Reality is Broken: Why Kids Prefer Games (and Whether That’s a Bad Thing)
Category : Books, Books for Mom, Technology
The other day I was going through a dusty stack of projects the boys had completed in art class last year. One piece, done by the younger son and hitherto ignored, was full of text that was cut in shapes, pasted at angles, and printed out in a variety of fonts…the same word, over and over again:
Gamer. GAMER. Gamer.
“We were supposed to pick a word that best symbolized who we are and who we want to be,” my 11-year-old explained.
Sigh. Not “Nobel laureate,” “neurosurgeon,” or “educator.” Gamer.
Of course, at his age, I also loved video games—I logged whole seasons playing Space Invaders, Ms. Pac Man, Qbert, et al. (and let us not even discuss my current Plants vs. Zombies addiction). As a teen, I didn’t actually refer to myself as a “gamer” but that was only because the term hadn’t yet been coined. Even remembering my own history, however, “gaming” has become an occasionally-divisive point between my younger son and myself. I find that when I head into nagging territory, it is generally because I would like to see a greater diversity in his activities, more reading and creative play, and less gaming in front of the television…
I’ve been asking myself: How did we get to this point? Why does my son find gaming such an integral element in his personality, and should I be worried about it? I am not a Tiger Mom by any stretch, but I have placed clear, controlled limits on our game systems, emphasized books and reading through personal example and by reading nightly to my children, taken the boys to countless museums, plays, lectures, concerts…
Part of the answer lies in my son’s personality and makeup. He is a child who has battled a complex set of challenges: attention deficits, sensory-integration deficits, speech and language delays, and an autoimmune disorder that (among other issues) predisposes him to pneumonia, “cold” abscesses, and long-bone breakage. So, yeah, there have been times (surgeries, hospitalizations, protracted illnesses) when it has been expedient on the parenting-end to encourage this gaming–but as much as possible, my long-term goal has been to help him hone and develop his unique real-world skills for use in this world.
I’ve found some possible answers to my concerns in a book I recently received for free to review: Jane McGonigal’s new release, Reality is Broken. According to McGonigal, the issue might be neither my parenting style, nor my son’s challenges, but that reality is just too easy, depressing, unsatisfying, and trivial. She claims that well-designed games are like “the perfect job,” fulfilling our most basic needs for:
- Satisfying work,
- The experience of being successful,
- Social connection, and
- Meaning—being a part of something larger than ourselves.
And, well…basically, our current reality is often lacking these core happiness components.
Book cover: Reality is Broken
I can acknowledge her main point readily: my son has an amazing set of skills to go along with his challenges–he is articulate, just, sensitive, and bubbles with energy and ideas–but his day-to-day life often demands that he sit still in a chair, listen while others speak, express understanding through writing, and tolerate a troubling middle-school moral code. His skill-set and his current reality do not easily align, and under those circumstances, escapism would naturally be attractive. I begin to wonder: Is it any coincidence that I was his age when I discovered Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and the golden age of science fiction?
However, I am not sure that I can embrace the “exodus from the real world” that McGonigal chronicles and justifies in her book–particularly in its first half, where she dwells primarily on the success of video games like Halo and World of Warcraft. I cannot, for instance, celebrate the fact that players of Halo 3 have achieved 10 billion kills, or that one in every 75 people on the planet in search of “blissful productivity” is playing Farmville, or that all of the minutes spent playing World of Warcraft cumulatively add up to 5.93 million hours—the same amount of time that has transpired since man began to walk upright. To me, these numbers reek of wasted potential and anomie.
Haters, take aim and glass me (I don’t play Halo but I have read the books–and also watched its alternative reality game I Love Bees evolve). No matter how “epic” the experience, this seems a gross waste of human time and talent and too much time to devote to something that Is. Not. Real.
McGonigal legitimizes these extraordinary numbers by quoting positive psychologist Martin Seligman: “The self is a very poor site for [establishing] meaning…the larger the entity you can attach yourself to, the more meaning you can derive.” However, I am not convinced that these gamers are choosing the most effective route to happiness. After all, cults also provide individuals with larger entities for attachment and are proof that sometimes, in seeking out happiness, our emotional mechanisms misfire.
