## Highlights - 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. - 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. Collectively, the planet is now spending more than 3 billion hours a week gaming. - Some recent relevant statistics from the Entertainment Software Association’s annual study of game players—the largest and most widely respected market research report of its kind: - 69 percent of all heads of household play computer and video games. - 97 percent of youth play computer and video games. - 40 percent of all gamers are women. - One out of four gamers is over the age of fifty. - The average game player is thirty-five years old and has been playing for twelve years. - Most gamers expect to continue playing games for the rest of their lives. - Meanwhile, the scientific journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking reported in 2009 that 61 percent of surveyed CEOs, CFOs, and other senior executives say they take daily game breaks at work. - We need to build hybrid industries and unconventional partnerships, so that game researchers and game designers and game developers can work with engineers and architects and policy makers and executives of all kinds to harness the power of games. - all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. - Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. - Many gamers would rather keep playing than win—thereby ending the game. In high-feedback games, the state of being intensely engaged may ultimately be more pleasurable than even the satisfaction of winning. - The philosopher James P Carse once wrote that there are two kinds of games: finite games, which we play to win, and infinite games, which we play in order to keep playing as long as possible. In the world of computer and video games, Tetris is an excellent example of an infinite game. We play Tetris for the simple purpose of continuing to play a good game. - Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”</mark> 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. There’s no clinical psychological term that describes this positive condition. But it’s a perfect description of the emotional state of gameplay. - 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. - Hard fun leaves us feeling measurably better than when we started. So it’s no surprise, then, that one of the activities for which ESM subjects report the highest levels of interest and positive moods both during and afterward is when they’re playing games—including sports, card games, board games, and computer and video games. The research proves what gamers already know: within the limits of our own endurance, we would rather work hard than be entertained. Perhaps that’s why gamers spend less time watching television than anyone else on the planet. As Harvard professor and happiness expert Tal Ben-Shahar puts it, “We’re much happier enlivening time rather than killing time.” - This was a whole different business, nothing like I’d ever known, like night and day.... Thirty seconds of play, and I’m on a whole new plane of being, all my synapses wailing. What Sudnow describes is the extreme neurochemical activation that happens in our brains and bodies when we start to play a good computer or video game. He was intensely focused, highly motivated, creatively charged, and working at the very limits of his abilities. Immersion was almost instant. Flow was fast and virtually guaranteed. - Many different competing theories of happiness have emerged from the field of positive psychology, but 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. We have to make our own happiness—by working hard at activities that provide their own reward. - happiness derived from intrinsic reward is incredibly resilient. Every time we engage in autotelic activities, the very opposite of hedonic adaptation occurs. We wean ourselves off consumption and acquisition as sources of pleasure and develop our hedonic resilience. - “When the source of positive emotion is yourself . . . , it can continue to yield pleasure and make you happy. When the source of positive emotion is yourself, it is renewable.” The prevailing positive-psychology theory that we are the one and only source of our own happiness isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a biological fact. Our brains and bodies produce neurochemicals and physiological sensations that we experience, in different quantities and combinations, as pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction, ecstasy, contentment, love, and every other kind of happiness. And positive psychologists have shown that we don’t need to wait for life to trigger these chemicals and sensations for us. We can trigger them ourselves through scientifically measurable autotelic activities. - One group is opting out of this soul-deadening, planet-exhausting hedonic grind, and in larger and larger numbers: hard-core gamers. Games, after all, are the quintessential autotelic activity. We only ever play because we want to. Games don’t fuel our appetite for extrinsic reward: they don’t pay us, they don’t advance our careers, and they don’t help us accumulate luxury goods. Instead, games enrich us with intrinsic rewards. - More importantly, it’s evidence that gamers aren’t escaping their real lives by playing games. They’re actively making their real lives more rewarding. - In real life, if someone gave you a task that normally took five hundred hours of work to finish, and then gave you a way to complete it in half that, you would probably be pretty pleased. But in game life, where the whole point for so many players is to get their hands on as much satisfying work as possible, two hundred fifty hours of work is a disappointment. - 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.” - more than half of these gameful executives say they play during work in order “to feel more productive.” Now this is a statement that sounds crazy on the face of it—playing games to feel more productive at work? But this speaks to how much we all crave simple, hands-on work that feels genuinely productive. 