Reality Is Broken Review - Part 2

I finally finished Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal a few weeks ago. I reviewed the first 50 pages back in March. This focuses on the next 300 pages.

I continue to be very interested in McGongial's point of view on how games can change the world and I feel like there is a heart to her ideals about how to use games more in daily lives that is missing from a lot of the current gamification buzz.

I also find it interesting that it feels like McGonigal may be distancing herself from the gamification community or at least the term gamification. I think there is definite concern that as a gamification industry begins to grow and becomes more corporate it will be less like the type of games for change that McGonigal likes to engineer and write about and more about trying to get people to do things that they don't want to do.

I have mixed feelings about this since on one hand in my gamification research I'm coming to see gamification as less of a panacea for any problem - the initial buzz of thinking how cool it would be to gamify practically anything has worn off - and I'm starting to look for the ways that game mechanics can be applied to enhance activities that already have intrinsic value. However I still feel that the growing gamification industry will end up creating platforms and processes that will add value to employee engagement initiatives as well as change the way that companies engage with their consumers for the better.

Enough tangents! In terms of the book I liked the last 300 pages a bit less than the first 50. It was still a good read but what really captured my imagination was the core research around games and positive psychology. I did appreciate the feeling for the scale of game collaboration in the wikipedia examples and her Lydia example was a nice bookend story.

There was a nice section on Nike+ which appealed to me as a runner but unfortunately their Android app is too buggy so I'm continuing to alternate between RunKeeper and MapMyRun.