Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (6 page)

Hard fun is what happens when we experience positive stress, or
eustress
(a combination of the Greek
eu,
for “well-being,” and
stress).
From a physiological and a neurological standpoint, eustress is virtually identical to negative stress: we produce adrenaline, our reward circuitry is activated, and blood flow increases to the attention control centers of the brain. What’s fundamentally different is our frame of mind.

When we’re afraid of failure or danger, or when the pressure is coming from an external source, extreme neurochemical activation doesn’t make us happy. It makes us angry and combative, or it makes us want to escape and shut down emotionally. It can also trigger avoidance behaviors, like eating, smoking, or taking drugs.
⁹

But during
eustress
, we aren’t experiencing fear or pessimism. We’ve generated the stressful situation on purpose, so we’re confident and optimistic. When we choose our hard work, we enjoy the stimulation and activation. It makes us want to dive in, join together, and get things done. And this optimistic invigoration is way more mood-boosting than relaxing. As long as we feel capable of meeting the challenge, we report being highly motivated, extremely interested, and positively engaged by stressful situations. And these are the key emotional states that correspond with overall well-being and life satisfaction.

Hard fun leaves us feeling measurably better than when we started. So it’s no surprise, then, that one of the activities for which ESM subjects report the highest levels of interest and positive moods both during
and
afterward is when they’re playing games—including sports, card games, board games, and computer and video games.
¹⁰
The research proves what gamers already know: within the limits of our own endurance, we would rather work hard than be entertained. Perhaps that’s why gamers spend less time watching television than anyone else on the planet.
¹¹

As Harvard professor and happiness expert Tal Ben-Shahar puts it, “We’re much happier
enlivening
time rather than killing time.”
¹²

 

 

THERE’S ONE MORE
important emotional benefit to hard fun: it’s called “fiero,” and it’s possibly the most primal emotional rush we can experience.

Fiero
is the Italian word for “pride,” and it’s been adopted by game designers to describe an emotional high we don’t have a good word for in English.
¹³
Fiero is what we feel after we triumph over adversity. You know it when you feel it—
and
when you see it. That’s because we almost all express fiero in exactly the same way: we throw our arms over our head and yell.

The fact that virtually all humans physically express fiero in the same way is a sure sign that it’s related to some of our most primal emotions. Our brains and bodies must have evolved to experience fiero early on the human timeline—and, in fact, neuroscientists consider it part of our “caveman wiring.” Fiero, according to researchers at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research at Stanford, is the emotion that first created a desire to leave the cave and conquer the world.
¹⁴
It’s a craving for challenges that we can overcome, battles we can win, and dangers we can vanquish.

Scientists have recently documented that fiero is one of the most powerful neurochemical highs we can experience. It involves three different structures of the reward circuitry of the brain, including the mesocorticolimbic center, which is most typically associated with reward and addiction. Fiero is a rush unlike any other rush, and the more challenging the obstacle we overcome, the more intense the fiero.

 

 

A GOOD GAME
is a unique way of structuring experience and provoking positive emotion. It is an extremely powerful tool for inspiring participation and motivating hard work. And when this tool is deployed on top of a network, it can inspire and motivate tens, hundreds, thousands, or millions of people at a time.

Anything else you think you know about games, forget it for now. All the good that comes out of games—every single way that games can make us happier in our everyday lives and help us change the world—stems from their ability to organize us around a voluntary obstacle.

Understanding that this is how games really work can help us stop worrying about how people might game our systems, and inspire us to start giving them real, well-designed games to play instead. If we actively surround ourselves with people playing the same game that we are, then we can stop being so wary of “players” playing their own game. When we know what it really means to play a good game, we can stop reminding each other:
This isn’t a game
. We can start actively encouraging people instead: This
could
be a game.

I
’m not the first person to notice that reality is broken compared with games, especially when it comes to giving us good, hard work. In fact, the science of happiness was first born thirty-five years ago, when an American psychologist by the name of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi observed the very same thing. In 1975, Csíkszentmihályi published a groundbreaking scientific study called
Beyond Boredom and Anxiety
. The focus of the study was a specific kind of happiness that Csíkszentmihályi named
flow
: “the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning.”
¹
He spent seven years researching this kind of intense, joyous engagement: when and where do we experience it most, and how can we create more of it?

Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced
cheek-SENT-me-high
) found a depressing lack of flow in everyday life, but an overwhelming abundance of it in games and gamelike activities. His favorite examples of flow-inducing activities were chess, basketball, rock climbing, and partner dancing: all challenging endeavors with a clear goal, well-established rules for action, and the potential for increased difficulty and improvement over time. Most importantly, flow activities were done for pure enjoyment rather than for status, money, or obligation.

During this kind of highly structured, self-motivated hard work, Csíkszentmihályi wrote, we regularly achieve the greatest form of happiness available to human beings:
intense, optimistic engagement with the world around us.
We feel fully alive, full of potential and purpose—in other words, we are completely activated as human beings.

