Hacking Reality from Enrico Gatti on Vimeo.
After rushing through Rushkoff’s awesome book on the importance of understanding and practicing the art of coding (in all its forms and shapes) to make sure that we, as global citizens and thinkers, still get to sit at the table of those who understand society, its tools, trends and needs, and of those who program its future accordingly, I got completely raptured by video-gaming as a way of possibly ‘coding’ a form of reality that’s fake but perfect (i.e. the virtual one typical of a game) into a more real (yet improved) version of our very own, everyday reality.
- uh?! -
Let me explain.
Probably because of the depth and breath of Rushkoff’s read, I almost immediately started to imagine what gaming would look like, being that I spend so much time playing, if it could be pulled beyond its traditional constraints of virtuality and playfulness into a society (the real one) capable of finally blurring the fundamental division between what’s real and what‘s not...to make things better, that is.
Well, as it turns out: lots of people have been thinking about this already, and for quite a while now. That’s because gaming is apparently a pretty big deal.
According to Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello, EA projects there will be 3 billion gamers globally by next year, up from 1.5 billion now and 200 million in 2000. By hours spent, gaming also trumps most major web properties. U.S. consumers spend 15 million hours per week gaming vs. 9.5 million hours on AOL. Gaming is the No. 1 category in the iPhone, iPad and Android app stores. It's also the top app category on Facebook. Even the first game offered on the grey-screened Kindle outsold the top book. Although a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than 6 million people in China who spend at least twenty-two hours a week gaming, the equivalent of a part-time job. More than 10 million “hard-core” gamers in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany spend at least twenty hours a week playing. And at the leading edge of this growth curve, more than 5 million “extreme” gamers in the United States play on average forty-five hours a week.
In other words: gaming is big...
But, who are these gamers?
Here’s the interesting way in which Jane McGonigal describes gamers in her book:
They are the nine-to-fivers who come home and apply all of the smarts and talents that are underutilized at work to plan and coordinate complex raids and quests in massively multiplayer online games like Final Fantasy XI and the Lineage worlds. They’re the music lovers who have invested hundreds of dollars on plastic Rock Band and Guitar Hero instruments and spent night after night rehearsing, in order to become virtuosos of video game performance. They’re the World of Warcraft fans who are so intent on mastering the challenges of their favorite game that, collectively, they’ve written a quarter of a million wiki articles on the WoWWiki—creating the single largest wiki after Wikipedia. They’re the Brain Age and Mario Kart players who take handheld game consoles everywhere they go, sneaking in short puzzles, races, and mini-games as often as possible, and as a result nearly eliminating mental downtime from their lives. They’re the United States troops stationed overseas who dedicate so many hours a week to burnishing their Halo 3 in-game service record that earning virtual combat medals is widely known as the most popular activity for off-duty soldiers. They’re the young adults in China who have spent so much play money, or “QQ coins,” on magical swords and other powerful game objects that the People’s Bank of China intervened to prevent the devaluation of the yuan, China’s real-world currency. Most of all, they’re the kids and teenagers worldwide who would rather spend hours in front of just about any computer game or video game than do anything else.
So if gaming is so big and gamers are such passionate people who decide to spend so much time playing, what’s in it for them really? Why is it that gaming is so fundamentally addictive and luring to them that they just can’t stop?
A great way of looking into that would be understanding what a (video)game actually is...
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. [Jane McGonigal, 2010]
Bernard Suits’s definition of a game is even more interesting and useful:
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
In other words, playing is really just...working!
The type of work though that you love, that makes you focused, positive and willing to reach a goal, accomplish something amazing, create something better, however difficult or even impossible it may look. That inspiring, deep feeling that uplifts you, rewards you and pushes you forward when you know you’re doing something unique, authentic and absolutely epic.
The question is then: why is it that it is so rare to feel happy and achieved in the real reality than in the virtual one?
A reason could be that... where, in the real world, can you find that gamer sense of being fully alive, focused, and engaged in every moment? Where is that gamer feeling of power, heroic purpose, and community? Where are the bursts of exhilarating and creative game accomplishments? Where is the heart-expanding thrill of success and team victory? While gamers may experience these pleasures occasionally in their real lives, they experience them almost constantly when they’re playing their favorite games.
Some of the game design leaders in the field feel that reality doesn’t quite motivate us as effectively, that reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential, and that it really wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy. [hmm... true that!]
But, could it be?
What if we used what we know about gaming to fix our own reality? What if we started living our lives like in the video-games, solving problems in the real world with the enthusiasm, self-confidence and optimism typical of a gamer?
Again some people seem to lead the way here in new inspiring ways:
I see a future in which games continue to satisfy our hunger to be challenged and rewarded, to be creative and successful, to be social and part of something larger than ourselves. But I also see a future in which the games we play stoke our appetite for engagement, pushing and enabling us to make stronger connections—and bigger contributions—to the world around us.
“It’s inevitable: soon we will all be gamers.” We have to start taking this growing gamer majority seriously. We are living in a world full of games and gamers. And so we need to decide now what kinds of games we should make together and how we will play them together. We need a plan for determining how games will impact our real societies and our real lives.
Game design, like coding, isn’t just a mere technical skill you acquire when studying computer science. Not today, in a society that is incredibly dominated, shaped and influenced both by what’s programmed for us in the real as well as in the virtual world.
Gaming isn’t just a way of passing time anymore. It’s got so much more potential than that. We can use it to hack reality. It’s our 21st century way of working together to accomplish change. As Antoine de Saint Exupéry once said:
As for the future, your task is not to see it, but to enable it.
Games, in the twenty-first century, will be a primary platform for enabling the future.
