Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (28 page)

We need help implementing new happiness habits—and we can’t just help ourselves. In fact, when it comes to improving our collective happiness levels, self-help rarely works. Outside the structure and social support of a clinical trial or classroom, these self-help recommendations are surprisingly hard to implement on our own. Depending on the activity, we either
can’t
or
won’t
do them solo—and there are three big reasons why.

The first and most important reason is summed up best by Sonja Lyubomirsky, who laments, “Why do many of the most powerful happiness activities sound so . . . well, hokey?”
³
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. The most common complaint, according to Lyubomirsky? Happiness activities sound “corny,” “sentimental,” or Pollyannaish.
⁴

“Such reactions are authentic, and I can’t dispute them,” Lyubomirsky admits.
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We instinctively resist activities that feel forced and inauthentic, and many people are deeply suspicious of unadulterated feel-goodness. Shouldn’t expressions of gratitude be spontaneous, not scheduled? Isn’t it naive to constantly look for silver linings? What if I just plain don’t
feel
like making a gesture of kindness today? When it comes to doing good and feeling good, we seem to think it’s more “real” if we wait for inspiration to strike, rather than committing to doing it whether we “feel like it” or not. On top of that, there’s just plain suspicion and skepticism of these unabashedly positive activities. There’s an undeniable tendency toward irony, cynicism, and detachment in popular culture today, and throwing ourselves into happiness activities just doesn’t fit that emotional climate.

Positive psychologist Martin Seligman explains that “the pervasive belief that happiness is inauthentic is a profound obstacle” to putting positive psychology into action.
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Science just doesn’t have a chance against our instinctive, visceral reactions—and, unfortunately, the best advice that positive psychologists have to offer seems to push all our cynical, skeptical buttons. For many people, happiness activities will need to be embedded in a more instinctively appealing—and less overtly do-good, feel-good—package.

The second obstacle to practicing simple happiness activities on our own is what I call the “self-help paradox.” Self-help is typically a personal, private activity. When it comes to some activities—overcoming fears, identifying career goals, coping with chronic pain, starting a fitness routine—there’s certainly reason to believe that self-help can work. But when it comes to everyday happiness, there’s just no way personal, private activity can work—because, according to most scientific findings, there are almost no good ways to be happy alone for long.

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.

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.

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.

Toward the end of his best-selling self-help book
Happier
, Ben-Shahar makes one last effort to convince people to make practical use of what they’ve read: “There is one easy step to
un
happiness—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. We simply can’t self-help our way out of the depression epidemic. Alongside platforms for communicating the science of happiness, we need platforms for
engaging
people in scientifically proven happiness activities.

And that’s where ideas like sidewalk compliments, cemetery poker, and stationary dancing come in.

Shout compliments at strangers, play poker in a cemetery, and dance without moving your feet are all instructions from large-scale public games that I’ve designed specifically with the intention of creating opportunities for as many people as possible to participate in happiness activities they wouldn’t ordinarily try.

These “crowd games”—meant to be played in very large, and usually face-to-face, groups—are called Cruel 2 B Kind, Tombstone Hold ’Em, and Top Secret Dance-Off. And they’re all perfect examples of a new design practice called “happiness hacking.”

The term “hacking” has its origins in the 1950s, when MIT students defined it as “creatively tinkering with technology.”
⁹

Back then, it was primarily radios that hackers were playing with, and it was a social activity: they would proudly show off their best hacks to anyone who would pay attention. Today, we most often think of hacking in the context of computing. You might associate the term “hacking” with malicious or illegal computer activity, but in the tech community it more commonly refers to clever, creative programming—especially if it takes a smart shortcut to accomplish something otherwise challenging. And as with the original MIT hacks, there’s still a tradition of showing off and freely sharing successful hacks.

Recently, especially in Silicon Valley circles, “hacking” has been used more broadly to talk about a kind of creative, hands-on problem solving that usually, but not always, involves computers. A good example of this phenomenon is a movement called “life hacking.” Life hackers look for simple tips and tricks to improve productivity in everyday life—such as adopting the “ten/ two rule.” The ten/two rule means you work for ten minutes, and then let yourself do something fun and unproductive for two minutes—checking e-mail, getting a snack, browsing headlines. The theory is that it’s easy to commit your attention to work for just ten minutes at a time, and as a result you’ll get fifty good working minutes out of every hour. For many people, that’s a huge boost in productivity. To make it easy to adopt this habit, life hackers have created desktop and mobile phone applications that buzz alternately every ten and two minutes to keep you on track.

