Reality is Broken Chapters 7+8 (Jaclyn)
In chapters seven and eight, McGonigal discusses the benefits of alternate reality games and provides examples for how they can improve reality. An alternate reality game is an antiescapist game, meaning that the game helps a person get more out of his or her life through optional participation, “compelling goals, interesting obstacles, and well-designed feedback systems” (McGonigal 126). She opens her discussion with a description of her experience playing Chore Wars, a game designed to motivate people to complete chores by making tasks competitive and rewarding. To me, the most interesting example that McGonigal discusses is the Quest to Learn school in New York City. The school is designed to help this generation of children, who have grown up with advanced games and technology, become more engaged in classrooms. In order to do so, the school makes education more game-like through quests, leveling up, and boss levels, as opposed to assignments, letter grades, and midterms and finals. The key concept behind the education is motivating kids to learn by working hard and completing quests to improve their skill in an area and eventually level up once they have successful learned the subject. Personally, I think this school is innovative and probably quite effective in educating kids. I think a major flaw in the general education system is that students are defined by their letter grades and standardized test scores, which are not always good representations of how well a student understands something. Quest to Learn recognizes this and makes it possible for students to be successful in school through their work ethic and actual understanding of a subject.
McGonigal continues to explain how alternate reality games work. Essentially, alternate reality games provide positive feedback, social connectivity, and motivation in people’s every day life through intrinsic reward systems. They encourage people to live in the moment and enjoy the moment, like how Jetset distracts people from the stressful nature of an airport through a virtual airport experience where they can actually be productive. While I think McGonigal’s claim that “reality is pointless and unrewarding” (148) is a bit harsh, I agree with her idea that feedback is the key to intrinsic motivation. Technology is making it easier and easier to get feedback on every day tasks or goals. I find that there is an iPhone app that tracks nearly every objective, from exercising to sleeping to eating better to being more productive. Nike+ is an example of a virtual system that helps users gain the health benefits of running and the mental benefits of productivity and accomplishment by providing effective feedback.
A key point that McGonigal mentions is that we have to be careful about where we implement feedback systems in our lives. Not everything in our lives can be based around positive feedback because we will lose the ability to enjoy activities simply for pleasure. I’m glad McGonigal is recognizing that we can’t turn every aspect of life into a game, namely because reality is in fact not a game. We can’t rely on quests and achievement points to make every part of our lives enjoyable. I think McGonigal is right that some of the theory behind alternate reality games could be effective in improving our lives, but they should be used cautiously and sparingly.
Josephine Bossidy 
Rachel Helbling 
Hyewon Hong 
Ahsan Ahmad
I agree with you that our educational system is flawed (and has taught me a habit that I have to break in college). Students are being taught in a way that puts emphasis on just knowing what the test expects them to do, not actually learning the materials. As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, “When Students cheat on exams it’s because our School System values grades more than Students value learning.” This, along with the focus on negative feedback that schools implement (i.e. having just one bad grade can undermine a student’s entire grade for the marking period), makes the goal of students actually learning the material (and being able to make mistakes along the way) all but impossible.
McGonigal’s point about how ARG’s can only enforce positive feeling about an activity (like running) but not create them, was very interesting. Even the game about chores didn’t create new feeling about chores, it placed a competition on top of it, thus changing the way that chores are thought of. So, in order to truly embrace the positive reinforcement of ARG’s we, as a society, have to change how we look at certain tasks; we have to make the positive feelings, and then enhance them with ARG’s.
(or just make robots that do the work for us, which, given people’s propensity to not get along, may be easier to implement)