In Chapter 13 of Reality is Broken, McGonigal discusses how games help people become expert collaborators. She expresses the idea from Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers that a person becomes an expert in some field once he or she has practiced that field for 10,000 or more hours. Collaboration is made up of people’s cooperation, coordination, and co-creation. McGonigal argues that by playing multiplayer games (and sometimes even single player games, like Spore), players make a good game for each other by putting forward their maximum effort to defeat an opponent either working together or working against each other, which helps them develop expert collaborative skills. I think that McGonigal makes a solid point here. Although I haven’t had much experience playing multiplayer video games besides playing wii sports, mario kart, or smash brothers with my brothers (and losing terribly every time), I see a clear connection in her argument with sports. While playing a team sport, if you want to be an excellent team player, you work your hardest and do what you do in order to help your teammates be successful. If you aren’t putting in full effort one game, it reflects badly on you and your teammates and coaches, which is unfair. Players have to collaborate effectively in order to bring out the best possible results for the team. As far as the competitive nature of sports, a win is not nearly as satisfying when you easily beat an opponent. Better games come from two teams competing aggressively for a win, keeping the game close and intense.

While I agree that games do help people develop collaborative skills, her expression that the Olympics are broken and her game to try to fix the games kind of threw me off. I think that the Olympics are a great way to bring the world together as athletes compete for Gold Medals, and just because only a small percentage of the world actually plays in the games doesn’t mean that a much larger percentage are deeply invested in the games and their results, which ultimately brings people into collaboration. Maybe it’s just because I’m a big fan of the Olympics and not a big fan of McGonigal’s self-created games, but I don’t agree that the Olympics are “broken.”

In Chapter 14, McGonigal brings all of her arguments together to express how she thinks games can change the world. She introduces the idea of planet craft and how people can change the world through “taking a long view,” “ecosystems thinking,” and “pilot experimentation.” She expresses that games that present future potential problems help players use their imaginations to create realistic potential solutions for the issues. She uses the examples of World Without Oil, Superstruct, and EVOKE, all of which to present very realistic future problems, to show how games can produce players who are SEHIs, or “super empowered hopeful individuals.” Although the name is sort of cheesy, she basically means players who believe that they can change the world. I think that McGonigal may have a point about how games that encourage planet craft may produce players that feel like they can positively change the world. However, the main issue would be spreading this sort of drive into more than a couple thousand players of some of her games. In order to change the world, there needs to be awareness about the world’s problems, motivation to solve the world’s problems, and participation in solving the world’s problems. McGonigal’s games could potential contribute to more awareness, motivation, and participation, but I don’t think getting more people to play her planet craft games would be a time efficient method of changing the world.