Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (30 page)

But I’ve never been prouder of a game design, and for one reason: players widely report being able to think about death and lost loved ones in a more positive way after playing Tombstone Hold ’Em. And that’s the point of the game. It’s a happiness hack meant to create more social, and more enjoyable, ways of remembering death.

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. Tombstone Hold ’Em is meant to make remembering death easier and more rewarding, by taking advantage of the largely underutilized social and recreational potential of cemeteries.

The central activity of Tombstone Hold ’Em poker is learning how to “see” a playing card in any tombstone, based on its shape (the suit) and the names and date of death (the face value). Once you can read stones as cards, you can spot “hands” all around you. The game works in any cemetery, as long as there are clearly marked tombstones. Here’s how it plays out:

Tombstone Hold ’Em allows players to actually get to know the people at rest in the cemetery. You read the stones, you learn the names, and you start to wonder about their stories—because every time you pick a pocket pair, you’re recruiting two dearly deceased as allies in the hand. Playing the game in a perfectly manicured cemetery is good, but playing it in a cemetery that could use a little loving care is better—it’s more challenging, and more rewarding. As you clear away clutter from the stones to make them legible again, you’re not just playing in the cemetery—you’re taking care of it.

The game is meant to be played by at least four people, and ideally in larger groups—the larger the group, the more enlivened the cemetery feels. I’ve organized large-scale Tombstone Hold ’Em games in historic cemeteries in Kansas City, Atlanta, New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, for crowds ranging between twenty and two hundred. With a group that big, you’ve got a dozen or more “flops” going at the same time, spread out around the cemetery, on various benches, tree stumps, or mausoleum steps. Whenever I’ve organized a larger game, I’ve done so with the official permission and assistance of the cemeteries. But I’ve also played much smaller, unofficial games everywhere from Austin to Helsinki to Barcelona to Vancouver. If it’s a small group—say, four, six, or even eight players—it doesn’t raise too many eyebrows, especially if you’re sure to play well out of the way of anyone who might be visiting the cemetery for more traditional purposes.

But before I get too much further dissecting the experience of playing Tombstone Hold ’Em, perhaps I should explain how I came to be designing a crowd game for cemeteries—and how happiness research convinced me to take on such an unusual project.

In 2005, I was working as a lead designer for a game company called 42 Entertainment. We accepted a commission to develop an alternate reality campaign for the Western-themed video game
Gun,
developed by Neversoft and published by Activision. The goal of the alternate reality campaign was to give gamers the chance to directly experience the historical world of
Gun
, the American Old West of the 1880s. The centerpiece of the alternate reality campaign was an online poker platform, styled in a Western theme. Gamers were invited to compete in online Texas Hold ’Em tournaments set in the past, competing at the same table with historical characters from the 1880s. It was a unique combination of historical role playing and card playing.

Alternate reality games usually have a real-world component, and since
Gun
featured real-world characters who’d died in the Old West, we came up with the idea of using real cemeteries as a site for some kind of live-action experience. Because of my expertise in running reality-based games, I was put in charge of figuring out what the live cemetery events would be.

On one hand, I was excited by the concept. In a world where video gamers are much maligned for being desensitized to violence, it struck me as a particularly provocative idea to send gamers to the
real-world graves
of characters they had killed in
Gun
. But I also felt some trepidation, hitting up against the cultural norms involving cemeteries. I
really
didn’t want to organize some kind of rowdy, unauthorized “flash mob,” so I started researching historic cemeteries and brainstorming what kinds of things gamers could do in them.

One of the first things I discovered was that cemeteries in the United States were absolutely
desperate
to convince people to spend more time in them. According to cemetery industry statistics, the average grave receives just
two
visits in its lifetime—
total
, by
any
friend or family member—after the initial flurry of visits that immediately follows the burial.
¹⁷
We think of cemeteries as spaces for mourning, but the truth is, mourners do not regularly return. Meanwhile, others are generally discouraged by social norms from spending significant time in the space—it’s considered either unseemly or morbid.

