Reality is Broken
Computer games are fulfilling a genuine human need that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. They are rewarding, teaching, and inspiring in a way that reality is not
Why should we waste the power of games on escapist entertainment?
A «mass exodus» to gaming worlds, millions of person-hours lost from society
People underutilizing their skills in the real world and prioritizing games
Cognitive effort, emotional energy, and collective attention lavished on game worlds instead of the real world
Computer games are fulfilling a genuine human need that the real world is currently unable to satisfy
They are rewarding, teaching, and inspiring in a way that reality is not
A sense of accomplishment, heroic purpose, power, community, focus, engagement, victory!
Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively
Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential
Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy
To develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight
Games have been a fundamental part of human civilization for thousands of years
Games for personal and social change
Positive impact games
Social reality games
Serious games
Leveraging the play of the planet
Games designed to improve quality of life, prevent suffering, and create real happiness
Satisfy our hunger to be challenged and rewarded, creative and successful, social and part of something larger than ourselves
CEOs taking game breaks at work
«As for the future, your task is not to see it, but to enable it»
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The way games structure experience:
A goal: a sense of purpose
Rules: limitations that unleash creativity and foster strategic thinking
A feedback system: a promise of an achievable goal, providing motivation to keep playing
Voluntary participation: makes for a safe and pleasurable experience; everyone is playing on the same common ground
«Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles»
– Bernard Suits
Voluntary unnecessary obstacles that challenge us and lets us put our personal strengths to better use
Tetris is a game you are guaranteed to lose, but it’s addictive because of the density of feedback it provides
In computer games, the interactive loop is satisfyingly tight; there’s no gap between your actions and the game’s responses; you can see the changes you make on the game world; the game is extraordinarily attentive to your performance and gets harder when you play well.
In a good computer game, you are always playing on the edge of your skill level; the state called «flow»
Competition and winning are NOT defining traits of games
Many gamers would rather keep playing than win
The state of being intensely engaged may ultimately be more pleasurable than winning
Finite games and infinite games (James P. Carse)
Gamers want to explore and learn and improve; they’re volunteering for unnecessary hard work—and they genuinely care about the outcome of their effort
There is nothing trivial about playing a good game
Why do unnecessary obstacles make us happy?
Nothing makes us happier than good, hard work
We’ve been taught to think of play as the opposite of work, but nothing could be further from the truth
«The opposite of play isn’t work, it’s depression» – Brian Sutton-Smith
Gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression
The hard work we hate is the work we HAVE to do; to make a living, to get ahead, to meet expectations, or because someone told us to
Busywork, mental work, physical work, discovery work, teamwork, creative work
«Work is more fun than fun» — Noël Coward
When we seek out passive entertainment and low-engagement activities, we’re using them as a counterbalance to how stimulated and overwhelmed we feel
eustress (greek)
fiero (italian)
nachos (yiddish) the burning pride we feel when someone we’ve taught or mentored succeeds
The science of happiness (Csíkszentmihályi)
Intense, optimistic engagement with the world around us
«Games are an obvious source of flow, and play is the flow experience par excellence»
The failure of schools [+++] to provide flow is a serious moral issue, one of the most urgent facing humanity
Why should we needlessly spend the majority of our lives in boredom and anxiety?
The field of positive psychology
Hedonic adaption
«We have been conditioned to believe that the wrong things will make us lastingly happy» – Sonja Lyubomirsky
Internal opiates
We crave:
satisfying work
the experience of being successful
social connection
meaning; curiousity, awe, and wonder about things that unfold on epic scales
Blissful productivity; the sense of being deeply immersed in work that produces immediate and obvious results
Compared with games, reality is unproductive
Well-designed work leaves no doubt that progress will be made; it has a guarantee of productivity built in
A clear goal attached to a specific task
Being able to see the fruits of our labour, inspiring a sense of self-worth
The joy of failure in games
Positive failure feedback
Optimism is built in to the medium of games
To truly flourish, we have to be optimistic about our own abilities and opportunities for success
There is no reason to fear failure in games and failure means the fun can keep going
«Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. With games, learning is the drug.»
–Raph Koster
Fun will always morph into boredom, once we pass the critical point of being reliably successful
Games as a learning environment
Facebook games: scheduled micro interactions with people you like into your everyday routine
Stronger social connectivity through games
Ambient sociability: the experience of playing alone together
Epic environments and quests
Awe and wonder
Stonehenge, Gobekli Tepe
Human made structures that inspire community
Places of worship
Meaning; taking part in something bigger than ourselves
If we’re forced to do something, or do it halfheartedly, we’re not really participating
If we don’t care how it all turns out, we’re not really participating
If we’re passively waiting it out, we’re not really participating
Alternate reality games
Optimal experience design
«Quest to Learn»: The ideal school doesn’t use games to teach students; it IS a game, from start to finish
Different types of ARGs: life-management, organizational, concept, live event, narrative
plusoneme.com: Leveling up stats IRL, getting points in skills from others like endorsements on linkedin
Being out of control is a fundamentally stressful feeling; games put us back in control, as real gameplay is always by definition voluntarily; it is always an exercise of our own freedom
We have a power to improve our own experience
Happiness hacking / life hacking
Hacking: creatively tinkering with technology and programming
Wikipedia as a crowdsourcing game (MMORPG)
Good game mechanics and community
Gamers’ participation bandwidth
Collective intelligence and the Web
Mass participation in crowd projects
A sustainable engagement economy
The emotional experience itself is the reward
Designing good player investment
Cooperation towards extreme-scale goals
Epic win!
IRL «We don’t have an endless stream of opportunities to do something that matters right now, presented with clear instructions, and finely tuned to our moment-by-moment capabilities.»
Social participation games
The Extraordinaries
HIT: human intelligence tasks
«We can love people when we know what they need»
– Joe Edelman
Citizen Logistics / Groundcrew (?)
«From widespread basic Internet literacy and mobile technology smarts to rapidly expanding Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing know-how, people everywhere are becoming increasingly connected and improving their ability to cooperate, coordinate and create together.»
The Lost Ring Codex
Superstruct
The Long Game
Life is hard, and games make it better.
When we play games, we consume less.