Factoids of the day: Game not over

Lots of interesting factoids in this Wall Street Journal

excerpt of Jane McGonigal's equally interesting book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Here are a few (italics added):

"[Al]though a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than five million 'extreme' gamers in the U.S. who play an average of 45 hours a week. To put this in perspective, the number of hours that gamers world-wide have spent playing "World of Warcraft" alone adds up to 5.93 million years."


"In a good game, we feel blissfully productive. We have clear goals and a sense of heroic purpose. More important,we're constantly able to see and feel the impact of our efforts on the virtual world around us. . . . One recent study found, for example, that players of 'Guitar Hero' are more likely to pick up a real guitar and learn how to play it."


"Research shows that gamers spend on average 80% of their time failing in game worlds, but instead of giving up, they stick with the difficult challenge and use the feedback of the game to get better."


"Studies show that we like and trust someone better after we play a game with them—even if they beat us. And we're more likely to help someone in real life after we've helped them in an online game. It's no wonder that 40% of all user time on Facebook is spent playing social games."