As a result, cemeteries are for the most part empty. And lack of participation in cemetery spaces has become a huge problem from an industry standpoint (cemeteries are running out of money), a community standpoint (the less visited a cemetery is, the more likely it is to be poorly maintained and vandalized), and, perhaps most of all, from a happiness standpoint (according to research, the less time we spend in cemeteries, the more likely we are to suffer from fear and anxiety about death).

I was first tipped off to these problems by a
New Yorker
article about the decline of American cemeteries, which was published while I was in the midst of my research. In the article, Tad Friend documents how Americans today spend less time in cemeteries than ever before, despite the vast expanses of green space they take up and the escalating costs of maintaining them. “Who are cemeteries for? The living or the dead?” he asks. We’ve apparently convinced ourselves they’re for the dead, since we don’t visit them. But that’s ridiculous, as Tad Friends argues: “They’re for the living; the dead can’t enjoy them. The trick for cemeterians is to get the living to come to them.” He documents a range of fledgling efforts on the part of cemeteries nationwide to become more relevant to the living. There are, for example, movies projected at night on the sides of mausoleums in Hollywood, 5K graveyard races in Kansas City, and dog-walking clubs in historic Washington, D.C., cemeteries.
¹⁸

As I researched the subject further, I discovered that many cemeteries were fighting for their very survival, and largely as a result of the American desire to keep the reality of death as far removed from our daily lives as possible. For decades private cemeteries have been quietly sold to accommodate new highways, schools, and condominiums; the graves are typically relocated to more remote areas. Meanwhile, many public and historic cemeteries receive insufficient funds to maintain the grounds properly; with such low visitation rates, they have a hard time documenting their value to the community. And abandoned cemeteries once belonging to now defunct churches are being adopted by local community groups in an effort to repair them and preserve their historical value.
¹⁹

People who care about and run cemeteries make many good arguments in favor of protecting them: they are a unique repository of historical data, they have significant architectural value, and, not least of all, there is the ethical imperative to honor contracts to families who have buried their loved ones with the expectation that they will be cared for in perpetuity.

All of these are worthy reasons to enliven cemetery spaces today—but what really convinced me was the happiness research.

In his report on global happiness trends, Eric Weiner writes that death is “a subject that, oddly, comes up an awful lot in my search for happiness. Maybe we can’t really be happy without first coming to terms with our mortality.”
²⁰
It’s a strange idea, but it’s not a new one. In
The Happiness Myth
, happiness historian Jennifer Michael Hecht devotes an entire chapter to “the age-old advice to remember death, to keep it in the forefront of our minds for the sake of bettering the life we lead now.”
²¹
She traces the idea all the way back to Plato, who advised students to “practice regular meditation upon death,” and to Buddha, who said, “Of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.” Even Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher best known for encouraging followers to seek simple pleasures, put death at the center of his vision of happiness, arguing that it is only when we shake free our fear of death that we can truly enjoy life.

According to Hecht, since ancient times meditations on death have served the same purpose: to replace fear and anxiety with a kind of calm, mellow gratitude for the life that we’re given. And today, these traditions have the backing of contemporary science. Positive psychologists have found that grappling with the reality of death forces a kind of mental shift that helps us savor the present and focus our attention on the intrinsic goals that matter most to us. Hecht has coined a term for this realignment of priority and attention: posttraumatic bliss. “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.”
²²

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. In
Happier
, Tal Ben-Shahar quotes Irvin D. Yalom, a psychotherapist who often works with dying patients: “They are able to trivialize the trivial, to assume a sense of control, to stop doing things they do not wish to do, to communicate more openly with families and close friends, and to live entirely in the present rather than in the future or the past.”
²³
This rare and intense positive focus on getting the most out of life is hard to come by in our ordinary lives, Ben-Shahar notes—especially when we spend so much time collectively trying to avoid thinking about death.

Can we learn to savor life and achieve that intensity of positive focus without the trauma of a terminal diagnosis or a near-death experience? That seems to be the idea behind classical and religious advice, and today positive psychologists like Ben-Shahar recommend activities such as imagining ourselves on our deathbeds as a way to try to provoke this positive clarity.