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. - Because being really good at something is less fun than being not quite good enough—yet. - games are “fun” only as long as we haven’t mastered them. He writes, “Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension.... With games, learning is the drug.” And that’s why fun in games lasts only as long as we’re not consistently successful - “The tease is like a social vaccine,” Keltner explains. “It stimulates the recipient’s emotional system.” 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 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. - Christopher Bateman, an expert in both cognitive psychology and game design, adopted the term “naches” to describe this phenomenon, reporting, “Players seem to really enjoy training their friends and family to play games, with a whopping 53.4 percent saying it enhances their enjoyment.” - Ambient sociability is a very casual form of social interaction; it may not create direct bonds, but it does satisfy our craving to feel connected to others. It creates a kind of social expansiveness in our lives—a feeling of inclusion in a social scene, and access to other people if we want it. - “The self is a very poor site for meaning.” We can’t matter outside of a large-scale social context. “The larger the entity you can attach yourself to,” Seligman advises, “the more meaning you can derive.” And that’s exactly the point of working together in a game like Halo 3. It’s not that the Covenant kills have value. It’s that pursuing a massive goal alongside millions of other people feels good. It feels meaningful. - Awe is a unique emotion. According to many positive psychologists, it’s the single most overwhelming and gratifying positive emotion we can feel. In fact, neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall calls awe “the orgasm of positive emotions.” 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. - “The experience of awe is about finding your place in the larger scheme of things. It is about quieting the press of self-interest. It is about folding into social collectives. It is about feeling reverential toward participating in some expansive process that unites us all and that ennobles our life’s endeavors.”12 In other words, awe doesn’t just feel good; it inspires us to do good. Without a doubt, it’s awe that a Halo 3 player is feeling when he says that the game sends “shivers down the spine.” Spine tingling is one of the classic physiological symptoms of awe—along with chills, goose bumps, and that choked-up feeling in the throat. - In the wake of unearthing these types of structures all over the planet, archaeologists have recently proposed a startling theory: that these stone cathedrals served an important purpose in the evolution of human civilization. They actually inspired and enabled human society to become dramatically more cooperative, completely reinventing civilization as it once existed. - can you imagine what it would feel like to have 6 billion people fighting on the same side of a fictional war? I think it’s pretty clear that such an effort would have real meaning, even if it failed to generate any real-world value. If you were able to focus the attention of the entire planet on a single goal, even if just for one day, and even if it just involved dispatching aliens in a video game, it would be a truly awe-inspiring occasion. It would be the single biggest collective experience ever undertaken in the whole of human history. It would give the whole earth goose bumps. That’s the epic scale that gamers are capable of thinking on. That’s the scale gamers are ready to work at. - Jean M Twenge, a professor of psychology and the author of Generation Me, has persuasively argued that the youngest generations today—particularly anyone born after 1980—are, in her words, “more miserable than ever before.” Why? Because of our increased cultural emphasis on “self-esteem” and “self-fulfillment.” But real fulfillment, as countless psychologists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have shown, comes from fulfilling commitments to others. We want to be esteemed in the eyes of others, not for “who we are,” but rather for what we’ve done that really matters. - We haven’t learned how to enjoy our real lives more thoroughly. Instead, we’ve spent the last thirty-five years learning to enjoy our game lives more thoroughly. 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. We need to engineer alternate realities: new, more gameful ways of interacting with the real world and living our real lives. - Chore Wars has transformed something we both normally hate doing into something that feels creative and fun. The game has changed our reality of having to do housework, and for the better. - No player is assigned a particular adventure. Instead, everyone gets to pick their own. There are no necessary chores. You are volunteering for every adventure you take. And this sense of voluntary participation in housework is strengthened by the fact that you’re encouraged to apply strategy as you choose your own housework adventures. - ARGs are games you play to get more out of your real life, as opposed to games you play to escape it. ARG developers want us to participate as fully in our everyday lives as we do in our game lives. - First and foremost, like any good game, an ARG must always be optional. You can bet that if you required someone to play Chore Wars, it would lose a large part of its appeal and effectiveness. An alternate reality