Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal

It took me a little while to read this one. Sometimes life gets in the way of reading a good book, and Reality is Broken is a good book. Jane McGonigal is a famous game designer with a great deal of experience in experimental game design (Check out some of her TED talks to see what she's all about). In Reality is Broken Jane talks about some of her experimental designs. She also touches on the underlying components that make games such great tools for behavior change. That is the premise after all: using games and game features to improve how we interact with the world around us.

Part III: How Very Big Games Can Change the World is my favorite section of McGonigal's book. In this section, Jane talks about ten game designs that utilize crowdsourcing to solve real world problems. A few of these designs include inviting people to browse through expense receipts from members of government to identify political scandal and engaging individuals to practice planet craft to plan for the next 1000 years of life on Earth. Another amazing example involves using the idle computing power of networked Playstations to run protein folding simulations in order to better understand how certain diseases like Alzheimer's and various cancers manifest.

Crowdsourced problem solving on a global scale sounds epic for lack of a better word. It reminds me of the premise of any movie where there is an impending life ending threat and humanity has to put its differences aside in order to survive against all odds. Unfortunately, I think it really will take a global threat in order for the world to come together and put our collaboration super powers into full use. Necessity is the mother of invention after all, and nothing necessitates global collaboration like a global threat. There are too many distractions for the world to come together otherwise (politics, religion, greed, etc.).

Even though I believe the global community is a little ways off from adopting game logic to solve its major problems, it is still comforting to know that people like Jane McGonigal exist to paint the picture and lay the ground work for us to join in on when we finally come to our senses. Thanks Jane for a good read, and for planting the seeds for a better future.