Broken reality cap 1

C H A P T E R O N E
What Exactly Is a Game?
Almost all of us are biased against games today—even gamers. We can’t
help it. This bias is part of our culture, part of our language, and it’s
even woven into the way we use the words “game” and “player” in
everyday conversation.
Consider the popular expression “gaming the system.” If I say that you’re
gaming the system, what I mean is thatyou’re exploiting it for your own personal
gain. Sure, you’re technically following the rules, but you’re playing in
ways you’re not meant to play. Generally speaking, we don’t admire this kind
of behavior. Yet paradoxically, we often give people this advice: “You’d better
start playing the game.” What we mean is, just do whatever it takes to get
ahead. When we talk about “playing the game” in thisway, we’re really talking
about potentially abandoning our own morals and ethics in favor of someone
else’s rules.
Meanwhile, we frequently use the term “player” to describe someone who
manipulates others to get what they want. We don’t really trust players. We
have to be on our guard around people who play games—and that’s why we
might warn someone, “Don’t play games with me.” We don’tlike to feel that
someone is using strategy against us, or manipulating us for their personal
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amusement. We don’t like to be played with. And when we say, “This isn’t a
game!,” what we mean is that someone is behaving recklessly or not taking a
situation seriously. This admonishment implies that games encourage and
train people to act in ways that aren’tappropriate for real life.
When you start to pay attention, you realize how collectively suspicious we
are of games. Just by looking at the language we use, you can see we’re wary
of how games encourage us to act and who we are liable to become if we
play them.
But these metaphors don’t accurately reflect what it really means to play a
well-designed game. They’re just a reflection of our worstfears about games.
And it turns out that what we’re really afraid of isn’t games; we’re afraid of losing
track of where the game ends and where reality begins.
If we’re going to fix reality with games, we have to overcome this fear. We
need to focus on how real games actually work, and how we act and interact
when we’re playing the same game together.
Let’s start with a really gooddefinition of game.
The Four Defining Traits of a Game
Games today come in more forms, platforms, and genres than at any other
time in human history.
We have single-player, multiplayer, and massively multiplayer games. We
have games you can play on your personal computer, your console, your handheld
device, and your mobile phone—not to mention the games we still play
on fields or on courts, withcards or on boards.
We can choose from among five-second minigames, ten-minute casual
games, eight-hour action games, and role-playing games that go on endlessly
twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. We can play storybased
games, and games with no story. We can play games with and without
scores. We can play games that challenge mostly our brains or mostly ourbodies—and infinitely various combinations of the two.
And yet somehow, even with all these varieties, when we’re playing a game,
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we just know it. There’s something essentially unique about the way games
structure experience.
When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities,
all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedbacksystem, and
voluntary participation.
The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses
their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the
game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose.
The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By removing
or limiting the obvious ways of getting to the goal, the rules push...