Why Gaming is Good

McGonigal’s central thesis is this: Reality is discouraging, unproductive, disconnected, and broken in about a dozen other ways. Meanwhile, electronic games are already “fulfilling genuine human needs,” she writes, in ways that our real lives often fail to. If lessons learned from Call of Duty or Wii boxing were applied to everyday life, could reality be “fixed”? Could day-to-day drudgery be slayed? “Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at” and make us “a part of something bigger.” Make life more game-like, and completing an onerous task becomes cake.