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

Author: Jane McGonigal

Narrator: Julia Whelan

Unabridged: 13 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 07/22/2025

Synopsis

“McGonigal is a clear, methodical writer, and her ideas are well argued. Assertions are backed by countless psychological studies.”—The Boston Globe “Powerful and provocative … McGonigal makes a persuasive case that games have a lot to teach us about how to make our lives, and the world, better.”—San Jose Mercury News  “Jane McGonigal’s insights have the elegant, compact, deadly simplicity of plutonium, and the same explosive force.”—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother  A visionary game designer reveals how we can harness the power of games to boost global happiness. With 174 million gamers in the United States alone, we now live in a world where every generation will be a gamer generation. But why, Jane McGonigal asks, should games be used for escapist entertainment alone? In this groundbreaking book, she shows how we can leverage the power of games to fix what is wrong with the real world—from social problems like depression and obesity to global issues like poverty and climate change—and introduces us to cutting-edge games that are already changing the business, education, and nonprofit worlds. Written for gamers and non-gamers alike, Reality Is Broken shows that the future will belong to those who can understand, design, and play games.

About Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal is the director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future. Her work has been featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times and on MTV, CNN and NPR. In 2009, BusinessWeek called her one of the ten most important innovators to watch. She has given keynote addresses at TED, South by Southwest Interactive, and the Game Developers Conference and was a featured speaker at The New Yorker Conference.

Reviews

Goodreads review by MJ on February 08, 2011

I’m in two minds about this ambitious beast. On the one hand, the author is clearly bonkers and operating on an epic bandwidth of partial megalomania. On the other hand, her enthusiasm and spirit of uncrushable optimism is a reassuring and powerful thing. So. What to do? I love the premise of this bo......more

Goodreads review by Kressel on August 25, 2016

As I said in my review of Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do, my oldest son is a computer game addict, but my second son has a different approach to gaming: he's a designer. He doesn't get as much time on the PSP as his older brother bec......more

Goodreads review by Barb on August 19, 2016

I"m not a gamer, but I am a player of games from sports to board games to game-format lessons for students. Games are fun. Games are motivating. Games in cultures are thousands of years old. This book is about computer and video games. Video games have a bad rap in the U.S. The media has bombarded t......more

Goodreads review by Julie on April 17, 2014

I find all the negative reviews that are listed for this book to be relatively amusing. It seems glaringly obvious from those who are providing these reviews that they are not part of the 176 million gamers currently residing in the western world. I also find their conclusions and reasons for dislik......more

Goodreads review by Chip on May 20, 2022

The first half of the book is amazing. I learned a lot about what made a game good, what we can learn from that to make real life work more exciting, what game developers know about engineering happiness. The second half of the book veered towards speculation, which was too anecdotal and fleeting to......more

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