Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (9 page)

What accounts for
World of Warcraft
’s unprecedented success? More than anything else, it’s the feeling of “blissful productivity” that the game provokes.
⁵

Blissful productivity is the sense of being deeply immersed in work that produces immediate and obvious results. The clearer the results, and the faster we achieve them, the more blissfully productive we feel. And no game gives us a better sense of getting work done than
WoW.

Your primary job in
World of Warcraft
is self-improvement—a kind of work nearly all of us find naturally compelling. You have an avatar, and your job is to make that avatar better, stronger, and richer in as many different ways as possible: more experience, more abilities, stronger armor, more skills, more talent, and a bigger reputation.

Each of these improvable traits is displayed in your avatar profile, alongside a point value. You improve yourself by earning more points, which requires managing a constant work flow of quests, battles, and professional training. The more points you earn, the higher your level, and the higher your level, the more challenging work you unlock. This process is called “leveling up.” The more challenging the work, the more motivated you are to do it, and the more points you earn . . . It’s a
virtuous circle
of productivity. As Edward Castronova, who is a leading researcher of virtual worlds, puts it, “There is zero unemployment in
World of Warcraft
.”
⁶
The
WoW
work flow is famously designed so that there is always something to do, always different ways to improve your avatar.

Some of the work is thrilling and high-stakes: it involves battling powerful opponents you’re just barely strong enough to fight. Some of the work is exploratory: you’re figuring out how to navigate around the many different regions of the kingdom, discovering new creatures and investigating strange environments. Some of the work is busywork: you study a virtual profession, like leatherworking or blacksmithing, and you collect and combine raw materials to help you ply your trade.

A lot of the work is teamwork: you can join forces with other players to take on quests that none of you is strong enough to survive alone, and you can go on raids that can only be completed by five, ten, or even twenty-five players working together. This kind of collaboration often involves strategic work before you take on the challenge. You have to figure out what role everyone will play in the raid, and you may have to rehearse and coordinate your actions many times to get it right.

Between the high-stakes work, the exploratory work, the busywork, the teamwork, and the strategic work, the hours of work definitely add up. There’s so much to do, the typical
WoW
player puts in as many hours weekly as a part-time job. All in all, it takes the average
WoW
player a total of
five hundred hours
of gameplay to develop his or her avatar to the game’s current maximum level, which is where many players say the fun
really
starts.
⁷
Now that’s a labor of love.

So how exactly does a game convince a player to spend
five hundred hours
playing it just to get to the “fun” part?

For some players, it’s the promise of ultimate challenge that makes the incredible workload worth it. At the highest levels of the game, you get to experience the extreme adrenaline rush of what players call the “endgame.” Players who crave high-stakes work and extreme mental activation level up as fast as they can to reach the endgame, because that’s where the most challenging opponents and the hardest work—in other words, the most invigorating, confidence-building gameplay—is available.

But there are plenty of online games that allow you to risk your virtual life and battle challenging opponents in adrenaline-producing environments—and you get to do it from the very start of the game. If that were the main reward for playing a game like
World of Warcraft
, the requirement of spending five hundred hours leveling up would be a bug, not a feature. The
process
of leveling up is easily as important, if not more important, than the endgame. As one player explains, “If all I wanted to do was run around and kill stuff, I could play
Counter-Strike
. . . and that game’s free.”
⁸
The players of
WoW
, and the many other subscription-based massively multiplayer online games like it, are paying for a particular privilege. They’re paying for the privilege of higher in-game productivity.

Consider many fans’ reactions when it was revealed that a highly anticipated new MMO,
Age of Conan
, would take just two hundred fifty hours of gameplay on average to reach the highest level. Bloggers described this as a “paltry” and “positively anemic” amount of work, and professional game critics worried that fans would reject an MMO that required “so little effort” to achieve the highest level.
⁹

In real life, if someone gave you a task that normally took five hundred hours of work to finish, and then gave you a way to complete it in half that, you would probably be pretty pleased. But in game life, where the whole point for so many players is to get their hands on as much satisfying work as possible, two hundred fifty hours of work is a disappointment. For these dedicated MMO players, the possibility of reaching the highest level is simply justification for what they really love most: getting better.

No wonder Nick Yee, a leading researcher of MMOs and the first person to receive a PhD for studying
WoW
, has argued that the MMOs are really massively multiplayer work environments disguised as games. As Yee observes, “Computers were made to work for us, but video games have come to demand that we work for them.” This is true—but, of course,
we
are really the ones who are asking to have more work. We want to be given more work—or rather, we want to be given more
satisfying
work.

This brings us to our next fix for reality:

Satisfying work always
starts
with two things:
a clear goal
and
actionable next steps
toward achieving that goal. Having a clear goal motivates us to act: we know what we’re supposed to do. And actionable next steps ensure that we can make progress toward the goal immediately.

