, Reality Is Broken shows that the future will belong to those who can understand, design, and play games.
Jane McGonigal is also the author of SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient.
- ISBN-109781101475492
- ISBN-13978-1594202858
- Edition1st
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateJanuary 20, 2011
- LanguageEnglish
- File size2329 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Reality is Broken explains the science behind why games are good for us--why they make us happier, more creative, more resilient, and better able to lead others in world-changing efforts.
But some games are better for us than others, and there is too much of a good thing.
Here are a few secrets that aren’t in the book to help you (or the gamer in your life) get the most positive impact from playing games.
This practical advice--5 key quidelines, plus 2 quick rules--is scientifically backed, and it can be summed up in a single sentence:
Play games you enjoy no more than 21 hours a week; face-to-face with friends and family as often as you can; and in co-operative or creator modes whenever possible.
1. Don’t play more than 21 hours a week.
Studies show that games benefit us mentally and emotionally when we play up to 3 hours a day, or 21 hours a week. (In extremely stressful circumstances--such as serving in the military during war-time--research shows that gamers can benefit from as many as 28 hours a week.) But for virtually everyone else, whenever you play more than 21 hours a week, the benefits of gaming start to decline sharply. By the time you’re spending 40 hours or more a week playing games, the psychological benefits of playing games have disappeared entirely--and are replaced with negative impacts on your physical health, relationships, and real-life goals. So always strive to keep your gaming in the sweet spot: 7–21 hours a week.
2. Playing with real-life friends and family is better than playing alone all the time, or with strangers.
Gaming strengthens your social bonds and builds trust, two key factors in any positive relationship. And the more positive relationships you have in real life, the happier, healthier and more successful you are.
You can get mental and emotional benefits from single-player games, or by playing with strangers online--but to really unlock the power of games, it’s important to play them with people you really know and like as often as possible.
A handy rule-of-thumb: try to make half of your gaming social. If you play 10 hours a week, try to play face-to-face with real-life friends or family for at least 5 of those hours.
(And if you’re not a gamer yourself--but you have a family member who plays games all the time, it would do you both good to play together--even if you think you don’t like games!)
3. Playing face-to-face with friends and family beats playing with them online.
If you’re in the same physical space, you’ll supercharge both the positive emotional impacts and the social bonding.
Many of the benefits of games are derived from the way they make us feel--and all positive emotions are heightened by face-to-face interaction.
Plus, research shows that social ties are strengthened much more when we play games in the same room than when we play games together online.
Multi-player games are great for this. But single-player works too! You can get all the same benefits by taking turns at a single-player game, helping and cheering each other on.
4. Cooperative gameplay, overall, has more benefits than competitive gameplay.
Studies show that cooperative gameplay lifts our mood longer, and strengthens our friendships more, than competing against each other.
Cooperative gameplay also makes us more likely to help someone in real life, and better collaborators at work--boosting our real-world likeability and chances for success.
Competition has its place, too, of course--we learn to trust others more when we compete against them. But if we spend all our time competing with others, we miss out on the special benefits of co-op play. So when you’re gaming with others, be sure to check to see if there are co-op missions or a co-op mode available. An hour of co-op a week goes a long way. (Find great co-op games for every platform, and a family-friendly list too, at Co-Optimus, the best online resource for co-op gaming.)
5. Creative games have special positive impacts.
Many games encourage or even require players to design and create as part of the gameplay process--for example: Spore, Little Big Planet, and Minecraft; the Halo level designer and the Guitar Hero song creator. These games have been shown to build up players’ sense of creative agency--and they make us more likely to create something outside of the game. If you want to really build up your own creative powers, creative games are a great place to start.
Of course, you can always take the next creative step--and start making your own games. If you’ve never made a game, it’s easier than you think--and there are some great books to help you get started.
2 Other Important Rules:
* You can get all of the benefits of a good game without realistic violence--you (or your kids) don’t have to play games with guns or gore.
If you feel strongly about violence, look to games in other genres--there’s no shortage of amazing sports, music, racing, puzzle, role-playing, casual, strategy and adventure games.
*Any game that makes you feel bad is no longer a good game for you to play.
This should be obvious, but sometimes we get so caught up in our games that we forget they’re supposed to be fun.
If you find yourself feeling really upset when you lose a game, or if you’re fighting with friends or strangers when you play--you’re too invested. Switch to a different game for a while, a game that has “lower stakes” for you personally.
Or, especially if you play with strangers online, you might find yourself surrounded by other players who say things that make you uncomfortable--or who just generally act like jerks. Their behavior will actually make it harder for you to get the positive benefits of games--so don’t waste your time playing with a community that gets you down.
Meanwhile, if you start to wonder if you’re spending too much time on a particular game – maybe you’re starting to feel just a tiny bit addicted--keep track of your gaming hours for one week. Make sure they add up to less than 21 hours! And you may want to limit yourself to even fewer for a little while if you’re feeling too much “gamer regret.”
