Story Board on Prezi
In Reality is Broken, Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal there is an impressive amount of statistics about the amount of time the average gamer plays video games. In fact, the amount of time is so impressive that it has led Jane McGonigal to come to the conclusion that reality is broken and therefore people have turned to virtual worlds to satisfy their worldly needs.
From this idea, McGonigal further discovered that there is a ridiculous amount of human participation hours being committed to playing a single game: World of Warcraft. On average gamers are committing 210 participation hours per week to playing WoW. This visual is meant to be a story board of a greater visual that has the potential to show an overwhelming statistic and what that number could mean if it were applied to worldly problems outside of gaming.
Included after the jump is a review of the book and how McGonigal's evaluation that video games and gamers are the future of our society can be applied to professional writers. This review is intended for all audiences, but is specifically geared towards helping people outside of the profession to understand the specifics of how a professional writer creates and designs successful documentation.
Reality is Broken: A Review and Comparison
In Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken, she shows the reader that “the future will belong to those who can understand, design, and play games.” In a future where video games are becoming an integral part of everyday life and advanced thinking, one must ask where this puts professional writers. I believe, after having read Reality is Broken, that people involved with the video game industry and professional writers have been doing the same job for years, just under different terms. Without having realized, McGonigal has written a book that serves a dual purpose; introducing the world to the idea that gamers hold the key to advanced thinking and also unintentionally describing the most basic aspects of what is involved with being a professional writer. From this book we can see that the reasons why video game developers and gamers are revolutionizing the ways we think are on par with the reasons that professional writers are becoming a vital part of the workforce.
Why Video Games are Successful
Throughout the first two sections of the book McGonigal is setting the reader up to understand why it is gamers have chosen to break away from reality and immerse themselves in fictional worlds. In sticking with her title for the book, she argues that reality is in fact broken and no longer satisfies the needs of advanced thinkers; i.e. the gamers. “Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not (4).” Games have become so efficient at doing the job they set forth that people are moving their lives from the real world and are spending more time out of their day playing games in a virtual world.
In moving to the third part of the book, McGonigal elaborates on what it is that makes video games so efficient at their intended job: they are able to effectively engage their audience. She achieves this by explaining “How Very Big Games Can Change the World;” i.e. how gamers have become a “valuable–and largely untapped– source of participation bandwidth (232).” The best example of how gamers’ untapped value can be effectively utilized is through crowdsourcing. “Crowdsourcing is a way to do collectively, faster, better, and more cheaply what might otherwise be impossible for a single organization to do alone (220).” But, as McGonigal points out, in order for crowdsourcing to be effective the organization has to be able to make the crowdsourcing interface as engaging as possible. By engagement, McGonigal doesn’t mean just being able to hold the users attention for a certain span of time, but instead means actively figuring “out how to capture the mental energy... (228)” of the intended audience.
This concept is easily applied to professional writing and is becoming a key component to creating successful documentation. While we always intend to engage our audience, we do not always think: to what level do we want to them be engaged? McGonigal argues that “if crowdsourcing is the theory, then games are the platform.” This is something that professional writers need to take note of because video games incorporate many different aspects that allow for successful engagement in crowdsourcing projects. Video games create in-depth worlds that allow their players to feel actively involved with. Professional writers can look to this and find inspiration for creating and designing documents that revolve around the engagement level their audience desires.
Why McGonigal is Wrong
While McGonigal is explaining why video games are the key to making crowdsourcing effective, she dives into reasoning why video games provide an infinitely renewable resource for gratification. As a part of her reasoning she gives an actual job listing for a position at Bungie. The listing reads:
“Do you dream about creating worlds imbued with real value and consequence? Can you find the fine line between a reward that encourages players to have fun and an incentive that enslaves them? Can you devise a way for a player to grow while preserving a delicate game balance? If you answered yes to these questions, you might want to polish up your résumé and apply to be Bungie’s next Player Investment Design Lead.
The Player Investment Design Lead directs a group of designers responsible for founding a robust and rewarding investment path, supported by consistent, rich and secure incentives that drive player behavior toward having fun and investing in their characters, and then validates those systems through intense simulation, testing and iteration (244).”
She goes on to say that “this kind of job doesn’t yet exist outside of the game industry (244).” As a professional writer, this struck me as very odd. McGonigal has blatantly outlined all of the most important roles that a successful professional writer needs to fill. The Player Investment Design Lead (PIDL) has to read their audience so well that they are able to “enslave” the players’ mind while simultaneously making the player feel enjoyment. In the same way, when creating a successful document a professional writer must be hyper aware of their audience and the audience’s needs. If effective, the professional writer will have captured their audience’s attention all the while keeping the audience so riveted that they don’t notice that their minds have been “enslaved.”
The PIDL also has to be creative enough that they can construct elaborate in-game worlds that reflect real world “value and consequence.” The professional writer has to be able to market their documents to their audience in a way that is not only creative, but innovative enough that the audience feels like they are experiencing something they have never seen before; even if the document is based off of ideas and concepts that are trending. In this way the professional writer has to create a “world” for the document to exist in while still holding to values (read: ideas) that we are already familiar with.
The job listing also states that the PIDL needs to “validate those systems through intense simulation, testing and iteration (244).” The intricate and carefully created world that the PIDL designs cannot just be thrown into a game and deemed successful. The system has to go through beta stages, rigorous user testing, and then revised before it can actually be called complete. The process is the same for the professional writer. In devising a document, the professional writer always has their intended audience in mind, but this does not mean that they successfully reach the audience on their first attempt. Documents are tested, usability tests are conducted, and the work done has to be revised before it can be comprehensive enough to be implemented in real world situations.
Conclusion
Readers of this book, and especially this review, should be able to take away that video games are effectively achieving levels of engagement that is becoming harder to attain every day. The implications of this is that, as professional writers, we should be able to see what makes the video game so successful and be able to apply it to our processes while making documentation. Readers should also be able to take away a further and more relatable understanding of just what it is professional writers do. There is a perceived “mystery” to how successful documentation gets created and by looking at how video game developers create a prosperous and engaging scenario we can learn more about the process a professional writer takes to create and design effective documentation.
Source
McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is Broken, Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York, NY: Penguin Pr.
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