At the end of the day, I don’t want to give people experience points for protesting. I think the ethics are problematic, and the obligation created by “treadmill” games as applied to protesting leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. McGonigal, and the design ethic espoused in Reality is Broken, is essentially one of creating “game designer overlords” who want to world to be shaped by the games they design. I’m wary of that project.

I think that if you wanted to be more constructive and actually help animals and activists, you might have focused on critiquing the strategies she outlines themselves. For one, we should recognize that for most people who are sympathetic to the animal lib cause, activism is not intrinsically rewarding. Most people do not like protesting, and even those of us who do it regularly think we should do it more. We might use the information in the book to design a social-networking game that creates intrinsic rewards for protest and action) which I happen to be doing the concept work on right now).

For instance, considering that picketing KFCs doesn’t ever seem to get them shut down, many activists become discouraged and the campaign attendance rates often drops off. But what if activists were accumulating experience points for ever protest, every demo, every letter to the editor, which would allow them to level up their and get new abilities in their online activist community? We would feel a better sense of accomplishment. And we could better track exactly how large the scale of our efforts is by looking at the total statistics of different activist groups.

I think we should use McGonigal’s research to our advantage–you know our enemies are.