Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by McGonigal Jane

Author:McGonigal, Jane [McGonigal, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The Penguin Press
Published: 2011-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

CRUEL 2 B KIND, like many happiness hacks, isn’t a product. There’s no software to download, no license to buy, no fee to pay. It’s meant to be a solution to a problem—the problem of how to increase the jen ratio of a shared space—and it can be adopted and adapted by anyone, anywhere. It was cheap to invent—Ian Bogost and I worked for free, and the whole project probably cost us less than five hundred dollars in expenses to playtest and launch.

The game can be played using any kind of mobile communications technology: text messaging, mobile e-mail, and Twitter are the most popular platforms for C2BK.

To help spread the hack, the Cruel 2 B Kind website includes a few essential tools. There’s a six-minute video showing the highlights of a game from start to finish, to help potential players get up to speed quickly. There’s also a one-page “cheat sheet” with rules and frequently asked questions that players can print out and bring to the game.

It’s hard to keep track of all the C2BK games that happen—game organizers don’t have to get our permission to run a game, so I rely on voluntary reports. Three years after launching the game, I still hear from new game organizers roughly every month. At the very least, C2BK has been played in more than fifty different cities, in ten countries, on four continents.

Recently, I received news of perhaps the most interesting C2BK setting yet: Summer Darkness, one of the biggest gothic festivals in Europe. The three game organizers wrote me an e-mail from the festival’s home city, Utrecht, in the Netherlands, explaining, “Ultimate goal: get the Goths (coming from all over Europe), and ‘civilians’ (non-Goths) to play together in the streets.”

Now, if any group would find straightforward happiness activities hokey, I’m pretty sure it would be goths. The gothic subculture, of course, is known for embracing dark, mysterious, and morbid imagery. There’s a kind of loneliness and alienation deeply entrenched in gothic stories, music, and style. And Summer Darkness is officially billed as a “dark underground lifestyle” festival, so it might be the last place you’d expect to see people throwing themselves into extroverted interaction with strangers, let alone cheerful expressions of gratitude and random acts of kindness.

For Cruel 2 B Kind to be an appealing activity to this community stands as excellent proof, I think, that even the most unabashedly do-good activity can be transformed into mischievous fun. It’s proof that happiness hacking works. You really can turn positive-psychology advice about what’s “good for you” into something that you really want to do.

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