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May 27 - July 6, 2022
They’re the young adults in China who have spent so much play money, or “QQ coins,” on magical swords and other powerful game objects that the People’s Bank of China intervened to prevent the devaluation of the yuan, China’s real-world currency.
Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.
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. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.
I’ve learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight.
Games made life bearable. Games gave a starving population a feeling of power in a powerless situation, a sense of structure in a chaotic environment. Games gave them a better way to live when their circumstances
primal hunger. But it is not a hunger for food—it is a hunger for more and better engagement from the world around us.
Collectively, the planet is now spending more than 3 billion hours a week gaming. We are starving, and our games are feeding us.
The people who continue to write off games will be at a major disadvantage in the coming years. Those who deem them unworthy of their time and attention won’t know how to leverage the power of games in their communities, in their businesses, in their own lives. They will be less prepared to shape the future. And therefore they will miss some of the most promising opportunities we have to solve problems, create new experiences, and fix what’s wrong with reality.
Game design isn’t just a technological craft. It’s a twenty-first-century way of thinking and leading. And gameplay isn’t just a pastime. It’s a twenty-first-century way of working together to accomplish real change.
And it turns out that what we’re really afraid of isn’t games; we’re afraid of losing track of where the game ends and where reality begins.
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work.
“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”
When we’re depressed, according to the clinical definition, we suffer from two things: a pessimistic sense of inadequacy and a despondent lack of activity. If we were to reverse these two traits, we’d get something like this: an optimistic sense of our own capabilities and an invigorating rush of activity.
All of the neurological and physiological systems that underlie happiness—our attention systems, our reward center, our motivation systems, our emotion and memory centers—are fully activated by gameplay.
But by trying to have easy fun, we actually often wind up moving ourselves too far in the opposite direction. We go from stress and anxiety straight to boredom and depression. We’d be much better off avoiding easy fun and seeking out hard fun, or hard work that we enjoy, instead.
The research proves what gamers already know: within the limits of our own endurance, we would rather work hard than be entertained.
As Harvard professor and happiness expert Tal Ben-Shahar puts it, “We’re much happier enlivening time rather than killing time.”
The more we try to “find” happiness, the harder it gets. Positive psychologists call this process “hedonic adaptation,”
found: happiness derived from intrinsic reward is incredibly resilient.
set out intentionally to trigger these systems. We don’t think of happiness as a process of tapping strategically into our neurochemistry. We just know what feels good and meaningful and satisfying, and that’s the kind of activity we’ll do for its own sake.
When we realize that this reorientation toward intrinsic reward is what’s really behind the 3 billion hours a week we spend gaming globally, the mass exodus to game worlds is neither surprising nor particularly alarming. Instead,
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.
To experience real meaning, we don’t have to contribute something of real value. We just have to be given the opportunity to contribute at all. We need a way to connect with others who care about the same massively scaled goal we do, no matter how arbitrary the goal.
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.
Gamers can imagine 6 billion people coming together to fight a fictional enemy, for the sheer awe and wonder of it. They are ready to work together on extreme scales, toward epic goals, just for the spine-tingling joy of it. And the more we seek out that kind of happiness as a planet, the more likely we are to save it—not from fictional aliens, but from apathy and wasted potential.
It’s high time we start applying the lessons of games to the design of our everyday lives. We need to engineer alternate realities: new, more gameful ways of interacting with the real world and living our real lives.
Nothing epitomizes mandatory, mindless activity more than waiting in line at the security or boarding lines at the airport.
Wherever there is a mandatory experience that is unpleasant or frustrating, a surefire way to improve it is to design a good game you can only play in that space. Jetset effectively tackles that problem for airports. But what about the experience of actually being in the air?
It turns out that knowing what makes us happy isn’t enough. We have to act on that knowledge, and not just once, but often.
For many people, happiness activities will need to be embedded in a more instinctively appealing—and less overtly do-good, feel-good—package.
Ideally, happiness needs to be approached as a collective process. Happiness activities need to be done with friends, family, neighbors, strangers, coworkers, and all the other people who make up the social fabric of our lives.
Sociologists call the positive relationships we have with strangers “transitory public sociality.”
According to cemetery industry statistics, the average grave receives just two visits in its lifetime—total, by any friend or family member—after the initial flurry of visits that immediately follows the burial.
Tad Friend
CrowdSPRING
That’s why it’s not surprising that surveys and polls repeatedly have shown that, on average, three out of four gamers prefer co-op mode to competitive multiplayer.
Within a year, more than 1.3 million player-created levels had been published by LBP players. Compare this epic number with the relatively small number of official LBP levels: forty-five. Collectively, the LBP player base has dramatically expanded the playable LBP universe by a factor of nearly thirty thousand.
When enough people play a game, it becomes a massively collaborative study of a problem, an extreme-scale test of potential action in a specific possibility space.
SEHI (pronounced SEH-hee) is someone who feels not just optimistic about the future, but also personally capable of changing the world for the better.
The entire experience is perhaps best summed up by a Twitter post from one of our players. It epitomizes exactly what IFTF hoped to accomplish with the game. “This is my favorite vision of the future, ever,” he wrote. “Because it’s the first one I feel personally capable of making a difference in.”
There’s no guarantee, of course, that evolution will continue along any given path, other than the path of improved survivability in a given environment. But all of the historic evidence seems to suggest that collaboration improves human survivability, and will continue to do so, as long as we can innovate new ways of working together.
cell in our bodies and every neuron in our brains. We are the result of five million years’ worth of genetic adaptations, each and every one designed to help us survive our natural environment and thrive in our real, physical world.
Let’s turn back one more time to the provocative history that Herodotus told of why the ancient Lydians invented dice games: so that they could band together to survive an eighteen-year famine, by playing dice games on alternate days and eating on the others.
be happier during difficult times. They were also teaching the entire society to work together wholeheartedly toward collectively agreed-upon goals. They were training the Lydians to hold on to a sense of urgent optimism even in the face of daunting odds. They were building a strong social fabric. And they constantly reminded every Lydian that they were a part of something bigger.
Games aren’t leading us to the downfall of human civilization. They’re leading us to its reinvention.
