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March 16, 2017 - January 29, 2018
If you are a gamer, it’s time to get over any regret you might feel about spending so much time playing games. You have not been wasting your time. You have been building up a wealth of virtual experience that, as the first half of this book will show you, can teach you about your true self: what your core strengths are, what really motivates you, and what make you happiest. As you’ll see, you have also developed world-changing ways of thinking, organizing, and acting. And, as this book reveals, there are already plenty of opportunities for you to start using them for real-world good.
On the other hand, when we set out to make our own happiness, we’re focused on activity that generates intrinsic rewards—the positive emotions, personal strengths, and social connections that we build by engaging intensely with the world around us. We’re not looking for praise or payouts. The very act of what we’re doing, the enjoyment of being fully engaged, is enough.
The scientific term for this kind of self-motivated, self-rewarding activity is autotelic
“There is zero unemployment in World of Warcraft.”6
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.
And perhaps her most significant finding yet is this: gamers spend nearly all of their time failing. Roughly four times out of five, gamers don’t complete the mission, run out of time, don’t solve the puzzle, lose the fight, fail to improve their score, crash and burn, or die.1
To optimists, set-backs are energizing—and the more energized we get, the more fervently we believe that success is just around the corner. Which is why, on the whole, gamers just don’t give up.
Compared with games, reality is hopeless. Games eliminate our fear of failure and improve our chances for success.
Learning to stay urgently optimistic in the face of failure is an important emotional strength that we can learn in games and apply in our real lives.
Instead of fixing reality, we’ve simply created more and more attractive alternatives to the boredom, anxiety, alienation, and meaninglessness we run up against so often in everyday life. It’s high time we start applying the lessons of games to the design of our everyday lives.
To participate wholeheartedly in something means to be self-motivated and self-directed, intensely interested and genuinely enthusiastic.
If we’re forced to do something, or if we do it halfheartedly, we’re not really participating.
If we don’t care how it all turns out, we’re not really participating.
If we’re passively waiting it out, we’re not really participating.
They have good reason to feel that way: it’s a lot harder to function in low-motivation, low-feedback, and low-challenge environments when you’ve grown up playing sophisticated games. And that’s why today’s born-digital kids are suffering more in traditional classrooms than any previous generation. School today for the most part is just one long series of necessary obstacles that produce negative stress.
The engagement gap is getting too wide for a handful of educational games to make a significant and lasting difference over the course of a student’s thirteen-year public education.
Leveling up is a much more egalitarian model of success than a traditional letter grading system based on the bell curve. Everyone can level up, as long as they keep working hard. Leveling up can replace or complement traditional letter grades that students have just one shot at earning. And if you fail a quest, there’s no permanent damage done to your report card. You just have to try more quests to earn enough points to get the score you want.
As the Quest website explains, boss levels are “two-week ‘intensive’ [units] where students apply knowledge and skills to date to propose solutions to complex problems.” “Boss level” is a term taken directly from video games. In a boss level, you face a boss monster (or some equivalent thereof)—a monster so intimidating it requires you to draw on everything you’ve learned and mastered in the game so far. It’s the equivalent of a midterm or final exam. Boss levels are notoriously hard but immensely satisfying to beat. Quest schedules boss levels at various points in the school year, in order to
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When something is that hard for so many people, when it causes so much daily suffering, needlessly, we should try to make it better if we can.
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. Ultimately, that’s the most important work that game designers can do in the future: to make things that are hard for us as rewarding—as intrinsically rewarding—as possible.
As the great nineteenth-century mathematical physicist Lord Kelvin famously said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” We need real-time data to understand our performance: are we getting better or worse? And we can use quantitative benchmarks—specific, numerical goals we want to achieve—to focus our efforts and motivate us to try harder.
Real-time data and quantitative benchmarks are the reason why gamers get consistently better at virtually any game they play: their performance is consistently measured and reflected back to them, with advancing progress bars, points, levels, and achievements.
Runners love running, but motivation is still an issue.
Perhaps my favorite Nike+ motivational feature is the “power song.” It’s the musical equivalent of a health pack or a power-up in a video game. Whenever you need a boost of energy or extra motivation to keep running or pick up speed, you simply hold down the center button on your iPod. That quick gesture automatically triggers your favorite, preset running song. For me, pressing the center button during a hard run feels like I’m unlocking some secret super-running power that I didn’t even know I had. The faster pace, the pounding beat, the lyrics ringing in my ears like a personal mantra—it’s
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In a widely cited experiment conducted at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), researchers demonstrated that watching customized, look-alike avatars lose or gain weight as we do exercise makes us work out longer and harder.
Does a game community among strangers last? Not always. Sometimes it lasts only as long as the game itself. The players might never see or talk to each other again. And that’s perfectly okay. We often tend to think of communities as best when they’re long-term and stable, and certainly the strength of a community can grow over time. But communities can also confer real benefits even when they last for mere days, hours, or even minutes.
