Reality is Better

"If I'm going to be happy anywhere, Or achieve greatness anywhere, Or Learn true secrets anywhere, Or save the world anywhere, Or feel strongly anywhere, Or help people anywhere, I may as well do it in reality" -Futurist Eliezer Yudkowsky (McGongial 345).  Games are a great way to achieve all of these but whats the point when it only lasts for a few moments in a game compared to a life time in reality.  We can play the games we want, we can create any future we can imagine.  We play so many games for so long that sometimes it feels like these games have become our reality: but why not play it out in the real world.

McGonigal says," We can no longer afford to view games as separate from our real lives and our real work.  It is not only a waste of the potential of games to do real good - it is simply untrue" (McGongial 354).  But many of you haven't even played a "video game" or haven'y "played" it like a gamer has.  So whats the point? Well... "games aren't leading us to the downfall of human civilization.  They're leading us to its reinvention" (McGonigal 354).  If you think about it the great challenge of today is to integrate games more closely into our everyday lives, and to embrace them as a platform for collaborating on our most important aspects of our lives (McGonigal 353-354).

I play games to help myself learn about how to improve my real quality of life.  Games make us happy for a reason.  They aren't something we use waste time but something we use to fill our time.  Massive multiplayer games can help save the real world - by helping to generate more participation bandwidth for our most important collective minds.  Someone just like you.

We've come together to create new things.  Gaming isn't something that is to be looked down upon but something to be looking forward too.

Games have affected in the real life.  People do things like creating artwork or create music for these games.

Games have slowly found a way into our lives and people are finally starting to realize it isn't a time filler.  It's a part of life.

All the game time I've played has really changed my life for the better.  Through ups and downs games have always helped me get through tough moments as well as make happy moments into great moments.  I've taught you all I can about games and I hope one day that you will pick up a game and enjoy them as much as the gaming community and I have.  Do you think gaming will change our futures for the better or the worse?

Citation: McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Collaboration Superpowers

Part of why playing video games is so fun is because it feels like you have superpowers.  By the age of twenty-one, the average young American has spent somewhere between two and three thousand ours reading books - and more than ten thousand hours playing computer and video games.  Think that's crazy? Well think of it like this... to put those numbers in perspective, ten thousand hours is almost exactly the same amount of time an average American student spends in the classroom from the moment they start fifth grade all the way though high school graduation - if they have perfect attendance (McGongial 266).

One of the biggest traits you have to have both in real life and while gaming is collaboration.  Collaboration is a special way of working together.  "It requires requires three distinct kinds of concerted efforts: cooperating (acting purposefully towards a common goal), coordinating (synchronizing efforts and sharing resources), and co-creating (producing a novel outcome together)" (McGonigal 268).  Online gamer's are increasingly doing both collaborating while actively opposing them.  Thanks to two factors: the fundamentally collaborative aspects of playing any good game, and new game technologies and design patterns that support entirely new ways of working together. (McGonigal 268).  Gaming really just comes down to shared concentration, synchronized engagement, mutual regard, collective commitment, and reciprocal rewards.  Have you done this in any of your games?  Whether they are virtual or real life these things are always present.

Spending a long time playing this game when I should be studying so I can get better at this game. LOL

Creating a team and fighting together as a whole working on our communication skills so that we can outsmart the enemy team

Citation: McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

~Leveling Up in Life~

How can alternate realities make difficult activities more rewarding?  I'm constantly asked that by my friends and family and I have finally found a answer thanks to Jane McGonigal author of Reality is Broken.  Many people think of gamer's as these anti-social people who are "nerds" and don't do anything else besides game all day.  Well that is mostly true, truth be told, but compared with games, reality is pointless and unrewarding.  Games help us feel more rewarded for making our best efforts.

McGonigal states, "If I have one regret in life, its that my undead priest in smart than I am.  Technically speaking, its true: if you were to add up every A I've gotten in my real life, through junior high through graduate school, the total still wouldn't come close to my World of Warcraft character's intellect stat (McGonigal 146).  But I guess you can't measure how much smart you really get once you finish school, can you?

Many of you guys are in club or some type of sport and that can be very stressful and out of control.  Being out of control is a fundamentally stressful feeling.  "Researchers have shown that it takes a huge hit on both our happiness and our physical health.  And it's not just in the moment that we're negatively affected" (McGongial 149).  Feeling that negative feeling that we often experience makes us feel endangered or powerless, our immune system suffers as well and we experience higher levels of anxiety, depression, and pessimism for the rest of our lives (McGongial 149-150).

Many of my friends say I'm this happy person and I can be fun to be around, but I can what people don't know is that I can actually be a pretty depressed person.  I just don't show it.  But games, of course, help me feel like I am in control.  Real gameplay (LARP) is always considered voluntary meaning that while progressing towards our goals and getting better at a game creates a sense of power and mastery.

My character is obviously smarter than me with a 56,305 Intelligence Stat

Playing something over and over helps give you a sense of mastery and in the end  makes you feel better because you have control over what you are doing.

Citation: McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Becoming A Part of Something Bigger Than Ourselves!

