Author looks for meaning in games

by Jana Bennett

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REALITY IS BROKEN: WHY GAMES MAKE US BETTER AND HOW THEY CAN CHANGE THE WORLD
By Jane McGonigal
Published by Penguin Press, $26.95

Compared to real life, games (like my current affliction, “Gardens of Time”) are useless bits of time-wasting fluff so I can avoid my problems. Not so, says Jane McGonigal. “Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work. Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks.”

When I picked up McGonigal’s book, I expected not to be convinced. I had images of mostly teenage boys playing blood-and-gore video games for days on end. But McGonigal has more in mind: nine-to-five workers bored with the rote mechanical work involved in many of today’s jobs. They comprise much of the population of gamers. As opposed to games, reality does not contain a hope of success or a sense of meaning. By merging good games with real life, real life is imbued with a sense of meaning. Much of McGonigal’s book is about alternate reality games that combine the fun of game play with real-life problems like getting housework done (play “Chore Wars”), the isolation of elderly in nursing homes (play “The Comfort of Strangers”), and political scandal (play “Investigate Your MP’s Expenses”).

I’m intrigued, but I remain only partly convinced. Does meaning really derive from games? Not for Christians.

McGonigal focuses on technological games, but neglects to think about the ways technology itself isn’t aimed toward good things. She helped develop “World Without Oil” to help gamers think realistically and positively about what to do in an energy crisis. Yet McGonigal apparently missed the irony of gamers depending on computers that use energy to play the game. The author also contends games provide a “renewable resource” of open-ended exploration and feedback. This seems great, but don’t we also want a satisfying point to a game? I think of McGonigal’s example of “Free Rice,” a game that helps feed the hungry (rice paid for by advertisers). Perhaps it was the lack of real rice or confrontation with real people that made me feel I wasn’t “doing” anything. I quit playing soon after I began. Will people remain convinced by a medium that seems endless, that never quite delivers a final, real result?

Finally, I am concerned about real teenage boys (and others!) I know who play games for hours on end, disconnected from the real world. How does a game stave off antisocial behaviors when “World of Warcraft” turns out to be more engaging than “Free Rice”? Even if we play “Free Rice,” all that rice eventually has to come from somewhere. How would games promote farming or working in a soup kitchen instead of playing “World of Warcraft”? McGonigal would say that Christians merely have to develop a game that would be more enticing than the available secular games.

I’m not convinced that people will want to trade a fantasy world -- compelling precisely because fantasy isn’t real life -- for the broken world in which we live. We can learn from games, but in order to live we need something better than a game.

[Jana Bennett is writing Aquinas on the Web?: Doing Theology in an Internet Age (Continuum). She is an assistant professor in religious studies at the University of Dayton, Ohio, teaching moral theology.]

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