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January 12 - January 30, 2022
Compared with games, reality is hopeless. Games eliminate our fear of failure and improve our chances for success.
Success is pleasurable, but it leaves us at a loss for something interesting to do. If we fail, and if we can try again, then we still have a mission.
Because being really good at something is less fun than being not quite good enough—yet.
Fun will always morph into boredom, once we pass the critical point of being reliably successful.
When we’re energized by failure, we develop emotional stamina. And emotional stamina makes it possible for us to hang in longer, to do much harder work, and to tackle more complex challenges. We need this kind of optimism in order to thrive as human beings.
depression may be an adaptive mechanism meant to prevent us from falling victim to blind optimism—and squandering resources on the wrong goals.
You haven’t so much failed as achieved partial success.
The secret to the addictiveness of Lexulous is its asynchronous gameplay: players don’t have to be online at the same time, and can take their turns whenever they want.
As numerous economists and positive psychologists have observed, globally we make the mistake of becoming less social the richer we become as individuals, and as a society. As Weiner observes: “The greatest source of happiness is other people—and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house and, if we’re really wealthy, to an estate. We think we’re moving up, but really we’re walling off ourselves.”13
Trash-talking, when it’s a playful way to insult your competition, is almost as important to our enjoyment of social network games as the actual core gameplay.
Teasing each other, recent scientific research has shown, is one of the fastest and most effective ways to intensify our positive feelings for each other.
Teasingly trash-talking allows us to provoke each other’s negative emotions in a very mild way—we stimulate a very small amount of anger or hurt or embarrassment. This tiny provocation has two powerful effects. First, it confirms trust: the person doing the teasing is demonstrating the capacity to hurt, but simultaneously showing that the intention is not to hurt. Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really would, hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone
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By letting someone else experience higher status, we intensify their positive feelings for us. Why? Because we naturally like people more when they enhance our own social status.
Social contact with strangers can offer different kinds of emotional reward, at the right times. One of these rewards that is unique to massively multiplayer online game environments is something researchers call “ambient sociability.” It’s the experience of playing alone together, and it’s a kind of social interaction that even the most introverted among us can enjoy.
Would it be more rewarding to have a real-world space in which to have face-to-face interaction? Probably—there is significant evidence to suggest that social rewards are intensified by things like eye contact and touch. But face-to-face contact isn’t always possible. Moreover, if we’re feeling depressed or lonely, we might not have the emotional reserves to get up and get out, or to contact a real-life friend or family member. Playing a game online, like ambient sociability, can be a stepping-stone to a more positive emotional state and, with it, more positive social experiences.
Meaning is the feeling that we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s the belief that our actions matter beyond our own individual lives. When something is meaningful, it has significance and worth not just to ourselves, or even to our closest friends and family, but to a much larger group: to a community, an organization, or even the entire human species.
How do we get more meaning in our lives? It’s actually quite simple. 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.
Individual success is always more rewarding when it happens in a multiplayer context,
“The self-help industrial complex hasn’t helped. By telling us that happiness lives inside us, it’s turned us inward just when we should be looking outward . . . to other people, to community and to the kind of human bonds that so clearly are the sources of our happiness.”
there’s a self-help problem that isn’t unique to the science of happiness: it’s easier to change minds than to change behaviors.
we’re often more willing to learn something new than we are to actively adapt our lives.
“There is one easy step to unhappiness—doing nothing.” But unfortunately, that’s exactly what most of us do after we read a book or magazine article about happiness: absolutely nothing. The written word is a powerful way to communicate knowledge—but it’s not necessarily the most effective way to motivate people.
Dancing together has been used throughout human history as a reliable source of a special kind of euphoria, the dancer’s high.
“Any time that you’re trying to get people to give you stuff, to do stuff for you, the most important thing is that people know that what they’re doing is having an effect. If you’re not giving people the ‘I rock’ vibe, you’re not getting people to stick around.”
the combination of good game design and real-world results is irresistible.
Any game that makes you feel bad is no longer a good game for you to play. This should be obvious, but sometimes we get so caught up in our games that we forget they’re supposed to be fun.