I previously stated that gaming is just four defining traits: goals, rules, voluntary participation, and feedback system.  Generally 99% of the time, those four traits are what make a game fun for people to play over and over for long periods of time each day.  But think about this and I really mean think about it, you probably wouldn't be playing this game, digital or not, without someone out there encouraging and supporting you.  Same thing with video games.  There are so many communities out there who have the same interests as you and in reality that one person who got you hooked on the game, just brought you into a community so much bigger than you can even imagine.  Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken, basically described why people enjoy gaming so much and why its worth it.

McGonigal begins off by saying, "Whenever I walk through the front door of my apartment, I enter an alternate reality.  It looks and works just like regular reality, with one major exception: when I want to clean the bathroom, I have to be really sneaky about it." (McGonigal 119)  She does this because her and her husband play a game called Chore Wars and based on what you do earns you points and experience (exp).  "We need to engineer alternate realities: new, more gameful ways of interacting with the real world and living our real files." (McGonigal 115)  So why not?  Compared with games, reality is trivial.  Games make us a part of something bigger and give epic meaning to our actions.  Epic is one of the most important concepts in gamer culture today.  That word is how many people describe their most memorable, gratifying, and craziest experiences that will send a shiver down your spine. (McGonigal 98-99)  That's the number one reason why gamers love epic games.  It's not just that bigger is better, but waht bigger is more "awe-inspiring."

One game I like to play is Clash of Clans or "COC."  In this game you build up your base and train your troops to attack other people to earn money and resources.  You can also join up with other people in what you call clan and have a community of your friends and clan mates battle against another clan for the ultimate reward.

This is my cousins base.

This is my base.

Another game I play is Maplestory.  Maplestory is an Mass Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) where you train solo or together with friends and the maple community.  In this game you do quests to achieve higher ranking and level up to explore new places.  Or you can party up with friends and conquer party mode quests together.  In this game the possibilities are endless.  Just depends on your imagination. 

In this game I am a level 163 Arch Mage (Fire Poison) and I teamed up with my friends and family to conquer different Dimensions.

In League of Legends I've teamed up with some friends at our school and we compete against other high schools.  Together we have team meetings and we talk about who is going to play what position and what our team's strategy is.  We like to bring this game into real life so that we can determine how things are going to play out and how can we as a team dictate the pace the game moves.

In this picture this is my individual rank in the gold division.  I compete within this small community of people to rank up and improve my stats. 

This picture shows my friends and I creating a team to go against other schools in nation wide competitions. 

It all comes down to the fact that video games can help strengthen your social connections with friends and family as well as forge new ones with other people.  Whether you are playing with friends and family or complete strangers you are still apart of a community bigger than you think.  This may sound stupid to you but a lot of people enjoy doing this because of all the excitement and fun.  You may not play video games but I bet a lot of you do sports or other group games and what not.  So tell me, how much of your life is digital and how much of your digital life is brought to the real world?

Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year!!

Citation: McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Gaming? Why Do We Do It?

I consider video gaming as something that has always been apart of my life.  Or at least what I can remember!  When I was seven years old when my older cousin introduced me to a game called League of Legends, which was pretty much my gateway into gaming.  Playing everyday with my friends, I never really know why I keep coming back.  Maybe it was the thrill of winning or the excitement my friends bring to the game.  Who knows?  However, Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken, gave me another reason as to why I enjoy gaming, and has made some pretty thought provoking theories.

McGonigal states that, "When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal (the goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve), rules (the rules place limitations on how players achieve the goal), a feedback system (the feedback system tells players how close they are to achieving that goal), and voluntary participation (the voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback)." (McGonigal 21)  Through her explanations of each trait, it explains why gamer's come back each day.  But does it really?  Any well-designed game - digital or not - is an invitation to tackle an unnecessary obstacle.  As gamers we understand the game in the "light" but we are "afraid" of playing the game in the "dark" where  we reveal our irrational fears.  We don't want to game the system, we just want to play the game. (McGonigal 27)  We will play until we exhaust ourselves of our own abilities, or until we can overcome the challenge.  Gamers continue to play games because there is nothing trivial about playing a good game.  The game MATTERS! (McGonigal 28)

I find myself constantly trying to escape reality to find something that suits me more.  Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work. (McGonigal 28)  I would rather find myself struggling in a game than struggling to do something that was assigned to me.  I want to have that sense of control over what I'm doing, and that's what gaming gives me to.  I can dictate the outcome of a game based on my performance and how well I perform.  With a goal set in mind and all the positive enforcement the game gives it makes me want to continue giving it my all.


The positive reinforcement of seeing myself get a Penta Kill (killing all five people) by myself gave me that satisfaction of fulfilling a goal made me want to set a new goal and keep playing.

Jackie Nguyen is my inspiration for this moment

In this picture you can see I got extremely fed (being able to predict your opponents patterns and taking advantage of it) and was able to dictate the outcome of the game.  Giving me this sense of control over what I am doing and have the positive feedback the game is giving me to continue playing.

Heidi Fonua is a gigantic KSer (Kill Stealer)

In this picture you can see even though I still lost the match.  I was able to complete a goal and have some type of positive reinforcement to make me want to keep playing.

Heidi distracted my focus and I got shot down. :(

All in all, the reasons I play video games is to challenge myself through exciting means with positive reinforcement.  So tell me, how has playing these games, digital or not, help you get through real life situations?

Citation: McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.