Of course, it’s possible to achieve this kind of extreme activation outside of games. But Csíkszentmihályi’s research showed that flow was most
reliably
and most
efficiently
produced by the specific combination of self-chosen goals, personally optimized obstacles, and continuous feedback that make up the essential structure of gameplay. “Games are an obvious source of flow,” he wrote, “and play is the flow experience
par excellence
.”
²

But if games are the most consistent and efficient source of joyous engagement in our lives, he wondered, then why did real life so infrequently resemble a game? Csíkszentmihályi argued that the failure of schools, offices, factories, and other everyday environments to provide flow was a serious moral issue, one of the most urgent problems facing humanity. Why should we needlessly spend the majority of our lives in boredom and anxiety, when games point to a clear and better alternative? “If we continue to ignore what makes us happy,” he wrote, “we shall actively help perpetuate the dehumanizing forces which are gaining momentum day by day.”

The solution seemed obvious to Csíkszentmihályi: create more happiness by structuring real work like game work. Games teach us how to create opportunities for freely chosen, challenging work that keeps us at the limits of our abilities, and those lessons can be transferred to real life. Our most pressing problems—depression, helplessness, social alienation, and the sense that nothing we do truly matters—could be effectively addressed by integrating more gameful work into our everyday lives.
³
It wouldn’t be easy, he admitted. But if we failed to at least try to create more flow, we risked losing entire generations to depression and despair.

He ended his groundbreaking study by warning of two populations in greatest need of more gameful work: “Alienated children in the suburbs and bored housewives in the homes
need
to experience flow. If they cannot get it, they will find substitutes in the form of escape.” This statement was eerily prophetic: today it is precisely these two demographic groups—suburban kids and women who are at home during the day—who spend the most time escaping into computer and video games.
⁴
Clearly, we haven’t done enough to increase everyday flow.

Csíkszentmihályi was right about the need to reinvent reality to work more like a game. He was just too early. In 1975, the rest of the field of modern psychology was still largely focused on understanding mental illness and negative emotions, not optimal human experience. There wasn’t enough critical momentum among his peers to pick up the problem of everyday happiness. Meanwhile, the tools we had in 1975 for inventing and sharing new games with mass audiences were still in their infancy.
Pong
, the first commercial video game, was just three years old. The Atari home console was still two years away from being released. And only one major research book had been published on the psychology of gameplay: a 1971 book titled, appropriately,
The Study of Games
.
⁵

Today, however, we are in a very different position. Since Csíkszentmihályi’s breakthrough study, two crucial things have happened, making it suddenly much more practical to improve quality of life with games: the rise of positive psychology and the explosion of the computer and video game industry.

Positive psychology is the relatively new field of science that studies “human flourishing,” or how we achieve different kinds of happiness. For just over a decade now, positive-psychology researchers have been accumulating a formidable body of knowledge about how our brains and bodies work to help us achieve well-being and life satisfaction.

Meanwhile, the commercial game industry is putting all that knowledge to use. Game developers today understand that games become hits and make money in direct proportion to how much satisfaction they provide and how much positive emotion they provoke—in other words, how happy they make their players. As a result, game designers have been taught to relentlessly pursue happiness outcomes, including
flow
—and they’ve innovated a wide range of other happiness strategies along the way.

Happiness, of course, hasn’t always been the explicit goal of the game industry, and not all game developers today share it. Plenty of game developers today still think more about fun and amusement than well-being and life satisfaction. But since the rise of positive psychology, the creative leaders of the industry have increasingly focused on the emotional and psychological impact of their games. More and more, the directors and designers of major game studios are drawing directly on research findings from positive psychology to make better games. The game industry has even produced a number of scientific research labs expressly devoted to investigating the neurobiology of gameplay emotions.

On the whole, a shift is clearly happening. As one journalist put it, the Microsoft game-testing lab “looks more like a psychological research institute than a game studio.”
⁶
This is no accident. Game designers and developers are actively transforming what once was an intuitive art of optimizing human experience into an applied science. And as a result, they are becoming the most talented and powerful happiness engineers on the planet.

Today, these two historical trends—the science of happiness and the emotional evolution of the game industry—are intersecting. Thanks to positive psychologists, we know better than ever what kinds of experiences and activities really make us happy. And thanks to game developers, we have more and more powerful, and increasingly mobile, systems for providing intense, optimistic engagement and the emotional rewards we crave most.

That gives us our second fix for reality:

We are finally perfectly poised to harness the potential of games to make us happy and improve our everyday quality of life.

Let’s take a look at how we got here.

 

 

IN 1983,
a jazz pianist and sociologist named David Sudnow published a video game memoir, the first of its kind. It was a 161-page chronicle of his efforts to master one of the original home video games: the Atari ping-pong-style game
Breakout
.

Sudnow wasn’t your stereotypical teen hanging out in an arcade. He was a forty-three-year-old professor with a successful side career in music and a full life by any objective measure. No one would have predicted that playing a video game would become more satisfying work for him than doing research or making music—least of all Sudnow himself. But to his great surprise, that’s exactly what happened. For three months, Sudnow played
Breakout
as if it were his full-time job: “Fifty hours, a good five hours a day for ten days, in the afternoon, the evening, at three o’clock in the morning.”

What was so captivating about
Breakout
? It was basically single-player
Pong
: you’d rotate a joystick knob to move a flat paddle along the bottom of the screen and wait for a falling ball to hit the paddle. Move the paddle, wait for the ball; move the paddle, wait for the ball. Your goal was to aim the ball using the paddle to knock bricks out of a wall at the top of the screen.