Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (5 page)

Screenshot from the first room of
Portal
.

With so few clues for how to proceed, your goal at the start of the game is simply to figure out what your goals are. You might reasonably guess that your first goal is to get out of the sealed room, but you can’t really be sure. It would seem that the main obstacle you face is that you have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing. You’re going to have to learn how to advance in this world on your own.

Well, not completely on your own. If you poke around the room enough, you might think to pick up a clipboard lying on the desk. This movement triggers an artificial intelligence system to wake up and start speaking to you. The AI informs you that you are about to undertake a series of laboratory tests. The AI does not tell you what you are being tested on. Again, it’s up to you, the player, to figure it out.

What you eventually discover as you continue to play is that
Portal
is a game about escaping from rooms that operate according to rules you are unaware of. You learn that each room is a puzzle, increasingly booby-trapped, and the game requires you to understand more and more complex physics in order to get out. If you don’t teach yourself the physics of each new room—that is, if you don’t learn the rules of the game—you’ll be stuck there forever, listening to the AI system repeat herself.

Many, if not most, computer and video games today are structured this way. Players begin each game by tackling the obstacle of
not knowing what to do
and
not knowing how to play
. This kind of ambiguous play is markedly different from historical, predigital games. Traditionally, we have needed instructions in order to play a game. But now we’re often invited to learn as we go. We explore the game space, and the computer code effectively constrains and guides us. We learn how to play by carefully observing what the game allows us to do and how it responds to our input. As a result, most gamers never read game manuals. In fact, it’s a truism in the game industry that a well-designed game should be playable immediately, with no instruction whatsoever.

A game like
Portal
turns our definition of a game on its head, but doesn’t destroy it. The four core elements of goals, rules, feedback, and voluntary participation remain the same—they just play out in a different order. It used to be that we were spoon-fed the goal and the rules, and we would then seek feedback on our progress. But increasingly, the feedback systems are what we learn first. They guide us toward the goal and help us decode the rules. And that’s as powerful a motivation to play as any: discovering exactly what is possible in this brand-new virtual world.

 

 

I THINK
it’s fair to say that Suits’ definition, and going forward
our
definition, holds up remarkably well against these diverse examples. Any well-designed game—digital or not—is an invitation to tackle an unnecessary obstacle.

When we understand games in this light, the dark metaphors we use for talking about games are revealed to be the irrational fears they really are. Gamers don’t want to game the system. Gamers want to play the game. They want to explore and learn and improve. They’re volunteering for unnecessary hard work—and they genuinely care about the outcome of their effort.

If the goal is truly compelling, and if the feedback is motivating enough, we will keep wrestling with the game’s limitations—creatively, sincerely, and enthusiastically—for a very long time. We will play until we utterly exhaust our own abilities, or until we exhaust the challenge. And we will take the game seriously because there is nothing trivial about playing a good game. The game
matters
.

This is what it means to act like a gamer, or to be a truly
gameful
person. This is who we become when we play a good game.

But this definition leads us to a perplexing question. Why
on earth
are so many people volunteering to tackle such completely unnecessary obstacles? Why are we collectively spending 3 billion hours a week working at the very limits of our ability, for no obvious external reward? In other words:
Why do unnecessary obstacles make us happy?

When it comes understanding how games really work, the answer to this question is as crucial as the four defining traits.

Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work.

We don’t normally think of games as hard work. After all, we
play
games, and we’ve been taught to think of play as the very opposite of work. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”
⁶

When we’re depressed, according to the clinical definition, we suffer from two things: a
pessimistic sense of inadequacy
and a
despondent lack of activity
. If we were to reverse these two traits, we’d get something like this:
an optimistic sense of our own capabilities
and
an invigorating rush of activity
. There’s no clinical psychological term that describes this positive condition. But it’s a perfect description of the emotional state of gameplay. A game is an opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, at something we’re good at (or getting better at) and enjoy. In other words,
gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression.

When we’re playing a good game—when we’re tackling unnecessary obstacles—we are actively moving ourselves toward the positive end of the emotional spectrum. We are intensely engaged, and this puts us in precisely the right frame of mind and physical condition to generate all kinds of positive emotions and experiences. All of the neurological and physiological systems that underlie happiness—our attention systems, our reward center, our motivation systems, our emotion and memory centers—are fully activated by gameplay.

This extreme emotional activation is the primary reason why today’s most successful computer and video games are so addictive and mood-boosting. When we’re in a concentrated state of optimistic engagement, it suddenly becomes biologically more possible for us to think positive thoughts, to make social connections, and to build personal strengths. We are actively conditioning our minds and bodies to be happier.

If only hard work in the real world had the same effect. In our real lives, hard work is too often something we do because we
have
to do it—to make a living, to get ahead, to meet someone else’s expectations, or simply because someone else gave us a job to do. We resent that kind of work. It stresses us out. It takes time away from our friends and family. It comes with too much criticism. We’re afraid of failing. We often don’t get to see the direct impact of our efforts, so we rarely feel satisfied.

Or, worse, our real-world work isn’t hard enough. We’re bored out of our minds. We feel completely underutilized. We feel unappreciated. We are wasting our lives.

