"Reality is Broken": how video games can make us better by Jane McGonigal
I recently read “Reality is Broken” by Jane McGonigal. Working in the video game industry, the author presents concrete examples of video games designed to enjoy more our life, and even save the world. By giving fixes for the reality, she shows that we can play to improve our reality. In this post I wanted to share with you the main insights she gathered.
- First, we have to explain what is a game. Philosopher Bernard Suits defined a game as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
Intrinsic Reward : We get happier by intrinsic rewards than by extrinsic ones (i.e. hedonic: shopping, drugs, etc.). Thanks to positive psychology, we know that we crave four things in life:
1) We crave more satisfying work (which is different from a person to another) such as playing guitar, which produces a direct impact to our efforts. Take for example the satisfaction felt by an office clerk vs. a mechanician. We want work that we can be proud of. A game has to be a long series of works so that we always have something to do, but also constant feedback and rewards.
2) We crave the experience or at least the hope of being successful. We love failure, it means that we can continue the fun. If we win, the game end. But to enjoy failure, the game has to be fair and you need a fair chance of winning. Failure also means that we can do better. Once we mastered a game, we get bored.
3) We crave social interaction. Another social benefit of video games is that while playing, teasing each other (pawn someone “I am so good at this game, I own it”) plays an invaluable role in helping us maintain positive relationships. Teasing and trash talking have 3 positive effects:
– It confirms trust: the person doing the teasing is demonstrating the capacity to hurt but simultaneously showing that the intention is not to hurt (provoke negative emotions in a mild way).
– By letting someone teasing us we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position, we’re also helping them feel more powerful. We give them a moment to enjoy higher status in our social relationship and so we intensify their positive feeling for us.
– Vicarious pride, an strong emotion that players want to feel. “Naches” means the bursting pride we feel when someone we’ve taught or mentored succeeds, especially when we already master the game. The author of a study based on more than one thousand gamers said “players seem to really enjoy training their friends and family to play games. With a whopping 53.4% saying it enhances their enjoyment.”
4) We crave meaning, or the chance to be part of something larger than us. The last generation of video games introduced the concept of “playing alone together”. For example, in World of Warcraft, and a lot of other MMORPG, gamers play alone 70% of the time. However, they still consider the company of others (they play alone but they are not), they share a common environment, even if they don’t interact together, players consider themselves to be part of a larger community, without communication or geographic boundaries. Another example is the video game Halo 3 that encouraged players to collectively make 10 billion kills. This collective work, even if it does not have any value, has a meaning for players and the community.
The Flow : In positive psychology, as Jane explains “flow is exhilarating in the moment. It makes us feel more energized. A major flow experience can improve our mood for hours, even days, afterward. But because it’s such a state of extreme engagement, it eventually uses up our physical and mental resources. We can’t sustain our flow indefinitely – as much as we might want to. ” This “flow” is what most gamers look for in playing games and what is more and more difficult to feel in the real world. This is why playing games few hours a week can increase our overall well-being over the long run.
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). According to the definition from McGonigal “ARGs are the antiscapist games”, they are “games you play to get more out of real life, as opposed to games you play to escape it.” This includes a wide range of game types, from games that makes cleaning more fun, to games that gather collective efforts to save the planet, or games that connect people with small requests to fulfill (i.e. bring a coffee; talk with someone, make the grocery…). For more exemples of mysterious ARGs, I invite you to check the Youtube channel of Feldup.
- Introverts tend to be more sensitive to external sensory stimulus: the cortical region of the brain, which processes the external world of objects, spaces and people, reacts strongly in the presence of any stimulus. Extroverts, on the other hand, have less cortical arousal.
- Extroverts tend to produce more dopamine in response to social rewards: smiling faces, laughter, conversation and touch, for example. Introverts are less sensitive to these social rewards but are highly sensitive to mental activity such as problem solving, puzzle and solo exploration. Researchers say it explains why extroverts seem happier around other people and in stimulating environments: they are feeling more intense positive emotions than introverts.
- Foursquare is an app developed by independent New York city-based developers, designed to improve social life of its participants. It encourages you to discover new places and to come back to your favorites. It tells your friends where you are (e.g. in a bar) to allow them to join you if they are in the neighborhood and free. The main feature, from a marketing point of view, is the “mayor” title. When you are the person who visited a place the most (e.g. a bar, fast food, a zoo, etc.), you become the “mayor” of this place. But if someone beats you, the title of mayor is transferred to him. Moreover, some brands, such as Starbucks or some local bars, have started to give benefits to mayors such as free drinks.
By the age of 21, the average American teenager spends nearly ten thousand hours playing video games. This time will make them exceptionally good at cooperating. Cooperation is a way of working together and three elements are needed:
- Cooperating: acting purposefully toward a common goal
- Coordinating: synchronizing efforts and sharing resources
- Cocreating: producing a novel outcome together
This last element is what makes coordination apart from other common efforts. It’s about creating something that would be impossible to produce alone. It allows gamers to develop skills thanks to a common ground for working together, such as share concentration, synchronized engagement, mutual regard or collective commitment, in order to produce reciprocal rewards.
Worldwide games like Superstruct, World Without Oil or EVOKE, invites gamers to think about challenges that we already face or that will arise in the future (i.e. global warming, resources decrease, poverty, etc.) By giving real-world problems and some initial ideas, gamers can develop their own solutions. And by gathering solutions of thousands of gamers, we can create sustainable, creative and actionable ideas that can be developed in the real world. The next step to bring more gamers to think actively and critically to current challenges is to facilitate the access to the poorest and most isolated populations to the Internet. People living in the poorest situation, in central Africa for example, can be very creative by using few resources to solve some of the biggest challenges. They show a great capacity of innovation, even if you don’t hear about it on TV or newspapers.
On this last positive note, we end our overview of video games and their various virtuous uses for players and the world around them.