“The world without spirit  is a wasteland. . . . What is the nature of a wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. “ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Reality is broken, and video gaming may well provide a way for fixing it, according to Jane McGonigal, a game designer and author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. The subtitle actually sums up the argument for the book. McGonigal argues that playing video games can help people find their core strengths. Essentially she believes that one can use video gaming as positive psychology therapy to learn how to become more optimistic, proactive, engaged, and creative in solving real-world problems. Not surprisingly the heroes in her book are the video game designers. She believes they can inspire people to give their lives more meaning and lead them to believe they are participating in epic actions, epic lives. She also suggests that people are likely to be more optimistic if they create alternate reality games in real life based on their favorite superhero mythology.

However, it is the subject of the main title, this  so-called“brokenness” of reality that provides a real clue to the mythology of  our time.  Reality (that is, real life) is disappointing, and in a series of bold statements, McGonigal tells us just how reality is failing us and why games are better. Here’s a sample:

 “Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with the voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use.” Behind this statement is the sad and abiding idea that our real lives are boring, our real work an involuntary burden of unwanted tasks done at someone else’s bidding. “We are wasting our lives,” McGonigal explains.

And again:

“Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.” Reality it seems  is  unstructured and offers few if any opportunities for satisfying work. Again, the work of our everyday lives is inherently tedious and the goals often ill-defined and hard to figure out.

One last sample:

“Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build strong social bonds and lead to more active social networks.” Real life is isolating, the author says. She cites the demise of extended communities in our everyday lives and refers to Robert Putnam’s landmark work Bowling Alone (2000) about the collapse of organizations and civic participation in the latter part of the twentieth century.

McGonigal argues that video gaming and alternate reality games can be powerful paths to help boost happiness, improve problem-solving and perseverance, and even provide sparks of a sense of community, all of which can
be applied to real-world experiences. To be sure, games of all sorts can be fun and give players a change of pace and respite from the responsibilities of life. But McGonigal goes way beyond the fun part. She is right in saying that we need to take games more seriously, that they are not just an evil force in society offering opportunities for people to waste their time or play incessantly and additively. But it is questionable whether she is also right in claiming that
video games are truly transformational and provide positive experiences that can influence the way people act and think in their real lives away from the video game screen. Her evidence is anecdotal and largely unconvincing.

In the end, it is McGonigal’s perspective is truly askew. Reality isn’t broken. It’s the relationship between people’s inner lives and their external reality that is out of whack. Life is complex, messy, full of demands, disappointments, inconveniences, and responsibilities. Virtual worlds and  gmes, on the other hand, offer more structure, clearer goals, and hence new ways to feel successful and to communicate. But this does not by any means lead to authentic living. In the mid-1980s, the renowned mythology expert Joseph Campbell observed that many people were leading inauthentic lives. He said that they weren’t connected to their own inner spirit. Nor did they have a sense of the fundamental mystery of life in general. Without a sense of who they really were and their place in the universe, it was not possible to be genuinely engaged with others. And all this basis for leading an authentic life, Campbell
wrote repeatedly, is what a living myth can provide.

Reality may seem broken for video gamers because the life on the screen is so vivid, so complete in its opportunity for vicarious heroism. It is  the land of superheros and super tasks, mythological in the sense that  characters and events are larger than life. But these things are not representative of a living mythology, which would inspire inward illumination and outer wonder through its symbols and narratives about modern life. “Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters [and here Joseph Campbell meant slaying the monsters within the individual] is slaying the dark things.” Campbell told Bill Moyers. “Myths grab you somewhere down inside.” Video games may excite, may amuse, may well elevate one’s mood, but they do not hit you down deep within your spirit. They do not change your life as Campbell defined it when he spoke of living myths.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I  don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an  experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we  actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about,  and that’s what these clues in myths help us to find within ourselves. . . .   Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.   . . . We need myths [today] that will identify the individual not with is  local group but with the planet.” Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

For many today, the Internet seems to be a powerful presence. Why does it have such a deep resonance within our imaginations? How has it become so central to our contemporary life? And what does that say about the lives we live and our values? People find the phenomenon of the Web full of possibilities. Many believe that there’s something magical in its very existence and that it offers access to knowledge and powerful modes of communication that are fundamentally different from what we have had in the past. There is also the pervading sense that the Internet is changing us, both individually and communally, in very important ways. 

One way of understanding the role of the Internet in our culture is to consider it as a metaphor and potentially part of a mythology that expresses some essence of what it means to be alive today. Many envision the Internet as an ever-expanding, boundless entity with near-infinite connections both to other people and to sources of knowledge. And this powerful pull of the Internet seems to me to come from its similarities both to our sense of our
outer world—that ever-expanding universe of which we are such a minute part—and to our inner world—the endless depth of our own psyche, imagination, and unconscious with its potential links to communal metaphors and myths. Both these worlds, the outer and the inner, are ineffable, boundless, and to a certain
extent mysterious, unknowable. 

The Internet shares these characteristics and hence seems to offer a similar potential for knowledge, insight, even adventure. It’s cyberspace, after all, a place for journeys. One clicks on an icon (our computers do have their own “iconographies,” just as mythologies do). Microsoft Windows offers users an “Explorer” program to cross the threshold into the vast and unknown space called the Internet. The potential seen in the boundless, gargantuan phenomenon of the Web leads many people to make large claims: Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired,
calls the Internet a “planetary computer,” a “global computer,” and even a “large-scale sentience” with a distributed and vast intelligence that grows “smarter” by the second as millions of users provide evermore information merely
by clicking on a specific website because, in so doing, they indicate their preferences, their interests.

Is there transcendence here, one might ask, the kind of move beyond our ordinary life toward the ultimate mystery of the universe and the source of life itself? Kevin Kelly and others seem to think this is possible, that there is the promise of ultimate knowledge, the unknowable, in the Internet: “Currently,” he writes in What Technology Wants, “we are prejudiced against machines, because all the machines we have met so far have  been uninteresting. As they gain in sentience, that won’t be true,” Kelly writes. “What technology wants is increasing sentience. This does not mean evolution will move us only toward one universal supermind. Rather in the course of time the technium tends to self-organize into as many varieties of mind as is possible. . . The universe is so huge, so vast in its available mysteries, that it will require every possible type of mind to comprehend it. The technium’s job  is to invent a million or a billion varieties of  comprehension.”

Much hinges on what Kelly means by technium, a word he coined because he found that “culture” was too “small” and does not for him convey a sense of “self-propelling momentum.” (I would point out that the word "culture" is also associated with organic growth.) Kelly reaches towards a new kind of mystical sense in defining his technium: it is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us.” And this is not just
hardware and software, but all “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations” along with this impulse (and here he quite anthropomorphizes technology) of essentially “what technology wants,” which is to generate more technology, more inventions, more connections. For Kelly, as for many enthusiasts of the Internet, the “technium” seems to be alive. But is it? And is it truly self-organizing, or is it just some version of Larry Paige
 standing behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz?

But the real question at the end of the day about what this technology “wants” is: does it have any place left for humanity and the spiritual potential that Joseph Campbell alludes to when he talks about the myths human beings create out of their own dreams, their own imaginations, their own psyches. Or is this new myth a myth of the machine as an all-knowing  and all-powerful deity—in short, a god? Or maybe it’s just all that smoke and mirrors, concocting something rather more illusory than elusive.