Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

And it turns out that what we’re really afraid of isn’t games; we’re afraid of losing track of where the game ends and where reality begins.
    If we’re going to fix reality with games, we have to overcome this fear. We need to focus on how real games actually work, and how we act and interact when we’re playing the same game together .
    Let’s start with a really good definition of game .

The Four Defining Traits of a Game
    Games today come in more forms, platforms, and genres than at any other time in human history.
    We have single-player, multiplayer, and massively multiplayer games. We have games you can play on your personal computer, your console, your handheld device, and your mobile phone—not to mention the games we still play on fields or on courts, with cards or on boards.
    We can choose from among five-second minigames, ten-minute casual games, eight-hour action games, and role-playing games that go on endlessly twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. We can play story-based games, and games with no story. We can play games with and without scores. We can play games that challenge mostly our brains or mostly our bodies—and infinitely various combinations of the two.
    And yet somehow, even with all these varieties, when we’re playing a game, we just know it. There’s something essentially unique about the way games structure experience.
    When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal , rules , a feedback system , and voluntary participation .
    The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose .
    The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By removing or limiting the obvious ways of getting to the goal, the rules push players to explore previously uncharted possibility spaces. They unleash creativity and foster strategic thinking .
    The feedback system tells players how close they are to achieving the goal. It can take the form of points, levels, a score, or a progress bar. Or, in its most basic form, the feedback system can be as simple as the players’ knowledge of an objective outcome: “The game is over when . . .” Real-time feedback serves as a promise to the players that the goal is definitely achievable, and it provides motivation to keep playing.
    Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.
    This definition may surprise you for what it lacks: interactivity, graphics, narrative, rewards, competition, virtual environments, or the idea of “winning”—all traits we often think of when it comes to games today. True, these are common features of many games, but they are not defining features. What defines a game are the goal, the rules, the feedback system, and voluntary participation. Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core elements. A compelling story makes the goal more enticing. Complex scoring metrics make the feedback systems more motivating. Achievements and levels multiply the opportunities for experiencing success. Multiplayer and massively multiplayer experiences can make the prolonged play more unpredictable or more pleasurable. Immersive graphics, sounds, and 3D environments increase our ability to pay sustained attention to the work we’re doing in the game. And algorithms that increase the game’s difficulty as you play are just ways of redefining the goal and introducing more challenging rules.
    Bernard Suits, the late, great philosopher,