Writings
On January 20, 2011, McGonigal's first book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World, was published. In this book, McGonigal looks not only at massively multiplayer online gaming and alternate reality games but also at games more widely. Using current research from the positive psychology movement, McGonigal argues that games contribute powerfully to human happiness and motivation, a sense of meaning, and the development of community.
The book was met with a favorable reception from The Los Angeles Times, and Wired, and mixed reviews from the The Independent. The book received criticism from some quarters, notably the Wall Street Journal, specifically writing that her thesis, which claims to use games to "fix" everyday life by making it seem more fulfilling and optimistic, and to provide a sense of achievement, was out of touch with the complexities of everyday life because it did not account for conflicting individual goals and desires, evil and death. The New York Times Book Review also criticized some points in her book, though to a lesser extent, calling out the lack of evidence demonstrating that in-game behavior and values translates into solutions to real world problems, such as poverty, disease and hunger.
Read more about this topic: Jane McGonigal
Famous quotes containing the word writings:
“If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be “To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one’s own writings in translation.””
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Even in my own writings I cannot always recover the meaning of my former ideas; I know not what I meant to say, and often get into a regular heat, correcting and putting a new sense into it, having lost the first and better one. I do nothing but come and go. My judgement does not always forge straight ahead; it strays and wanders.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)