In Chapter 6, McGonigal starts the talk with Halo and how it brought together millions of players under a common cause, one as convenient as a fictional boss. She discusses the immensely large scale sense of community and purpose that games are able to provide through their digital environments; this happens in reality as well but often it involves something way more serious like protests or community-wide campaigns. The virtual world is able to provide this for a significantly ‘lesser’ cost in comparison. I put lesser in quotation marks because it’s not like massive-world video games have small budgets either (for perspective, GTA V cost $285 million to produce). It’s just that they don’t have many real-life/social consequences. Luckily, these games are still able to gain insane amounts of traction and create huge communities, as evinced from Halo’s Covenant event.

McGonigal then goes to talk about the ‘epic’ phenomenon. With a very interesting touch of philosophy intertwined in her discussion, she talks about the ideas and history surrounding awe and epic meaning. According to her, there is something about epic scale and proportions that tends to attract us and our admiration. I would guess it’s just the magnificence of the moment for most of us but I would also suspect that for the few narcissists among us, it’s the rude awakening of them being infinitesimal and insignificant relative to the grandeur around them which really shakes them up and adds to the awe effect. And thanks to the staggering visuals of today’s games, this rude awakening has never been easier to put into perspective. Moving on, McGonigal further discusses how the epic worlds that have been created from large-scale collaboration could have a recursive effect: when people look at what collective effort has brought about, they are even more inclined to commit themselves to such collective effort. I found this part to be really interesting as it shows that such epic-ness has a greater use than just that of inspiring awe, it humbles people and brings them together.

Personally, I’ve experienced both the moments of massive collaboration and of epic-ness before in video games. A memorable experience was in a space MMO called DarkOrbit where an alien invasion event had players killing millions of UFO spaceships over weeks. Even rival clans teamed up—which was a moment of unparalleled shock for the community—to amass their firepower against the aliens once and for all. It was a truly impressive sight, one that only further proved the power of video games.