Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (14 page)

Promotion screenshot and gameplay image of
WarioWare: Smooth Moves.
(Nintendo Corporation, 2007)

One reviewer reasonably asks: “Games this crazy shouldn’t be this popular, should they?”
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But they are hugely popular.
Smooth Moves
has sold more than 2 million copies. They are easy to learn and quick to deliver emotional rewards—if you’re willing to pick your virtual nose by shoving your game controller up and down, you really do trust the people around you.

In a recent major study of more than one thousand gamers, a little-known prosocial emotion called “naches” ranked number eight on the top ten list of emotions that gamers say they want to feel while playing their favorite games.
Naches
, a Yiddish word for the bursting pride we feel when someone we’ve taught or mentored succeeds, ranked just below surprise and fiero.
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The term “naches” hasn’t caught on in the gamer world the way “pwn” or “fiero” has. But players in the study frequently described a kind of vicarious pride from playing over someone else’s shoulder, and giving advice and encouragement—especially on games they themselves had already mastered. The author of the study, 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.”
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It’s no surprise that mentoring our friends and family in gameplay makes us happy and brings us closer together. Paul Ekman, a pioneering emotions researcher and an expert on the phenomenon of naches, explains that this particular emotion is also likely an evolved mechanism, designed to enhance group survival. The happiness we get from cheering on friends and family ensures our personal investment in other people’s growth and achievements. It encourages us to contribute to someone else’s success, and as a result we form networks of support from which everyone involved benefits.
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And because naches is so strongly correlated with survival, Ekman says, we feel it intensely. We don’t describe ourselves as “bursting with pride” over our own success, but we do for others; this language suggests that the feeling of naches is even more explosive than personal fiero.

However, we don’t naturally explode with pride at someone else’s success if we haven’t helped and encouraged them; too often, we feel jealousy or resentment. If we aren’t actively contributing to the achievement with our support, then our emotional systems don’t register vicarious pride. To generate the emotional reward of naches, we have to throw ourselves into the act of mentoring.

Most parents live in an almost constant state of naches. Unfortunately, outside of parenthood, we aren’t always alert to opportunities for naches—among friends, between husband and wife, or from children toward their parents—because we don’t have significant incentive or encouragement to mentor each other in everyday school or work. For the most part, we live in a culture of individual achievement, or what Martin Seligman calls “the waxing of the self” and “the waning of the commons.”
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He explains, “The society we live in takes the pleasures and pains, the successes and failures of the individual with unprecedented seriousness.”
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And when we see success or failure as an entirely individual affair, we don’t bother to invest time or resources in someone else’s achievements.

We need more naches, which helps explain the rise in single-player games being played with two or more people in the same room. Game researchers who study industry trends report that, increasingly, one person will play a game while another, or others, watch, encourage, and advise.
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What makes this scenario attractive—and here is a big difference between ordinary life and games—is that computer and video games are perfectly replicable obstacles, we know in advance that our support will be useful, and we know exactly what our friends and family members are getting themselves in for.

The notoriously difficult puzzle game
Braid,
by independent game developer Jonathan Blow, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Players must work their way through thirty-seven monster-filled puzzle rooms in order to rescue a princess. Early reviews of the single-player game were raves, but many reviewers worried that the reliance on puzzles would limit the replay value of the game. Once you’d solved a puzzle, one reviewer wrote, “there is little incentive to come back for seconds.”
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But a large amount of anecdotal evidence from gamer blogs and forums suggests that gamers are revisiting
Braid
—in order to generate naches. Players seem absolutely tickled to watch friends and family work out the a-ha moments for each puzzle, lending their advice and positive morale in the face of the game’s frustrating mental challenges. “Just finished the game, now I’m watching my wife work through it and it’s a delight,” one husband-turned-mentor writes.
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Another says, “I finished the game last night and only needed help from my kids on two of the very final puzzle pieces. I think they were very proud of their mom!”
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Games give us the opportunity to learn and master new challenges, and usually we learn skills that we can pass on to the other gamers in our lives.

Not all the social rewards we get from playing games are about strengthening bonds with people we already know. 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.

Sometimes we want company, but we don’t want to actively interact with anybody. That’s where the idea of playing alone together comes in.

