Reality is certainly broken. Leave aside the big problems like climate change, peak oil, political instability, and economic collapse, on a day to day basis, people are feeling alienated from their jobs, their communities, their very lives, and are fleeing into virtual worlds. Jane McGonigal makes the claim that this is not as bad as it appears, that in fact, games might save the world. Unfortunately, the book falls into the what I might call the Malcolm Gladwell (sorry, Malcolm) trap of thinking that an interesting idea and a bunch of anecdotes somehow adds up to a well-supported thesis.

McGonigal breaks the book into three sections. The first is about why we game. She brings into two unusual emotions, fiero, which is triumphant pride in victory, and naches the pleasure of helping someone else become accomplished to explain we find games fun. Games provide ample opportunities to experience these otherwise rare emotions. Games also help us bond, socially, in that they can be a shared interest, but also help us feel like part of a larger project. Just walking around World of Warcraft feels like being part of a community. The second and third part focus on Alternate Reality Games (ARG), which can be used to get people to help with everything from household chores (Chore Wars) to urban decay (Groundcrew.us). Another side of games is developing long term thinking, whether it be a World Without Oil, or SUPERSTRUCT.

Now, I'm going to be a little critical. One important question that McGonigal drops are if forms of community fostered actually as meaningful as 'traditional communities'. It's one thing if people are replacing watching Jerry Springer with gaming, it's another if it's replacing the traditional institutions of cohesion. My D&D group are some of my closest friends on campus, but it's not because we play D&D, it's because we sit around the table for four hours a week and talk, face to face (and as my players will tell you, I'm the worst for letting table talk interrupt the game.) I can't say that the virtual communities I've belong to have felt event a little bit as real.

On a related note, can games create valuable behavior? There are certainly lessons to be learned from game design about making boring tasks like work and school more interesting and intrinsically rewarding, but a fundamental facet of games is the freedom to leave. Can games replace other forms of organization with the going gets tough, or boring? Bruce Sterling said something like, "Good luck getting these twitterhead neterati to pay attention to anything long enough to govern it," in relation to the recent uprising in the Middle East. The same likely applies to game. Chapter 11, on the Engagement Economy, is one of the better ones in the book, but really deserves somebody with an economics PhD to flesh it out. Translating value between the game and the cash economy will be a perennial problem for serious game designers, and is one that McGonigal sidesteps.

Finally, there is the idea that games can reprogram us, to be be nicer, more collaborative, or wiser. Certainly, gamers have created immense things, after Wikipedia, most of the the large wikis on the web are about videogames, but questions of external value still apply. Futurism is hard work, and while you can say "crowd-sourced many-eyes good-results", I'm not sure if these kind of open scenario exercises actually inspire true reflection or wisdom, or merely reinforce pre-existing biases.

I wanted to like this book. Games are important, as the ever increasing number of game players demonstrates, but we need to have a clearer conception of what they can and cannot do. Uncritical cheerleading doesn't help; the topic deserves a better book.