From Booklist
Review
“Once you read this remarkable book, you'll never look at games—or yourself—quite the same way.” —Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind
“Jane McGonigal is worth hearing out--her point in this provocative manifesto is that the energy and devotion that gamers pour into video games is a powerful force and that we are fools if we fail to harness it. . . . McGonigal marshals convincing evidence in smart and snappy prose, delivered in an old-fashioned book for techno-peasants such as me.” —Janice P. Nimura, Los Angeles Times
“Reality is Broken is a compelling exploration of why playing games makes us feel so good, and why, far from being a distraction from reality, technology-led games are increasingly providing solutions to our daily dissatisfactions. . . . Despite her expertise, McGonigal's book is never overly technical, and as with a good computer game, anyone, regardless of gaming experience, is likely to get sucked in.” —New Scientist
“Powerful and provocative . . . McGonigal makes a persuasive case that games have a lot to teach us about how to make our lives, and the world, better.” —San Jose Mercury News
“Jane McGonigal's insights have the elegant, compact, deadly simplicity of plutonium, and the same explosive force.” —Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B004G8Q1Q4
- Publisher : Penguin Books; 1st edition (January 20, 2011)
- Publication date : January 20, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 2329 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 310 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #254,895 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #131 in Video & Electronic Games
- #191 in Cognitive Psychology (Kindle Store)
- #198 in General Technology & Reference
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of games designed to improve real lives and solve real problems.
She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World(Penguin Press, 2011), SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient—Powered by the Science of Games (Penguin Press, 2015), and Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things that Seem Impossible Today (Spiegel & Grau, 2022).
She is also the inventor of SuperBetter, a game that has helped more than one million players tackle real-life health challenges such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury.
She has created and deployed award-winning games in more than 30 countries on six continents, for partners such as the American Heart Association, the International Olympics Committee, the World Bank Institute, and the New York Public Library. She specializes in games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, such as poverty, hunger and climate change, through planetary-scale collaboration. Her best-known work includes EVOKE, Superstruct, World Without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, Find the Future, and The Lost Ring. These games have been featured in The New York Times, Wired, and The Economist, and on MTV, CNN, and NPR.
A former New Yorker, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Kiyash, twin daughters, and Shetland sheepdogs.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
OK, how? McGonical wrote this book to share her thoughts and feelings about how such an admirable objective could (perhaps) be achieved. First, defining terms: She suggests there are four defining traits of a game: It has a goal, rules, a feedback system (e.g. score), and voluntary participation. I have been an avid golfer for most of my life and still play about once a week. My goal is to enjoy myself, I follow most of the rules, no longer keep score, and play willingly. According to Bernard Suits, "Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." In golf, my obstacles include insufficient skill, natural hazards, and impatience.
McGonical identifies twelve unnecessary obstacles in the real world and suggests a how a specific gaming "fix" can overcome each. For example, years ago she coined the term "happiness hacking" which is "the experimental design practice of positive-psychology research findings into game mechanic. It's a way to make happiness activities feel significantly less hokey, and to put them in a bigger social context. Fix #10: "Compared with games, reality is hard to swallow. Games make it easier to take good advice and try out happier habits."
These are among the dozens of business subjects and issues of special interest and value to me, also listed to indicate the scope of McGonigal's coverage.
o The Four Defining Traits of a Game (Pages 20-22)
o How Games Provoke Positive Emotion (28-31)
o The Four Secrets to Making Our Own Happiness (45-50)
o Why Failure Makes Us Happy (65-71)
o Happy Embarrassment (83-86)
o Epic Context for Heroic Action (100-104)
o Chore Wars (120-127)
o Jetset and Day in the Cloud (150-157)
o How Alternative Reality Games Can Create New Real-World Communities (168-173)
o The Invention of Happiness Hacking (187-214)
o Making Better Use of Gamers' Participation Bandwidth (232-246)
o The Evolution of Games as a Collaborative Platform (268-295)
o World Without Oil (304-316)
o EVOKE: A Crash Course in Changing the World (333-344)
Jane McGonigal provides an especially appropriate conclusion to her book: "Games aren't leading us to the downfall of human civilization. They're leading us to its reinvention. The great challenge for us today, and for the remainder of the century, is to integrate games more closely into our everyday lives, and to embrace them as a platform for collaborating on our most important planetary efforts. If we commit to harnessing the power of games for real happiness and real change, then a better reality is more than possible -- it is likely. And in that case, our future together will be quite extraordinary."
I share her faith and am in great debt to her for sharing in her book an abundance of information, insights, and counsel as to how all of us, sharing games together, can help to make us and our world better.
Reality Is Broken
Why Games Make Us Better and
How They Can Change The World
Reviewed by R. Murry
The world around us is changing at a fast pace. Can you remember when a TV wasn't a flat screen or a telephone wasn't a cell? What did we do without the internet? Now we can communicate with literally thousands, if not millions, of people in a flash.
A question is posed: Are games, using the internet, leading us to reinventing civilization as we know it? Ms. McGonial in her intelligent hypothesis would say yes. She is not writing about those games that the gamer goes around killing everyone and wasting precious time. What she proposes are games that are geared to resolving global problems such as famine, power, communications, social differences, etc. and making people feel happy about doing it.
In her well detailed explanations, Jane reveals how these games full fill one's need for happiness. She does this by defining numerous ways a gamer is satisfied in reaching their particular goals albeit not reaching a final conclusion while a level of completing a personal accomplishment is felt - an achievement that the gamer is happy with.
Ms. McGonial introduces us to games that will or have made an effect on social norms. I'll just mention a few: CHORE WARS is a game where you win by doing work around the house and receive rewards for your due diligence. THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS is one where you learn more about your community and smile a lot. EVOKE is a game network for social innovation. There are many others, some using the internet to change our world concept of each other.
The book is lengthy. But if you can bear with some of the detail, you'll be amazed at what Jane McGonial has written. I watched her introduction the way games and gamers can make a difference in the world on [...] I was impressed and purchased Reality Is Broken.
Here is Jane's link: [...]