Home > Work > Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
61 " In study after study, positive-psychology researchers have shown that extroversion is highly correlated with greater happiness and life satisfaction. Extroverts are simply more likely to seek out the experiences that create social bonding and affection. As "
― Jane McGonigal , Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
62 " 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. "
63 " 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.”7 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. "
64 " Approaching happiness as a self-help process runs counter to virtually every positive-psychology finding ever published. Even if we can get ourselves past the hokiness problem, thinking of happiness as a self-help process will doom us to failure. 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. "
65 " Community typically arises when a group of people who have a common interest start to interact with each other in order to further that interest. It requires positive participation from everyone in the group. "
66 " Finally, 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. 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,” he writes. “People often abandon theories when they discover how difficult they are to put into practice.”8 Either we never try or we get bored or frustrated quickly. "
67 " Happiness hacking is the experimental design practice of translating positive-psychology research findings into game mechanics. "
68 " 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. "
69 " Collaborate or perish” is perhaps the single most urgent rallying cry for our times. The ability to collaborate at extreme scales isn’t just a competitive advantage in business or in life anymore. Increasingly, it’s a survival imperative for the human race. "
70 " We will have to overcome the lingering cultural bias against games, so that nearly half the world is not cut off from the power of games. "
71 " Busywork generally gets a bad rap in our real lives, but when we choose it for ourselves, it actually helps us feel quite contented and productive. "
72 " 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. "
73 " But even playing a very short game together, we are reminded of how much we share with even the strangest of strangers. We gain confidence that we can connect with others when we want to, and when we need to. And with that confidence, there is no reason to ever feel alone in the world—virtual, real, or otherwise. "
74 " That’s because there is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability—or what both game designers and psychologists call “flow.”4 When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes. "
75 " 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. "
76 " In 2004, researchers Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson published Character Strengths and Virtues, a manual with twenty-four such categories, divided into six groups: wisdom and knowledge—cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge; courage—emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal; humanity—interpersonal strengths that involve tending to and befriending others; justice—civic strengths that underlie healthy community life; temperance—strengths that protect against excess; and transcendence—strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning. 9 "
77 " It’s only fun to fail if the game is fair—and you had every chance of success. "
78 " Wikipedia has good game mechanics. Player action has direct and clear results: edits appear instantly on the site, giving users a powerful sense of control over the environment. This instant impact creates optimism and a strong sense of self-efficacy. It features unlimited work opportunities, of escalating difficulty. As the Wikipedians describe it, “Players can take on quests (WikiProjects, efforts to organize many articles into a single, larger article), fight boss-level battles (featured articles that are held to higher standards than ordinary articles), and enter battle arenas (interventions against article vandalism).” It also has a personal feedback system that helps Wikipedians feel like they are improving and making personal progress as they contribute. “Players can accumulate experience points (edit count), allowing them to advance to higher levels (lists of top-ranking Wikipedians by number of edits). "
79 " It’s not just about making good edits. The game also has a clearly defined enemy to defeat: vandals who make unhelpful edits to the site. “Edit wars” are said to break out between competing contributors with different points of view, and players have developed collaboration techniques and combat tools to deal with these high-level challenges. As an edit war escalates, more and more editors are called to join the conversation and work toward a solution. "
80 " third key aspect of Wikipedia’s good gameness: it has good game community. Good game community requires two things: plenty of positive social interaction and a meaningful context for collective effort. Wikipedia has both. As Wikipedians describe it: Every unique location (article) in the game world (encyclopedia) has a tavern (“talk page,” or discussion forum) where players have the opportunity to interact with any other player in real time. Players often become friends with other players, and some have even arranged to meet in real life (“meetups,” or face-to-face social gatherings for frequent Wikipedia contributors). "