Can Video Games Solve Real-World Problems?

The power to make positive changes in society lies in our complex relationship with gaming.

There are a lot of problems in the world, from rebellions to earthquakes to education to climate change. The challenges that face our generation and ones to follow are significant. Our networked world, which has exponentially increased our capacity for growth and progress, has also correspondingly increased the impact of this growth on our social and natural systems. Governments and NGOs the world over are scrambling to organize and inspire wholesale change. None of the initiatives, however, be it Copenhagen meetings on climate change or the STEM education initiatives in the U.S., appear to have the good ideas or momentum to spur the foundational societal shifts necessary for a sustainable and prosperous future.

Someone has an answer, although it isn’t a politician or activist but a game designer named Jane McGonigal. McGonigal believes that activating and solidifying change in society on both micro and macro levels lies in the power of games. In her new book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, she presents a well-supported 14-step fix to translating the power of video games to make a happier, healthier, more productive and sustainable world.

Her argument is simple enough: 174 million Americans spend millions of hours playing digital games, exerting tremendous virtual effort on tasks that range from the menial to the epic. How can we apply the mechanics that drive this virtual devotion to real world situations with real world impact? Her foundational definition of a game has four components: goals, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation.

McGonigal believes that if we apply a game framework to activities such as work, education, socializing and politics, we will harness greater human potential in creativity, participation and effort. Her recurring example is Halo 3, a massive science-fiction war game developed by Microsoft. The amount of human effort expended to protect these fictional, virtual planets is astounding – millions of hours in creative, collaborative and tedious tasks alike. She suggests that if people devote so much time and effort to this activity, then let us take the same model that is obviously fulfilling and inspiring on a massive scale and layer it atop other activities, which aren’t capturing our attention in the same way.

It is a similar argument that underlies the gamification of everyday life that we discussed a few months ago in the article The Game of Life. So, too, the concern with gamification lies at the heart of my concern with McGonigal’s extremely optimistic perspective. In McGonigal’s world, people are happy when playing games and unhappy in reality, so, she suggests that we take the elements from games that make us happy and apply them to reality.

I think the problem is a lot more complicated. The rampant lack of satisfaction with reality that McGonigal continually refers to, I believe, is more of a result of the instant, interactive virtual encounters to which we have become accustomed. It is the digitally conditioned expectation that every action has clear and instant reactions, the immediacy of the impact of our behaviour, and the score boards that distill complex systems into flashing lights and bar graphs that breed our increasing frustration with reality.

Our farmer progenitors understood that when you plant something in the ground, it does not bear fruit immediately and it may not grow at all. They understood that the journey of life wasn’t necessarily a “one plus one equals two” experience. The farmers on Farmville definitely have a different relationship to the complexity of their farms and, I bet, an increasing dissatisfaction with life in general. The farmers who struggled with the land also struggled greatly with challenging day-to-day lives but, seemingly, didn’t suffer from the constant dissatisfaction that plagues us these days.

The rich experiences in life, be it love or jobs or politics, should not have clearly articulated goals or score cards. Encounters with the sides of life that are meaningful should not be distilled into a simplified game mechanic. The fundamental concern is that a generation raised suckling on interactive does not know how to handle the hard stuff. They do not know how to wait to analyze the impact of an action, appreciate that the goals of an endeavour are not always clear and that there isn’t always a choice in what responsibilities we have to undertake. In life it isn’t always clear, and I’d be fearful of a generation hooked on such a distilled encounter with reality that the only way to engage people is by such a condensed representation of reality.

The other element of McGonigal’s argument is based on the belief that games can galvanize large groups of passionate people around a real-world issue, and I agree. Using games to inspire engagement with issues and unite large groups around positive missions is exciting. Our networked infrastructure is primed for this new form of activism that goes beyond the current vogue of passively supporting issues through Facebook groups and Twitter campaigns, and it is game structures that will propel us to action. This represents a distinction between the implications of a gamified life on the personal level and a society driven to action through positive game mechanics.

All this being said, I’m a gamer. I play shooting games and sports games, and kick aside the books on my coffee table as I rest my feet and blast the heads off aliens and stab to death my best friend in virtual hand-to-hand combat. I appreciate and enjoy all the elements of games that McGonigal thoroughly documents. But I’m just not convinced that the answer to creating more fulfilled lives lies in layering these mechanics onto other aspects of reality beyond entertainment. McGonigal hints at this concern but shrugs it off, declaring that “measuring our efforts with game-like feedback systems makes it easier for us to get better at any effort we undertake.” Perhaps, but making something easier is not always a good thing especially when it comes to the ongoing complexity of the human experience.