howtowrite3e

PROPOSAL FOR CHANGE

Jane McGonigal designs alternate reality games intended to “improve real lives or solve real problems.” She is the author of the best-selling book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (2011) and serves as creative director for the group Social Chocolate and director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future. This article first appeared in the Huffington Post in February 2011. In this essay, McGonigal offers a modest and perhaps counterintuitive proposal about gaming.

Reading the Genre

Question

1. McGonigal argues for something that is counterintuitive, because many people think games are not good for us at all. How does she organize her own arguments and her research to respond to popular arguments against video games?

Question

2. McGonigal is arguing for the positive effects of gaming for one to three hours a day, but she doesn’t necessarily discuss the other things we might do with that time — things that might actually be even better for us. For instance, she cites studies that show that students perform better on tests after gaming. Yet wouldn’t they be better off studying? Propose counterarguments or qualify the arguments that McGonigal makes in this essay to account for these other possibilities.

Question

3. Look at how McGonigal takes risks with style in this essay, using exclamation points, short sentences, and a conversational tone. How could some of these strategies help her connect with some audiences but not others?

Question

4. WRITING: Create a short “how-to” manual for gaming in college, using the arguments in McGonigal’s proposal, in addition to your own personal opinions and some secondary research on the impact of gaming on college students. How can you play video games and do well in school?

Question

5. MULTIMODALITY—ADVERTISING POSTER: Look for some examples of the “pro-social” games that McGonigal references in this proposal. Create a poster advertising the benefits of one of these games, utilizing the research McGonigal mentions in this article as evidence. Aim your advertisement at both young people and their parents.