What if we have a clear goal, but we aren’t sure how to go about achieving it? Then it’s not work—it’s a
problem
. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having interesting problems to solve; it can be quite engaging. But it doesn’t necessarily lead to satisfaction. In the absence of actionable steps, our motivation to solve a problem might not be enough to make real progress. Well-designed work, on the other hand, leaves no doubt that progress will be made. There is a
guarantee of productivity
built in, and that’s what makes it so appealing.

WoW
offers a guarantee of productivity with every quest you undertake. The world is populated by thousands of characters who are willing to give you special assignments—each one presented on an individual scroll that lists a clear goal, and why it matters, followed by actionable steps: where to go, step-by-step instructions for what to do when you get there, and a concrete measure of proof you’re expected to gather to demonstrate your success. For example, here is an annotated version of a typical
WoW
quest:

When you’re on a
WoW
quest, there’s never any doubt about what you’re supposed to do, or where or how. It’s not a game that emphasizes puzzle solving or trial-and-error investigation. You simply have to get the job done, and then you will collect your rewards.

Why do we crave this kind of guaranteed productivity? In
The How of Happiness
, Sonja Lyubomirsky writes that the fastest way to improve someone’s everyday quality of life is to “bestow on a person a specific
goal
, something to do and to look forward.”
¹⁰
When a clear goal is attached to a specific task, she explains, it gives us an energizing push, a sense of purpose.

That’s why receiving more quests every time we complete one in
World of Warcraft
is more of a reward than the experience points and the gold we’ve earned. Each quest is another clear goal with actionable steps.

The real payoff for our work in
WoW
is to be rewarded with more opportunities for work. The design of the work flow is key here: the game constantly challenging you to try something
just a little bit
more difficult than what you’ve just accomplished. These microincreases in challenge are just big enough to keep sparking your interest and motivation—but never big enough to create anxiety or the sense of an ability gap. As one longtime
World of Warcraft
player explains, “When accepting a quest, you rarely have to question
if
you can complete it; you just need to figure out
when
you can fit it into your jam-packed hero schedule.”
¹¹
This endless series of goals and actionable steps is exactly what makes
World of Warcraft
so invigorating.

 

 

MOTIVATION AND REASONABLY
assured progress: this is the start of satisfying work. But to be truly satisfied, we have to be able to
finish
our work as clearly as we started it. To finish work in a satisfying way, we must be able to see the results of our efforts as directly, immediately, and vividly as possible.

Visible results are satisfying because they mirror back to us a positive sense of our own capabilities. When we can see what we’ve accomplished, we build our sense of self-worth. As Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, argues, “The most important resource-building human trait is productivity at work.”
¹²
The key here is
resource building
: we like productive work because it makes us feel that we are developing our personal resources.

The famous heads-up display of
World of Warcraft
, which shows us our improvement in real time, is all about making our own resource building more visible. It constantly flashes positive feedback at players: +1 stamina, +1 intellect, +1 strength. We can count our own internal resources by these points, watching as we become more and more resourceful with every effort we make: able to inflict or sustain more damage, or able to cast more powerful spells.

We can also see the self-improving results of our game work just by looking at our avatar, which visibly bears more impressive armors, weapons, and jewels over time. And many players install a game modification that can show them a complete history of every quest they’ve completed—the ultimate, tangible record of work well done.

And it’s not just self-improvement. At the highest levels of the game, during the most collaborative game missions, the raids,
collective
improvement is the focus. Players may join what are called “guilds,” or long-term alliances with other players, to complete the most difficult raids. One popular
WoW
guide explains, “Raiding is about building and maintaining a team, a close-knit group of players who progress together.”
¹³
As the guild’s raid statistics and achievement statistics measurably improve, the satisfaction of resource building is amplified by celebrating it with so many others.

But perhaps the most compelling form of feedback we get from working in the
World of Warcraft
isn’t strictly about us. It’s a visual effect called
phasing
, which is designed to vividly show us our impact on the world around us.

This is how phasing works: When I play an MMO on my computer, most of the game content isn’t on my hard drive. It’s on a remote server that’s processing the game experiences for me and thousands of other players at the same time. For the most part, if I’m in one part of the game world on my computer, and you’re in the same part of the game world on your computer, and we’re both playing on the same server, we see exactly the same world. The game server sends us exactly the same visual data about who’s there, what they’re doing, and what the environment looks like.

But in phasing, the server compares the game histories of different players in the environment and shows each player a different version of the world depending on what they’ve accomplished. When you complete a heroic quest or a high-level raid, your virtual world literally changes—you see different things from someone who hasn’t finished the quest or raid. As one
WoW
FAQ explains: “Did you help a faction conquer an area? When you next return they’ll have a camp set up with vendors and other services, and all the bad guys are gone! The same area now serves a different purpose reflecting your earlier work.”
¹⁴