Reality is Broken

Jane McGonigal begins her new book Reality Is Broken : "Gamers have had enough of reality. They are abandoning it in droves." And that is all the farther I got on my first read. I was distracted, as I often am when reading, by an epiphany. Those lines pulled together a lot of things that were going on in my head making sense and giving focus to a number of disparate ideas. Let me explain.

I have been wondering for years why people would spend so much time in virtual worlds such as Second Life or MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft.  Certainly they are fun. But bowling is fun and people don't spend every waking moment in the bowling alley. People don't recount stories of their first experience bowling turning into a seven hour marathon as Tom Bissell does with his first encounter with Fallout3 in Extra Lives. Why is this?

Well, here is the epiphany that struck me. In the 18th century people were leaving all corners of the world to come to America. They were leaving their homes, their families, their traditions, and their cultures to come a new place.  Why? Because the old world was broken. It did not provide them with the opportunities they needed to live gainful, produce and satisfying lives. They left behind everything familiar in exchange for an opportunity to grow and seek satisfaction.

Today, the place we call reality, or real life, or the real world is not providing people with the opportunities they need to live fully satisfying lives. So, they are escaping to virtual worlds, game worlds and games. Instead of seeing a mass migration from the old world to the new world we are seeing a mass migration from the real world to the virtual world. It is the same phenomenon, and probably one that have been going on since our ancestors left Africa 50,000 years ago. Searching for a better life. That is the reason. And that was my epiphany.