Life hacking positions itself in direct contrast to self-help; it’s meant to be a more collective way of working out solutions and testing them out together. As Merlin Mann, one of the leading life hackers, explains, “Self-help books tend to be about lofty ideas, whereas life hacks are about getting things done and solving life’s problems with modest solutions.”
¹⁰
Any good hack—whether it’s a computer hack or a life hack—should be free to adopt and extremely
lightweight
—meaning easy and inexpensive to implement—without any special equipment or expertise.

It was in this spirit that I coined the term “happiness hacking” several years ago.
¹¹

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. Game mechanics also allow you to escalate the difficulty of happiness activities and inject them with novelty, so they stay challenging and fresh.

When I design games today, I always embed at least one proven happiness activity into the game mechanics—and sometimes I invent games based entirely on a handful of new research findings. It’s my way of enacting the tenth fix for reality:

The two most frequently recommended happiness activities across the scientific literature are to express gratitude and practice acts of kindness. Recent research has shown that we don’t even have to know someone to experience the benefits of thanking and being nice to them. Even fleeting acts of gratitude and kindness toward strangers can have a profound impact on our happiness. And positive gestures from strangers can make a big difference in how rich and satisfying our everyday lives feel.

Sociologists call the positive relationships we have with strangers “transitory public sociality.” We experience it in all kinds of public places: sidewalks, parks, trains, restaurants, stadiums, and coffee shops, for example. These transitory social interactions, when they happen, are usually brief and anonymous: we catch another’s eye, we smile, we make room for someone else, we pick up something someone has dropped, we go on our way. But these brief encounters, taken cumulatively, have an aggregate impact on our mood over time.

Researchers have shown that sharing the same space for even just a few minutes a day with kind and friendly strangers makes us more optimistic, improves our self-esteem, makes us feel safer and more connected to our environment, and generally helps us enjoy our lives more.
¹²
And if we return the favor, we benefit as well: when we give to others, or act cooperatively, the reward centers of the brain light up.
¹³

But strangers aren’t always inclined to be friendly to each other—and some researchers believe our shared spaces are becoming less friendly over time.

Dacher Keltner has devised a simple way to test this theory: a mathematical method for measuring the social well-being of any shared environment. It’s called the “
jen
ratio,” from the ancient Chinese word for human kindness. It compares the total positive interactions between strangers to the total negative interactions, in a given period of time and in a given place.
¹⁴
The higher the ratio, the better the social well-being of the space and the happier you’re likely to feel after spending time in it. The lower the ratio, the poorer the social well-being, and the unhappier you’ll be if you spend too much time there.

To measure the jen ratio of a space, you simply watch it very closely for a fixed period of time—say, one hour. You count up all the positive and negative microinteractions between strangers, keeping track of two different totals: how many times people smile or act kindly toward each other, and how many times people act unfriendly, rude, or openly uninterested. All the positive microinteractions—such as big smiles, a hearty thank-you, a door being held open, a concerned question—get tallied on the left side of the ratio. All the negative microinteractions—a sarcastic comment, an eye roll, an unexcused bump, someone cursing under their breath—get tallied on the right side.

The jen ratio is a simple but powerful way to predict whether being in a particular place will make us happier or unhappier. When Keltner surveyed several years’ worth of recent research on social well-being and social spaces, he concluded, “Signs of a loss of
jen
in the United States are incontrovertible . . . with a jen ratio trending toward zero.”
¹⁵

So how can we raise the jen ratio of everyday shared spaces? The solution is obvious, if hard to enact: we need to convince large numbers of people to do things like smile more, be more welcoming, express more gratitude, or pay more compliments. Positive psychologists, of course, have already given us this recommendation—but, as Lyubomirsky’s research shows, such recommendations rarely inspire direct individual action. Who wouldn’t feel daunted by the challenge of trying to increase the jen ratio of a big public space singlehandedly ? More likely, it would take a crowd, and not a single person, to effectively bump up the jen ratio. But there simply aren’t any well-established social traditions for going out and expressing gratitude or being kind to strangers together.

As a game designer, it is clear to me that we can tackle these problems by making this behavior more challenging and social. All it needs are a few arbitrary limitations, some multiplayer obstacles, and a feedback system in order to turn unlocking the kindness of strangers into a game.

So what exactly would a kindness game look like? And who would play it? These are questions I asked myself a few years ago, and, together with my good friend and fellow game developer Persuasive Games cofounder Ian Bogost, I decided to invent a game with the core mechanism of performing acts of kindness on strangers—as
sneakily
and
stealthily
as possible.