game has to remain a true “alternate” for it to work. It’s not enough, however, just to make something optional. Once the activity is under way, a good ARG, like any good game, also needs compelling goals, interesting obstacles, and well-designed feedback systems. - Quest to Learn is a public charter school in New York City for students in grades six through twelve. It’s the first game-based school in the world—but its founders hope it will serve as a model for schools worldwide. - Levelling 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. This system of “grading” replaces negative stress with positive stress, helping students focus more on learning and less on performing. - 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. - Bounce takes just ten minutes to play. When you call the game, you’re connected live on the phone with a “senior experience agent”—someone at least twenty years older than yourself. You follow a series of computer prompts to swap stories about your past, in order to discover life experiences you have in common. For example: What is something you both have made with your own two hands? What is a useful skill that you were both taught by a parent? What is a faraway place you both have visited? Your goal: find out how many points of connection you can make with your senior experience agent before time runs out. - practical recommendations taken straight from positive-psychology manuals. For example: • Practice random acts of kindness twice a week. (The reward center of the brain experiences a stronger “dopamine hit” when we make someone else smile than when we smile first.) • Think about death for five minutes every day. (Researchers suggest that we can induce a mellow, grateful physiological state known as “posttraumatic bliss” that helps us appreciate the present moment and savor our lives more.) • Dance more. (Synchronizing physical behavior to music we like is one of the most reliable—not to mention the safest—ways to induce the form of extreme happiness known as euphoria.) - “Why do many of the most powerful happiness activities sound so . . . well, hokey?” Lyubomirsky earned a million-dollar research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to test a dozen different happiness activities—and she discovered that despite their incontrovertible effectiveness, many people resist even trying them. - As the author Eric Weiner, who has studied worldwide happiness trends, reports: “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.” Weiner makes an excellent point here: 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 self-help just doesn’t usually unfold collectively, particularly when self-help advice comes in the form of books. - it’s easier to change minds than to change behaviors. As Harvard professor of psychology Tal Ben-Shahar explains, we’re often more willing to learn something new than we are to actively adapt our lives. “Making the transition from theory to practice is difficult: changing deeply rooted habits of thinking, transforming ourselves and our world, requires a great deal of effort,” - Happiness hacking is the experimental design practice of translating positive-psychology research findings into game mechanics. It’s a way to make happiness activities feel significantly less hokey, and to put them in a bigger social context. - Thinking about death is one of the most highly recommended happiness activities, but it’s also one of the most difficult to convince ourselves to undertake. We’re accustomed to pushing thoughts of death out of our minds, not cultivating them. - “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.” Researchers have documented the phenomenon of posttraumatic bliss among patients confronting a terminal medical diagnosis. Something seems to click in their minds, empowering them to enjoy their lives more. It’s not just that they’ve realized how precious life is; there seems to be some kind of significant mental clearing that occurs along with a new ability to focus on positive goals. - We are accustomed to being asked to behave and think unconventionally in a game. We’re used to being creative and playing outside of social norms when we’re inside the socially safe “magic circle” of a game. And the more people who come together to play an unconventional game like Tombstone Hold ’Em, the safer it feels. A crowd carries the social authority to redefine norms. - “As a happiness lesson, nothing could be more straightforward: if you get a chance to dance in a circle, get up out of your chair and do it.” That’s Jennifer Michael Hecht’s advice in The Happiness Myth, and with good reason. - It’s very difficult to motivate large numbers of people to come together at the same time and to contribute any significant amount of energy—let alone their very best effort—to a collaborative project. Most big crowd projects today fail: they fail to attract a crowd, or they fail to give the crowd the right kind of work, or they fail to reward the crowd well enough to keep it participating over the long haul. - Crowd-dependent projects must figure out how to capture the mental energy and the active effort it takes to make individual contributions to a larger whole. For this reason, the overall crowdsourcing culture likely will not be immune from “the tragedy of the commons”—the crisis that occurs when individuals selfishly exhaust a collective resource. Collaboration projects will have to compete for crowd resources as online communities seek to grab as many mental hours as possible from their members. These gains will likely come at the expense of other projects still striving to secure their own passionate community. - I had two insights. First, gamers are an extremely valuable—and largely untapped—source of participation bandwidth. Whoever figures out how to