10/30 Reading Response 6.0

Chapter 8 – Leveling up in Life
Chapter 9 – Fun with Strangers

Jane McGonigal’s 8th Fix is: Meaningful Rewards When We Need Them The Most. It introduces a series of games and systems that are made for the purpose of awarding points to people for different accomplishments. “Compared with games, reality is pointless and unrewarding. Games help us feel more rewarded for making our best effort.”

Two examples are games made to be played at airports and on planes: Jetset and Day in the Cloud. The justification is that there are millions of people in the world who hate flying and airports because they are frustrating. These two games give a person something to do to pass the time. It seems fairly successful at taking their mind off the fact that they are in a place that they don’t enjoy. However, this solution might only be appealing to people who have difficulty flying. Adding a point system to every activity won’t do much besides giving certain people a chance to enjoy it more. For others though, it might have the opposite effect. This begs the question, where should this kind of system be a priority? Where will it have the greatest positive effect? Avatars are a slightly different story. We have an instinctive desire to please them and attain success for their sake. In essence, we are like their parent figures. When they are pleased with us, we can tell and seek to keep them happy. When they are unsatisfied, we are often driven to try and appease them. Like McGonigal says, it is more subtle then a direct points system but can be just as effective.

McGonigal’s 9th fix is: More Fun with Strangers. “Compared with games, reality is lonely and isolating. Games help us band together and create powerful communities from scratch.”

This statement seems a bit too extreme. It almost seems to imply that people can’t form social connections in reality anymore. Obviously this is completely untrue. Games do help people reach out to one another and it may be a little easier than approaching and talking to someone in real life, but striking up a conversation with someone in real life is by no means a lost practice. There are people who are called introverted, reclusive or antisocial and McGonigal’s examples may make it easier for them to form social bonds. But these people could just have difficulty in approaching others or be quite satisfied with their own company and the company of their existing friends. I don’t believe that some community games are going to make people wholeheartedly embrace the real world and emerge from a virtual seclusion that has proven to be so much more adept at helping people form social bonds.