Free Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal Page B

stronger, and richer in as many different ways as possible: more experience, more abilities, stronger armor, more skills, more talent, and a bigger reputation.
    Each of these improvable traits is displayed in your avatar profile, alongside a point value. You improve yourself by earning more points, which requires managing a constant work flow of quests, battles, and professional training. The more points you earn, the higher your level, and the higher your level, the more challenging work you unlock. This process is called “leveling up.” The more challenging the work, the more motivated you are to do it, and the more points you earn . . . It’s a virtuous circle of productivity. As Edward Castronova, who is a leading researcher of virtual worlds, puts it, “There is zero unemployment in World of Warcraft .” 6 The WoW work flow is famously designed so that there is always something to do, always different ways to improve your avatar.
    Some of the work is thrilling and high-stakes: it involves battling powerful opponents you’re just barely strong enough to fight. Some of the work is exploratory: you’re figuring out how to navigate around the many different regions of the kingdom, discovering new creatures and investigating strange environments. Some of the work is busywork: you study a virtual profession, like leatherworking or blacksmithing, and you collect and combine raw materials to help you ply your trade.
    A lot of the work is teamwork: you can join forces with other players to take on quests that none of you is strong enough to survive alone, and you can go on raids that can only be completed by five, ten, or even twenty-five players working together. This kind of collaboration often involves strategic work before you take on the challenge. You have to figure out what role everyone will play in the raid, and you may have to rehearse and coordinate your actions many times to get it right.
    Between the high-stakes work, the exploratory work, the busywork, the teamwork, and the strategic work, the hours of work definitely add up. There’s so much to do, the typical WoW player puts in as many hours weekly as a part-time job. All in all, it takes the average WoW player a total of five hundred hours of gameplay to develop his or her avatar to the game’s current maximum level, which is where many players say the fun really starts. 7 Now that’s a labor of love.
    So how exactly does a game convince a player to spend five hundred hours playing it just to get to the “fun” part?
    For some players, it’s the promise of ultimate challenge that makes the incredible workload worth it. At the highest levels of the game, you get to experience the extreme adrenaline rush of what players call the “endgame.” Players who crave high-stakes work and extreme mental activation level up as fast as they can to reach the endgame, because that’s where the most challenging opponents and the hardest work—in other words, the most invigorating, confidence-building gameplay—is available.
    But there are plenty of online games that allow you to risk your virtual life and battle challenging opponents in adrenaline-producing environments—and you get to do it from the very start of the game. If that were the main reward for playing a game like World of Warcraft , the requirement of spending five hundred hours leveling up would be a bug, not a feature. The process of leveling up is easily as important, if not more important, than the endgame. As one player explains, “If all I wanted to do was run around and kill stuff, I could play Counter-Strike . . . and that game’s free.” 8 The players of WoW , and the many other subscription-based massively multiplayer online games like it, are paying for a particular privilege. They’re paying for the privilege of higher in-game productivity.
    Consider many fans’ reactions when it was revealed that a highly anticipated new MMO, Age of Conan , would take just two hundred fifty hours