effectively engage them first for real work is going to reap enormous benefits. - crowdsourcing projects—if they have any hope of capturing enough participation bandwidth to achieve truly ambitious goals—must be intentionally designed to offer the same kinds of intrinsic rewards we get from good games. Increasingly, I’m convinced that this is the only way to dramatically increase our total available participation bandwidth. - GAMERS’ MASS PARTICIPATION in, and enthusiasm for, this big crowd project is a clear sign that there is a growing desire to be of service to real-world causes. For decades, gamers have been answering heroic calls to action in virtual worlds. It’s time we ask them to answer real-world calls to action, and all the evidence suggests that they are more than happy—they are happier—to rise to the real-world occasion. - design the mechanics that drive in-game player reward and incentives: • So players feel invested in the world and their character. • So players have long-term goals. • So players can’t grief or exploit them, or each other. • So that content are rewards in and of themselves. - In the First Aid Corps mission, the task of saving a life is presented just like a World of Warcraft quest. The instructions are straightforward, the reason for the mission compelling, and the task well within your ability level. - Groundcrew represents the potential for an entirely new kind of economy, built around the exchange of three intrinsic rewards: the happiness that comes from doing good, the thrill that comes from accomplishing a challenging mission, and the satisfaction of accumulating points that signify something real and wonderful—your ability to make other people’s wishes come true, and your future chances at having your own wishes fulfilled. - Right now, it’s easier and more fun to be a superhero in a video game than it is to help solve real global problems in everyday life. But social participation games like Lost Joules are starting to tip the balance: soon, we may find ourselves able to do both at the same time. - That’s why today competitive online gamers—even after they’ve been virtually beaten, bloodied, or blasted by each other—thank each other afterward by typing or saying “GG,” short for “good game.” It’s a grateful acknowledgment that, regardless of who wins or loses, everyone in a good game has tried hard, played fair, and worked together. That’s the fundamental act of collaboration at the heart of every good multiplayer game: the active and concerted creation of a positive experience. Gamers don’t just play a good game. They make a good game. - Multiplayer and online games strengthen our capacity to build and exercise shared intentionality. Every time we agree to play a game together, we are practicing one of the talents that makes us fundamentally human. - Researchers have pointed to a particularly American failure to believe that the worst can really happen, because we’re systematically trained by our culture to focus on the positive. It’s a failure that makes us more susceptible to catastrophic events, like Hurricane Katrina or the 2008 housing market collapse, for example. In Never Saw It Coming, sociologist Karen Cerulo argues that our collective inability to focus on negative futures is our culture’s biggest blind spot. - Games don’t distract us from our real lives. They fill our real lives: with positive emotions, positive activity, positive experiences, and positive strengths. Games aren’t leading us to the downfall of human civilization. They’re leading us to its reinvention. The great challenge for us today, and for the remainder of the century, is to integrate games more closely into our everyday lives, and to embrace them as a platform for collaborating on our most important planetary efforts. ## Fixes - FIX # 1 : UNNECESSARY OBSTACLES Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use. - FIX # 2 : EMOTIONAL ACTIVATION Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy. - FIX # 3 : MORE SATISFYING WORK Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work. - FIX #4: BETTER HOPE OF SUCCESS Compared with games, reality is hopeless. Games eliminate our fear of failure and improve our chances for success. - FIX #5: STRONGER SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “prosocial emotions.” - FIX #6: EPIC SCALE Compared with games, reality is trivial. Games make us a part of something bigger and give epic meaning to our actions. - FIX # 7 : WHOLEHEARTED PARTICIPATION Compared with games, reality is hard to get into. Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever we’re doing. 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. - FIX # 8 : MEANINGFUL REWARDS WHEN WE NEED THEM MOST Compared with games, reality is pointless and unrewarding. Games help us feel more rewarded for making our best effort. - FIX # 9 : MORE FUN WITH STRANGERS Compared with games, reality is lonely and isolating. Games help us band together and create powerful communities from scratch. - FIX #10: HAPPINESS HACKS Compared with games, reality is hard to swallow. Games make it easier to take good advice and try out happier habits. - FIX # 11 : A SUSTAINABLE ENGAGEMENT ECONOMY Compared with games, reality is unsustainable. The gratifications we get from playing games are an infinitely renewable resource. - FIX # 12 : MORE EPIC WINS Compared with games, reality is unambitious. Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together. - FIX # 13: TEN THOUSAND HOURS COLLABORATING Compared with games, reality is disorganized and divided. Games help us make a more concerted effort—and over time, they give us collaboration superpowers. - FIX # 14 : MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER FORESIGHT Reality is stuck in the present. Games help us imagine and invent the future together.