Learning to improvise with strangers toward a shared goal teaches players what they call “swarm intelligence”—intelligence that makes people better able and more likely to band together toward positive ends.
To become a member of any community, you need to understand the goals of the community and the accepted strategies and practices for advancing those goals.
Sociologists call the positive relationships we have with strangers “transitory public sociality.”
She traces the idea all the way back to Plato, who advised students to “practice regular meditation upon death,” and to Buddha, who said, “Of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.”
Even Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher best known for encouraging followers to seek simple pleasures, put death at the center of his vision of happiness, arguing that it is only when we shake free our fear of death that we can truly enjoy life.
Hecht has coined a term for this realignment of priority and attention: posttraumatic bliss. “There are feelings in this life—good and bad—that cannot be conquered by intellect or force of will,” she writes. “Almost dying can realign you in a way that is the positive incarnation of trauma: posttraumatic bliss.”22
In Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar quotes Irvin D. Yalom, a psychotherapist who often works with dying patients: “They are able to trivialize the trivial, to assume a sense of control, to stop doing things they do not wish to do, to communicate more openly with families and close friends, and to live entirely in the present rather than in the future or the past.”23
But as a happiness activity, solitary deathbed reflection leaves a lot to be desired.
Moreover, it’s hard to force ourselves to grasp the reality of our own individual mortality. It’s easier to acknowledge the universality of death—and that’s where cemeteries come in.
To put it another way, as Michelangelo said, “to touch is to give life”—and I couldn’t think of a better way to enliven a cemetery than to unleash a flood of oxytocin in the crowd.26
A crowd carries the social authority to redefine norms.
Dancer’s high is what we feel when endorphins (from the physical movement) combine with oxytocin (from touch and synchronized movement) and the intense stimulation of our vagus nerve (what we feel when we “lose ourselves” in the rhythms of the music and are part of a crowd moving together). It’s an expansive mixture of excitement, flow, and affection that is hard to experience any other way.28
As a result, Dacher Keltner writes, “Dance is the most reliable and quickest route to a mysterious feeling that has gone by many names over the generations: sympathy, agape, ecstasy, jen; here I’ll call it trust. To dance is to trust.”29
A good game is that powerful—it can change the way you see yourself and what you’re capable of forever.
Two hundred years ago, the British political philosopher John Stuart Mill suggested a subversive approach to self-help. It’s an approach that has much in common with the growing community of happiness hackers. Mill argued that while happiness might be our primary goal, we can’t pursue it directly. It’s too tricky, too hard to pin down, too easy to scare off. So we have to set other, more concrete goals, and in the pursuit of those goals, we capture happiness as a kind of by-product. He called this approaching happiness “sideways, like a crab.”30 We can’t let it know we’re coming. We just kind
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Alternate reality games of all kinds are designed to make us better: happier, more creative, and more emotionally resilient.
It turns out that our ability to make ourselves better as individuals—to dive into more satisfying work, to foster real hopes of success, to strengthen our social connections, to become a part of something bigger—also helps us work together, longer, on more complex and pressing problems. Games aren’t just about improving our lives today—they can help us create a positive legacy for the future.
The term crowdsourcing, coined by technology journalist Jeff Howe in 2006, is shorthand for outsourcing a job to the crowd.
the Guardian launched Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, the world’s first massively multiplayer investigative journalism project.
My experience and research suggests that gamers are more likely than anyone on the planet to contribute to an online crowdsourcing project. They already have the time and the desire to tackle voluntary obstacles. They’re playing games precisely because they hunger for more and better engagement. They also have proven computer skills and an ability to learn new interactive interfaces quickly. And if they’re playing games online, they already have the necessary network access to join any online project and start participating immediately.
Gamers who have grown up being intensely engaged by well-designed virtual environments are hungry for better forms of engagement in their real lives. They’re seeking out ways to be blissfully productive while cooperating toward extreme-scale goals. They are a natural source of participation bandwidth for the kinds of citizen journalism, collective intelligence, humanitarian, and citizen science projects that we will increasingly seek to undertake.
With each epic win, our possibility space expands—dramatically. That’s why epic wins are so crucial to creating sustainable economies of engagement. They make us curious about what more we can do—and as a result, we are more likely to take positive action again in the future. Epic wins help turn a one-off effort into passionate long-term participation.
Second, gamers aren’t afraid to fail. Failing in a good game is at the very least fun and interesting; it can also be instructive and even empowering.
Games also require us to coordinate attention and participation resources. Gamers must show up at the same time, in the same mind-set, to play together. They actively focus their attention on the game, and they agree to ignore everything else for as long as they’re playing. They practice shared concentration and synchronized engagement.
