Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

by Jane McGonigal

While gamers may experience these pleasures occasionally in their real lives, they experience them almost constantly when they’re playing their favorite games.

The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy.

Like the ancient Lydians, many gamers have already figured out how to use the immersive power of play to distract themselves from their hunger: a hunger for more satisfying work, for a stronger sense of community, and for a more engaging and meaningful life.

Game design isn’t just a technological craft. It’s a twenty-first-century way of thinking and leading.

When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.

That’s because there is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability—or what both game designers and psychologists call “flow.”

In high-feedback games, the state of being intensely engaged may ultimately be more pleasurable than even the satisfaction of winning.

Traditionally, we have needed instructions in order to play a game. But now we’re often invited to learn as we go. We explore the game space, and the computer code effectively constrains and guides us.

Any well-designed game—digital or not—is an invitation to tackle an unnecessary obstacle.

Why should we needlessly spend the majority of our lives in boredom and anxiety, when games point to a clear and better alternative?

Game developers today understand that games become hits and make money in direct proportion to how much satisfaction they provide and how much positive emotion they provoke—in other words, how happy they make their players.

human flourishing requires a more “continuous” approach to well-being. It can’t just be all flow, all the time. We have to find ways to enjoy the world and relish life even when we’re not operating at our peak human potential.

If we let our desire for more and more extrinsic rewards monopolize our time and attention, it prevents us from engaging in autotelic activities that would actually increase our happiness.

In Shop Class as Soul Craft, author and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford reflects on the psychological differences between manual labor and everyday office work. As he observes:

When we play WoW, we get blissed out by our own productivity—and it doesn’t matter that the work isn’t real. The emotional rewards are real—and for gamers, that’s what matters.

We turn to games to help us alleviate the frustrating sense that, in our real work, we’re often not making any progress or impact.

And for many of us who aren’t gratified enough by our day-to-day jobs or don’t feel like our work is having a direct impact, gameful work is a real source of reward and satisfaction.

the right kind of failure feedback is a reward. It makes us more engaged and more optimistic about our odds of success.

If failure feels random or passive, we lose our sense of agency—and optimism goes down the drain.

Meanwhile, when we can enjoy our own failure, we can spend more time suspended in a state of urgent optimism—the moment of hope just before our success is real, when we feel inspired to try our hardest and do our best.

The success we achieve in games is not, of course, real-world success. But for many people it is more realistic than the kinds of success we put pressure on ourselves to achieve—whether it’s money, beauty, or fame.

Simply put, social network games make it both easier and more fun to maintain strong, active connections with people we care about but who we don’t see or speak to enough in our daily lives.

It’s not a good substitute for real interaction, but it helps keep extended friends and family in our daily lives when we might otherwise be too busy to stay connected.

Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being.

We mostly tease and let ourselves be teased because it feels good. But the reason why it feels good is that it builds trust and makes us more likable.

The happiness we get from cheering on friends and family ensures our personal investment in other people’s growth and achievements. It encourages us to contribute to someone else’s success, and as a result we form networks of support from which everyone involved benefits.

As a society, we may feel increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and neighbors—but, as gamers, we are adopting strategies to reverse the phenomenon.

Philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders agree: the single best way to add meaning to our lives is to connect our daily actions to something bigger than ourselves—and the bigger, the better.

Awe is what we feel when we recognize that we’re in the presence of something bigger than ourselves. It’s closely linked with feelings of spirituality, love, and gratitude—and more importantly, a desire to serve.

In this regard, Halo players join a long tradition in human culture of feeling awe, wonder, and gratitude toward the builders of epic environments.

young people who spend more time playing games in which they’re required to help each other are significantly more likely to help friends, family, neighbors, and even strangers in their real lives.

In this way, Chore Wars brilliantly reverses the most demoralizing aspects of regular housework. The results of a chore well done may start to fade almost immediately, but no one can take away the XP you have earned.

The better you can identify triggers of your symptoms, the more pain and suffering you’ll avoid.

You can’t opt out of security and boarding rituals, but you can opt in to the game. It’s a subtle, but powerful, way to change the dynamics of the situation. Instead of feeling external pressure, you’re focused on the positive stress of the game.

When an experience is difficult for us, offering challenging goals, tracking points and levels and achievements, and providing virtual rewards can make it easier to get through the experience.

The challenge puts the runner’s personal goals into a larger social context, which gives each jog more meaning.

The researchers theorized that seeing virtual versions of themselves doing a positive activity stimulated memories of the subjects’ own real-life positive experiences, making them more likely to reengage in the activity.

In the end, what makes a Foursquare social life better than your regular social life is the simple fact that to do well in Foursquare, you have to enjoy yourself more.

In other words, it’s not a game that rewards you for what you’re already doing. It’s a game that rewards you for doing new things, and making a better effort to be social.

It not only heightens your awareness of the potential for strangers to play a role in your life, it also provokes a real curiosity about others, and a longing to connect.

When we have community, we feel what anthropologists call “communitas,” or spirit of community.3 Communitas is a powerful sense of togetherness, solidarity, and social connection. And it protects against loneliness and alienation.

Experiencing a short burst of community in a space that previously felt uninviting or simply uninteresting can also permanently change our relationship to that space. It becomes a space for us to act and to be of service, not just to pass through or observe.

In other words, the gameplay knocks down the “fourth wall” that usually separates the work of the museum’s curators and the visitors. And in doing so, it completely reinvents the idea of museum membership, making it possible for a real museum community to emerge.

major studies at Harvard and Stanford have demonstrated that a prejudice against the elderly is one of the most widespread and intractable social biases, particularly in the United States and especially among people under the age of thirty.

But even playing a very short game together, we are reminded of how much we share with even the strangest of strangers.

And it’s becoming increasingly obvious that it is just not that easy to put scientific findings into practice in our everyday lives.

There’s an undeniable tendency toward irony, cynicism, and detachment in popular culture today, and throwing ourselves into happiness activities just doesn’t fit that emotional climate.

self-help isn’t typically social, but so many happiness activities are meant to be. Moreover, positive psychology has shown that for any activity to feel truly meaningful, it needs to be attached to a much bigger project or community—and

Happiness hacking is the experimental design practice of translating positive-psychology research findings into game mechanics.

Paying a compliment becomes an act of courage: you have to work up your nerve to overcome the social norms of ignoring strangers,