Jane McGonnigal has become a figurehead for what has become known as the “gamification” movement. This movement posits that elements of game design should be incorporated into real life. The premise is that jobs, education, exercise, social life, and essentially any other human activity can be improved by studying the human propensity to play games and tapping into that propensity to improve quality of life.

Divided into three parts, Reality is Broken opens with a section titled Why Games Make Us Happy. There fun right? Yes that is certainly part of it but the main thought behid McGonnigal’s thinking is that while games are often seen as an escape or a distraction, they actually help satisfy “the most powerful motivations we have other than our basic survival needs.”

The second and third parts of Reality is Broken – Reinventing Reality and How Very Big Games Can Change The World McGonigal looks at the ways gaming’s best aspects can be put to work in the real world, both through alternate reality game projects she’s worked on and in game-style approaches to collective problem-solving and other efforts.

And toward the end, when you’re reading about the collective thought-experiment type games and possibilities generated by people doing nothing more than playing a game, it’s difficult not to feel like there’s a real power and potential out there waiting to be unlocked by gamer-think.

The book has its fair share of detractors:

“I’m in two minds about this ambitious beast. On the one hand, the author is clearly bonkers and operating on an epic bandwidth of partial megalomania. On the other hand, her enthusiasm and spirit of uncrushable optimism is a reassuring and powerful thing“.

“This author is an anarchist and doesn’t even know it. She’s a populist and doesn’t even know it. And she’s very close to being bat-shit crazy….”

“It’s almost painfully clear that Jane McGonigal has never written anything for a wide audience before. It isn’t that her book is poorly written or that it doesn’t make its point well, but somewhere in her blissful vision of a future where gaming is the new paradigm, McGonigal forgot that if you’re trying to make a convincing point, you need to focus on that point. Reality is Broken is the worst kind of populist non-fiction because it is trying so hard to be universally relevant.“

Personally I find the negative reviews that are listed for this book to be relatively amusing. Are the hundreds of millions of gamers across the western world bonkers, anarchists and crazy as well? I would like to think that games might help reality improve (who’s reality?), but I think that is a little Utopian. All I can say is without games the world would be a sadder place and I would have more money in my pocket!

This one is well worth the read.