MMOs are famous for their collaborative quests and group raids. But it turns out that a majority of players prefer to play the game solo. An eight-month study of more than 150,000
World of Warcraft
players discovered that players were spending on average 70 percent of their time pursuing individual missions, barely interacting with other players.
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The researchers, based at Stanford University and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), found this surprising and counterintuitive. Why bother paying a monthly subscription to participate in a massively multiplayer game world if you are going to ignore the masses?

The researchers conducted interviews to explore these findings and found that players enjoyed
sharing
the virtual environment, even if there was little to no direct interaction. They were experiencing a high degree of “social presence,” a communications theory term for the sensation of sharing the same space with other people.
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Although the players were not fighting each other or questing together, they still considered each other virtual company. The Stanford and PARC research team dubbed this phenomenon “playing alone together.”
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One
World of Warcraft
player explains on her blog why she prefers to play alone together: “It’s the feeling of not being alone in the world. I love being around other real players in the game. I enjoy seeing what they’re doing, what they’ve achieved, and running across them out in the world ‘doing their thing’ while I’m doing mine.”
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What she describes here is actually a special kind of social presence: a presence enhanced by sharing goals and engaging in the same activities. The players can
recognize
each other because they have a common understanding of what they’re doing and why. Their actions are intelligible and meaningful to each other.

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 Stanford and PARC researchers posited that introverted players were more likely to enjoy playing alone together, and recent cognitive science studies support this theory. The best explanation scientists have for why some people are extroverted while others are introverted has to do with two differences in brain activity.

First, introverts in general 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 lower cortical arousal. They require
more
stimulus to feel engaged with the external world. This makes extroverts more likely to seek higher levels of social stimulation, while introverts are more likely to feel mentally exhausted after lower levels of social engagement.

Meanwhile, extroverts tend to produce more dopamine in response to social rewards—smiling faces, laughter, conversation, and touch, for example. Introverts, in turn, are less sensitive to these social reward systems but highly sensitive to
mental
activity, such as problem solving and puzzling and solo exploration. Researchers say this explains why extroverts seem happier around other people and in stimulating environments: they are feeling significantly more intense positive emotions than introverted people.

But some game researchers, including Nicole Lazzaro, believe that ambient sociability and lightweight social interaction can actually train the brain to experience social interaction as more rewarding. Lazzaro proposes that since introverts are so sensitive to the rewards of mental activity, which gaming provides, doing these activities in online social settings can create new, positive associations for introverts about social experience. In other words, games like
WoW
may make introverts feel more comfortable with social interaction in general.

Studies have yet to be conducted to offer concrete support to this theory, but initial interviews and anecdotal evidence suggest it is worth further investigation. Our solo
WoW
player describes how she can be drawn into lightweight social interaction even as she makes her own way in the online world: “Chuck a heal there, apply a buff here, kill that thing that’s about to kill that player, ask for some quick help or information, join up for a spontaneous quick group.”
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She remains open to these unexpected social interactions, and they are an essential part of why she likes to play alone together. She craves the
possibility
of “the spontaneous adventures that erupt between real people.”

Why does this matter? Why is it a good thing for introverts to be open to more social interaction, and to find shared experiences more rewarding?

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 a result, they are better liked and better supported than introverts, two measures that factor heavily into quality of life. Introverts want to be liked and appreciated, and they need help just as much as anyone else; they’re just not as motivated to seek out opportunities to build up that kind of positive social feeling and exchange.
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Fortunately, as many gamers are discovering, ambient sociability can play a key role in building up a desire for social interaction in the most introverted of people. Ambient sociability is hardly a substitute for real-world social interaction. But it can serve as a gateway to real-world socializing—and therefore greater quality of life—by helping introverts learn to view social engagement as more intrinsically rewarding than they are naturally predisposed to do.

 

 

GAME DESIGNER
Daniel Cookman writes that when gamers decide to play with strangers or with people they know in real life, they’re effectively choosing between “forging new relationships or strengthening old ones.... We can ask which the stronger draw is: strong, safe relationships with existing friends, or weak, ‘risky’ relationships with new people.” Cookman says that, in most circumstances, he (and most gamers) prefers to strengthen existing relationships. The payoff is simply greater, and more clearly connected to our everyday lives.

Cookman is right that, on the whole, gamers make the choice to strengthen existing relationships—increasingly, online gamers report that they prefer to play online with people they know in real life. This is truer the younger a gamer you are. A recent three-year study of Internet use by young people in the United States revealed that gamers under eighteen spend 61 percent of their game time playing with real-life friends and family, rather than alone or with strangers.
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