When we don’t choose hard work for ourselves, it’s usually not the right work, at the right time, for the right person. It’s not perfectly customized for our strengths, we’re not in control of the work flow, we don’t have a clear picture of what we’re contributing to, and we never see how it all pays off in the end. Hard work that someone else requires us to do just doesn’t activate our happiness systems in the same way. It all too often doesn’t absorb us, doesn’t make us optimistic, and doesn’t invigorate us.

What a boost to global net happiness it would be if we could positively activate the minds and bodies of hundreds of millions of people by offering them better hard work. We could offer them challenging, customizable missions and tasks, to do alone or with friends and family, whenever and wherever. We could provide them with vivid, real-time reports of the progress they’re making and a clear view of the impact they’re having on the world around them.

That’s
exactly
what the game industry is doing today. It’s fulfilling our need for better hard work—and helping us choose for ourselves the right work at the right time. So you can forget the old aphorism “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” All good gameplay
is
hard work. It’s hard work that we enjoy and choose for ourselves. And when we do hard work that we care about, we are priming our minds for happiness.

The right hard work takes different forms at different times for different people. To meet these individual needs, games have been offering us increasingly diverse kinds of work for decades now.

There’s
high-stakes work
, which is what many people think of first when it comes to video games. It’s fast and action oriented, and it thrills us with the possibility not only of success but also of spectacular failure. Whether we’re driving hairpin turns at top speeds in a racing video game like the
Gran Turismo
series or battling zombies in a first-person shooter game like
Left 4 Dead
, it’s the risk of crashing, burning, or having our brains sucked out that makes us feel more alive.

But there’s also
busywork,
which is completely predictable and monotonous. 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. When we’re swapping multicolored jewels in a casual game like
Bejeweled
or harvesting virtual crops in a social game like FarmVille, we’re happy just to keep our hands and mind occupied with focused activity that produces a clear result.

There’s
mental work
, which revs up our cognitive faculties. It can be rapid-fire and condensed, like the thirty-second math problems in Nintendo’s
Brain Age
games. Or it can be drawn-out and complex, like the simulated ten-thousand-year conquest campaigns in the real-time strategy game
Age of Empires
. Either way, we feel a rush of accomplishment when we put our brains to good use.

And then there’s
physical work
, which makes our hearts beat faster, our lungs pump harder, our glands sweat like crazy. If the work is hard enough, we’ll flood our brains with endorphins, the feel-good chemical. But more importantly, whether we’re throwing punches in
Wii Boxing
or jumping around to
Dance Dance Revolution
, we just enjoy the process of getting ourselves completely worn out.

There’s discovery work, which is all about the pleasure of actively investigating unfamiliar objects and spaces. Discovery work helps us feel confident, powerful, and motivated. When we’re exploring mysterious 3D environments, like a vast city hidden in the sea in the role-playing shooter game
BioShock
, or when we’re interacting with strange characters, like the fashionable undead teenagers who populate Tokyo in the handheld battle game
The World Ends with You
, we relish the chance to be curious about anything and everything.

Increasingly in computer and video games today there’s
teamwork,
which emphasizes collaboration, cooperation, and contributions to a larger group. When we carve out special duties for ourselves in a complex mission like the twenty-five-player team raids in
World of Warcraft
, or when we’re defending our friends’ lives in a four-player cooperative game of the comic adventure
Castle Crashers
, we take great satisfaction in knowing we have a unique and important role to play in a much bigger effort.

Finally, there’s
creative work.
When we do creative work, we get to make meaningful decisions and feel proud of something we’ve made. Creative work can take the form of designing our homes and families in the
Sims
games, or uploading video karaoke performances of ourselves to the
SingStar
network, or building and managing an online franchise in the
Madden NFL
games. For every creative effort we make, we feel more capable than when we started.

 

 

HIGH-STAKES WORK,
busywork, mental work, physical work, discovery work, teamwork, and creative work—with all this hard work going on in our favorite games, I’m reminded of something the playwright Noël Coward once said: “Work is more fun than fun.”

Sure, this sounds mildly absurd. Work more fun than fun? But when it comes to games, this is measurably and demonstrably true, thanks to a psychology research method known as “experience sampling.”

Psychologists use the experience sampling method, or ESM, to find out how we really feel during different parts of our day. Subjects are interrupted at random intervals with a pager or by text message and asked to report two pieces of information: what they’re doing and how they feel.
⁷
One of the most common findings of ESM research is that what we think is “fun” is actually mildly depressing.

Virtually every activity that we would describe as a “relaxing” kind of fun—watching television, eating chocolate, window-shopping, or just chilling out—doesn’t make us feel better. In fact, we consistently report feeling worse afterward than when we started “having fun”: less motivated, less confident, and less engaged overall.
⁸
But how can so many of us be so wrong about what’s fun? Shouldn’t we have a better intuitive sense of what actually makes us feel better?

We certainly have a strong intuitive sense of what makes us feel bad, and negative stress and anxiety are usually at the top of the list. ESM researchers believe that when we consciously seek out relaxing fun, we’re usually trying to reverse these negative feelings. When we seek out passive entertainment and low-engagement activities, we’re using them as a counterbalance to how stimulated and overwhelmed we feel.

But by trying to have easy fun, we actually often wind up moving ourselves too far in the opposite direction. We go from stress and anxiety straight to boredom and depression. We’d be much better off avoiding easy fun and seeking out
hard fun
, or hard work that we enjoy, instead.