On her website, in an effort to provide practical, scientifically-supported advice to gamers, McGonigal addresses this time issue when she suggests that players try to avoid “gamer remorse” by remaining in the “sweet spot” of 7-21 hours per week:
Studies show that games benefit us mentally and emotionally when we play up to 3 hours a day, or 21 hours a week. (In extremely stressful circumstances – such as serving in the military during war-time – research shows that gamers can benefit from as many as 28 hours a week.) But for virtually everyone else, whenever you play more than 21 hours a week, the benefits of gaming start to decline sharply.
By the time you’re spending 40 hours or more a week playing games, the psychological benefits of playing games have disappeared entirely – and are replaced with negative impacts on your physical health, relationships, and real-life goals.
I would argue (and I imagine that the American Academy of Pediatrics would agree) that children should err on the lower side of that sweet spot or else risk misappropriating time resources and missing out on vital life-skills development (as well as jeopardizing their physical health)–just some of the things I worry over as a mother…
In reading Reality is Broken, I was actually unsettled to read about some of the strategies top game-designers are using to continuously engage players. For instance, in describing an online “Museum of Humanity” created to commemorate the “dead soldiers” of Halo, McGonigal states, “Halo works hard to engage emotions to subvert reality.” She then quotes a fan as saying, “They’ve made something real out of fiction.”
I’m sorry, but isn’t that the working definition of propaganda? Isn’t it good that this is just a game?
Even McGonigal’s description of the music in Halo caused me to pause:
The score includes Gregorian chanting, a string orchestra, percussion, and Qawwali vocals, a Sufi devotional style of music intended to produce an ecstatic state in the listener. These are timeless musical techniques for provoking our bodies’ epic emotions—and video games are increasingly making use of them.
Clearly, these games are not successful by chance; they have been intentionally engineered to engage players at primal levels. Frankly, as a parent, I am inclined to question the motivations of anything that attempts to hold my children’s minds and emotions at that level of sway…
All this would seem to imply that I dislike Jane McGonigal or did not find her book compelling–nothing could be farther from the truth. I think that she is a visionary and a genius and I hope very much that she achieves her personal goal of one day seeing a game designer receive a Nobel prize.
If she does, it will not be for “shoot ‘em up” Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMPORGs) like World of Warcraft or Halo, though. It will be for work that combines her ideas on gaming with education and humanitarian efforts–games like EVOKE and World Without Oil, two alternative reality games McGonigal designed in her work with the Institute for the Future that aim to collaboratively, gamefully imagine and reinvent the human trajectory by addressing multi-decade, multi-generational problems of climate, biology, or social-dynamics. These games, almost reminiscent of brilliantly-designed educational lesson-plans, are engineered to teach children and adults planetary stewardship while promoting the development of “SEHIs” or “super-empowered, hopeful individuals.”
Hey! Now, that is the kind of gamer I would like my son to become…
Andrea has two jobs, two kids, and can't find her car keys. She was on Team Jacob, thinks Katniss and Gale would have ultimately made each other miserable, and firmly believes that fast zombies are against the rules. She adores serial commas and lives on Long Island.
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My husband is a gamer, and my 6 year old daughter is currently playing Lego Star Wars behind me. In December 2008 I completed my degree in Civil Engineering and told my husband that it was his turn, I didn’t care what is was, or how much he made, I don’t want to listen to him complain about how much he hated his job for the next 40 years.
My husband got his GED his sophmore year in High School. He was diagnosed with a Reading Comprehension Learning Disability and lost interest in school. Post GED, he bounced around, taking random jobs, attending trade school for a couple of semesters before dropping out (several times). When I told him it was his turn, he decided to make his passion a career, and enrolled in DeVry’s “Game and Simulation Programming” degree. I honestly couldn’t be happier. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this excited about school. He successfully completed Pre-Calc and English with a B, and actually quit playing World of Warcraft because the game design classes caused him to look at his games critically and he decided that he wasn’t happy with what they were doing with the storylines.
