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The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose.
The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By removing or limiting the obvious ways of getting to the goal, the rules push players to explore previously uncharted possibility spaces. They unleash creativity and foster strategic thinking.
The feedback system tells players how close they are to achieving the goal. It can take the form of points, levels, a score, or a progress bar. Or, in its most basic form, the feedback system can be as simple as the players’ knowledge of an objective outcome: “The game is over when . . .” Real-time feedback serves as a promise to the pl...
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Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally...
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three kinds of feedback: visual—you can see row after row of pieces disappearing with a satisfying poof; quantitative—a prominently displayed score constantly ticks upward; and qualitative—you experience a steady increase in how challenging the game feels.
Any well-designed game—digital or not—is an invitation to tackle an unnecessary obstacle.
But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”6
high-stakes work, which is what many people think of first when it comes to video games. It’s fast and action oriented, and it thrills us with the possibility not only of success but also of spectacular failure.
busywork, which is completely predictable and monotonous. Busywork generally gets a bad rap in our real lives, but when we choose it for ourselves, it actually helps us feel quite contented and productive.
mental work, which revs up our cognitive faculties. It can be rapid-fire and condensed, like the thirty-second math problems in Nintendo’s Brain Age games. Or it can be drawn-out and complex,
physical work, which makes our hearts beat faster, our lungs pump harder, our glands sweat like crazy. If the work is hard enough, we’ll flood our brains with endorphins,
discovery work, which is all about the pleasure of actively investigating unfamiliar objects and spaces. Discovery work helps us feel confident, powerful, and motivated.
teamwork, which emphasizes collaboration, cooperation, and contributions to a larger group.
creative work. When we do creative work, we get to make meaningful decisions and feel proud of something we’ve made.
Hard fun is what happens when we experience positive stress, or eustress (a combination of the Greek eu, for “well-being,” and stress).
Fiero is what we feel after we triumph over adversity. You know it when you feel it—and when you see it. That’s because we almost all express fiero in exactly the same way: we throw our arms over our head and yell.
But Csíkszentmihályi’s research showed that flow was most reliably and most efficiently produced by the specific combination of self-chosen goals, personally optimized
Allan Reiss, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford, led a team of researchers in a study of the neurochemistry of fiero in gamers.
if there’s one thing virtually all positive psychologists agree on, it’s this: there are many ways to be happy, but we cannot find happiness. No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us.
The more we try to “find” happiness, the harder it gets. Positive psychologists call this process “hedonic adaptation,” and
The scientific term for this kind of self-motivated, self-rewarding activity is autotelic
intrinsic rewards fall into four major categories.25
we crave satisfying work, every single day.
Second, we crave the experience, or at least the hope, of being successful.
Third, we crave social connection.
Fourth, and finally, we crave meaning, or the chance to be a part of something larger than ourselves.
Time spent playing WoW
There's an article on Polygon I think that mentions this 2020
Less work is a disappointment
Reality fix 3: More satisfying work, getting better
Why do we crave this kind of guaranteed productivity? In The How of Happiness , Sonja Lyubomirsky writes that the fastest way to improve someone’s everyday quality of life is to “bestow on a person a specific goal, something to do and to look forward.”
“The most important resource-building human trait is productivity at work.”12 The key here is resource building: we like productive work because it makes us feel that we are developing our personal resources.
Phasing, which provides competency feedback in Wow
Source: Pleasures of Sorrorw and Work
casual games, there is no greater purpose to our actions—we are simply enjoying our ability to make something happen.
Nicole Lazzaro
Gamers spend a lot of time failing
Failure that reminds us of our agency is invigorating
It's only fun to fail if the game is fair and you had every chance of success
Stretching out the period of learning in a game is important to keeping it fun
Why depression exists
Why depression exists
Rock band success explained
Fun Failure in Rock Band
FIX #5: STRONGER SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY
Although the players were not fighting each other or questing together, they still considered each other virtual company.
But some game researchers, including Nicole Lazzaro, believe that ambient sociability and lightweight social interaction can actually train the brain to experience social interaction as more rewarding.
10 Billion Kills
But on the other hand, just because the kills don’t have value doesn’t mean they don’t have meaning.
Meaning vs Value
