I was inspired to write this post when I read Kirby's remarkably honest discussion of how she just can't bring herself to accept McGonigal's thesis that gaming is the salvation of mankind, thought she finds the optimism admirable earlier this week. Like her, I have a hard time explaining why I have a problem with what Jane McGonigal has been promoting but I think it may be crystallizing. Before it used to be an amorphous revulsion and I felt the same way about Jesse Schell's vision of the future. At least Jesse doesn't appear to be strongly advocating moving towards this future, merely analyzing what appears to be inevitable.
However, McGonigal IS advocating moving towards her vision. And I think that I am now reaching a firm understanding of exactly why I think McGonigal is wrong. To me, McGonigal is not just wrong in a minor way. She isn't just overlooking some alternative side of an argument, as Kirby may argue/believe. In my view, McGonigal is deeply and profoundly wrong. And she is wrong in a way that may actually end up being extremely corrosive to people's actual lives.
But let's look at McGonigal's argument in detail to see where the cracks lie.
First, she asserts that when people are gaming, we are the "best version of ourselves". We are cooperative, we are happy, we are fulfilled. This is partially true. When we do behave in this way, it is not because we are inherently cooperative or social, but because the game requires us to be. And just as quickly as children forget what they learned after the test is over (education reform is a whole other topic, let's not tangent), once we leave the game those habits fall away. Just like the game, they are illusory.
McGonigal points out that in the real world, we feel overwhelmed by problems. However, in the game we know problems are solvable. They are solvable because they are contrived. They are not actually challenging and you are intended to succeed. If someone made a video game where you were a starving African running around the savannah, but the game designer only populated the savannah with deadly animals but didn't include any reasonable path to survival or food, nobody would play that game. Unfortunately, the real world actually has significant problems with no easy solution that require extraordinary work to solve.
She talks about how games provide constant feedback and that is more rewarding than real life. Duh! Unfortunately, to do things in the real world you have to work. You don't actually get +1 intelligence or +1 strength just because you found a power-up. In many ways, the real world has no advancement system. The advancement system that exists either a) is profoundly unfair or b) based on randomness or c) requires a shit-ton of actual work to accomplish. Who wants to play that game? Nobody. That is why people are escaping into cyberspace.
McGonigal also makes a false equivilance between evolutionary time scales and the number of hours people spend playing video games. We have more humans in Portugal than existed for most of human history. To compare hours of video game play by millions of people today to sequential evolution over lifetimes either reveals a deep deep misunderstanding of evolution or intentional deception.
We are not evolving in any scientific sense of the term. What she is observing is reactions to false incentives. We make a contrived game where people benefit in the game from behaving a certain way, then pretend that this makes them somehow better people. Has McGonigal ever read psychological studies before? We can create games to get people to do almost anything. The prison wardens in the Sanford Prison Experiment didnt go on to become real prison wardens or torture people indiscriminately. You can make people collaborate by presenting unrealistic conditions that have no application to the real world.
She talks about Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour theory. A more incorrect application of the theory is hard to imagine. They are learning mastery level skill at solving contrived puzzles with almost no application to the real world. Additionally, most of the people I know that have put in 10,000 hours of games are demotivated and unambitious. They just want to play more games. They languish in crappy retail and food service jobs to earn enough coin to keep their WoW account active. This is not a vision of productivity, it is a vision of personal destruction.
McGonigal describes 4 "Super Powers" that gamers have.
1. Urgent Optimism
2. Social Fabric
3. Blissful Productivity
4. Epic Meaning
Urgent optimism is easy to achieve when the only goals you have are easy and you have a good chance of success every time. Take your urgent optimism and apply it to the real world, expect disappointment. That social fabric she talks about is merely the faded replacement of actual real life relationships. Most of the time, you are making friends with people whom you know in only the most shallow way.
Let me briefly step back a bit here between the first two powers and the last two, and discuss human beings. Humans have an inherent need for fulfilling work. The phrase Day Job works because we understand this basic fact. It is a job that someone is working just to make money, so that they can pursue their actual passions in the off hours. Fulfilling work involves moving towards a clear and worthwhile goal, often involving the construction of something.
In a pre-industrial society, the process of acquiring food can satisfy this requirement. Hunting, gathering, and even farming are fairly fulfilling activities. You work hard, there is a tangible result, and you find fulfillment. However as societies industrialized and labor became highly specialized, people did not have to exert themselves in this manner anymore. They were not creating a fixed product, they were making a single aspect of a large complex product. Working in a factory as a cog in the industrial process is not fulfilling work. Neither is the office work that many of us toil to complete in the post-industrial society. As a result, people have increasingly had to turn to hobbies and entertainment for fulfillment.
And that brings us back to McGonigal. Video games are a form of fulfilling work. Make no mistake, the work component of that phrase is definitely present. What other term would you use to describe games where you run back and forth locating missing items for imaginary people, building imaginary empires, and so on. The problem with this is that the work is real but the final product is just an illusion. It means nothing, it does nothing. People are spending their time creating absolutely nothing. Contrary to McGonigal's thesis that these people are being productive, they are being profoundly unproductive. People who might otherwise be engaged in creative hobbies with actual results like art, music, or even carpentry and similar constructive pursuits are instead wasting their time completing imaginary tasks in cyberspace.
I am far from the first to observe that civic engagement is in dramatic decline. People do not even know their neighbors, they don't spend as much time with their friends, and they are increasingly apathetic about their role in politics. People just don't care anymore. They are withdrawing into a private world of entertainment; spending their lives staring at softly glowing screens. Video game have become our hamster wheels.
Far from the nirvana imagined by McGonigal, I see this trend leading to a future much like the Matrix. Only the machines don't have to trick people about their role in the process, we are jumping into the pods willingly. We don't want to actually live our lives anymore, we give that up for an imaginary world where things are easy and fulfilling. Our apathy about the actual reality is having disastrous consequence on our lives.
These super powers should be relabeled as super delusions. There is a mass exodus to the virtual world because it is a mass delusion! It is designed specifically to be seductive and immersive, while providing nothing of real value. You are trapped on that hamster wheel.
McGonigal's story of Lydia is actually horrifying. First of all, it is impossible to actually solve famine this way. People cannot distract themselves into nutrition for 18 years. Apparently, they had enough food for at least most of them to survive. What this Herodotus tells is a tale of escaping from reality through delusion. Nobody was saved from famine because of playing games, but someone may have been so distracted that they didnt notice the smell of putrefaction rising from the dead around them. It reminds me of the occasional news story about someone who let their baby or pets starve because they were too ensnared in Farmville to give a damn.
McGonigal apparently believes that because she made a few games with an advocacy basis, and people responded to that advocacy, that games can make people "better". I call shenanigans. Her games are not based on actual market appeal, but on activism. Few will want to play them. Nobody is going to line up outside of Gamestop at 3am to buy "saving starving Africans, the game!" She is preaching the choir and proclaiming everyone a believer. Well, Pastor McGonigal, turn around and look at the delusional deadbeats who are not interested in your games at all.
Again and Again, she makes the same claim. I have seen her do it in several venues now. She makes the ludicrous claim that if half of us play video games for 10,000 hours somehow humanity will be transformed for the better.
Where have I have heard this logic before....
Note: Just to be clear, I have no problem with video games per se. I actually used to play them a lot and I think they are very addictive because of how they make you fulfilled. But I realized that it was a delusion and I am pulling away from them now. I don't think people should stop playing video games, but I do thing we should realize what they really are; escapist delusions. We should not be advocating people spend all their time playing video games any more than we should advocate everyone play ping-pong all day. Although, to be fair, at least ping-pong gives you a little exercise.
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