Devry’s program is classified as engineering, and when he finishes in 2015, he will have a Master’s degree, something neither of us would have even considered previously. He is full of ideas for his own games and dreams of starting his own studio. I think that maybe instead of looking for the negatives of gaming, maybe we should look for ways to use it to our advantage and motivate those who don’t work well in traditional settings.
Katie
Katie, I loved your comment! And I agree with your last sentence…I have two non-traditional learners in this house and I can absolutely see the value in using games wisely. I judge games based on what I perceive the goals and expected outcomes as being–delight, community, and entertainment are all fine goals–but they are like dessert, then–good in limited doses. If you can take that same basic recipe and add life-skill building, creative problem solving, critical thinking and improvement of the human condition, though, that seems to me to be time well-spent.
Excellent, thought-provoking post. I tried to watch the videos you posted and I found Jane McGonigal to be incredibly disingenuous: if you could substitute the word “creative play” every time she says “gaming” her speech might actually ring true.
The second video just creeped me out. A couple of years ago, I was a chaperone on a school field trip. I overheard two third grade boys having the most gory, disturbing conversation I have ever heard: “shot his head right off his body…you could see brain and blood coming out…” I asked them what they were talking about and they both gave me a dirty look and said, “Nothing.” Later, my daughter told me they were avid Halo players. Nine years old! Incidentally, those two boys were the worst-behaved kids on the field trip. It will be interesting to see how their loss of innocence at age nine will affect them as they grow up.
(Just a side note: we homeschool our children for non-religious reasons, and one of the main reasons was the disruptive, troubling behavior of other students.)
From my own anecdotal experience, I can tell you that my kids are better in every way when their gaming time is limited: they can concentrate better, they get along better with each other, they read and create more, and they even sleep better. We impose a one-hour-a-day limit on school days, and a two-hour limit on weekends. Even that seems like too much to me. But according to my kids’ friends, we’re in the minority there. Most of them have no limits at all. Meanwhile, teachers complain about an “epidemic” of ADD and behavior problems.
If humanity wants to solve the world’s problems, we need to get out there and solve them. Taking care of our planet and each other is no game!
Sparklee, I read about this study and immediately thought of those 9 year old boys you mentioned: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/video-games-and-the-depressed-teenager/
Forgive my intrusion, but I thought I might mention a few relevant factoids (just for reference – I’m not implying any bias).
For anyone reading these comments, especially the one by Sparklee above mine, an important quote from the mentioned study would be “Dr. Gentile suggested that teenagers who are experiencing problems may retreat into gaming, and that the gaming may, in turn, increase their depression and isolation. He says that parents should regulate their children’s use of video games and trust their instincts on what constitutes excessive use, something that his critics from the gaming industry also agree on.”
This is important if you consider that Halo 3, the game those two nine-year-olds were likely discussing, is rated M for Mature in the US and most other countries, which is like an R rating for movies, and means it should not be played by children under 17, mostly because of the violence. There’s a big sticker on the box that says so, and any responsible parent would have noticed it. Also the Xbox 360 consoles they played it on (and it only works on the Xbox 360) can easily be password protected to play only games up to a certain age rating (and all the games are rated), which means any parental ban would have been trivial to enforce. Similar protections exist for all other consoles and most modern PCs.
I would posit that those children’s behavior is indicative of general poor parenting, and the fact they’re playing Halo at their age is another proof of it, but the game itself is correlative more than causative.
(That being said, I’ll note that in my opinion Halo 3 is not a very good game, and the majority of its audience – if what one hears on voice chat in multiplayer is any evidence – are in fact abysmally-behaved (also exceptionally foul-mouthed) teenagers, whose parents should know better. I actually believe violence in games (to a certain extent) is far less of a problem than it might seem, especially with more mature teenagers, but I would not recommend any Halo game to any parent specifically because of its very poor social environment.)