The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not. (Location 116)
Like the ancient Lydians, many gamers have already figured out how to use the immersive power of play to distract themselves from their hunger: a hunger for more satisfying work, for a stronger sense of community, and for a more engaging and meaningful life. (Location 153)
When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. (Location 348)
The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose. (Location 350)
The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By removing or limiting the obvious ways of getting to the goal, (Location 353)
The feedback system tells players how close they are to achieving the goal. It can take the form of points, levels, a score, or a progress bar. (Location 356)
Real-time feedback serves as a promise to the players that the goal is definitely achievable, and it provides motivation to keep playing. (Location 358)
voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. (Location 360)
the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity. (Location 362)
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (Location 373)
Competition and winning are not defining traits of games—nor are they defining interests of the people who love to play them. Many gamers would rather keep playing than win—thereby ending the game. (Location 424)
Any well-designed game—digital or not—is an invitation to tackle an unnecessary obstacle. (Location 463)
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. (Location 477)
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. (Location 511)
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. (Location 552)
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. (Location 560)
Hard fun is what happens when we experience positive stress, or eustress (a combination of the Greek eu, for “well-being,” and stress). (Location 562)
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. (Location 569)
The research proves what gamers already know: within the limits of our own endurance, we would rather work hard than be entertained. (Location 577)
Harvard professor and happiness expert Tal Ben-Shahar puts it, “We’re much happier enlivening time rather than killing time.” (Location 580)
ONE MORE important emotional benefit to hard fun: it’s called “fiero,” (Location 582)
Fiero is the Italian word for “pride,” and it’s been adopted by game designers to describe an emotional high (Location 584)
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. (Location 590)
fiero is one of the most powerful neurochemical highs we can experience. (Location 593)
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. (Location 599)
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. (Location 614)
Most importantly, flow activities were done for pure enjoyment rather than for status, money, or obligation. (Location 618)
Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy. (Location 672)
the extreme neurochemical activation that happens in our brains and bodies when we start to play a good computer or video game. He was intensely focused, highly motivated, creatively charged, and working at the very limits of his abilities. Immersion was almost instant. Flow was fast and virtually guaranteed. (Location 704)
We can’t sustain flow indefinitely—as much as we might want to. That’s why, according to Keyes, human flourishing requires a more “continuous” approach to well-being. (Location 746)
Too much flow can lead to happiness burnout. (Location 751)
As long as we are regularly immersed in self-rewarding hard work, we will be happy more often than not (Location 811)
But the relationship between hard work, intrinsic reward, and lasting happiness has been verified and confirmed through hundreds of studies and experiments. (Location 813)
As research psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leading expert on intrinsic reward, explains: “One of the chief reasons for the durability of happiness activities is that … they are hard won. You’ve devoted time and effort… . You have made these practices happen, and you have the ability to make them happen again. This sense of capability and responsibility is a powerful boost in and of itself.” In other words, we become better able to protect and strengthen our quality of life, regardless of external circumstances. We rely less and less on unreliable and short-lived external rewards and take control of our own happiness. (Location 828)
By accomplishing something that is very hard for us, like solving a puzzle or finishing a race, (Location 843)
When we make someone else laugh or smile, (Location 845)
Every time we coordinate or synchronize our physical movements with others, such as in dance or sports, (Location 847)
When we seek out what we might describe as “powerful” and “moving” stories, media, or live performances, we’re actually triggering our vagus nerve, (Location 849)
if we provoke our curiosity by exposing ourselves to ambiguous visual stimulus, like a wrapped present or a door that is just barely ajar, (Location 853)
We just have to work hard at things that activate us and immerse ourselves in challenging activities we enjoy for their own sake. (Location 863)
We have the biological capability to create our own happiness through hard work. And the harder we work to experience intrinsic rewards, the stronger our internal happiness-making capabilities become. (Location 867)
we crave satisfying work, every single day. (Location 872)
we crave the experience, or at least the hope, of being successful. We want to feel powerful in our own lives and show off to others what we’re good at. We want to be optimistic about our own chances for success, to aspire to something, and to feel like we’re getting better over time. (Location 875)
we crave meaning, or the chance to be a part of something larger than ourselves. We want to feel curiosity, awe, and wonder about things that unfold on epic scales. And most importantly, we want to belong to and contribute to something that has lasting significance beyond our own individual lives. (Location 882)
Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work. (Location 980)
Satisfying work always starts with two things: a clear goal and actionable next steps toward achieving that goal. (Location 981)
When we’re playing a well-designed game, failure doesn’t disappoint us. It makes us happy in a very particular way: excited, interested, and most of all optimistic.2 (Location 1149)
the right kind of failure feedback is a reward. It makes us more engaged and more optimistic about our odds of success. (Location 1186)
design failure sequences that are spectacular and engaging. The trick is simple, but the effect is powerful: you have to show players their own power in the game world, and if possible elicit a smile or a laugh. As long as our failure is interesting, we will keep trying—and remain hopeful that we will succeed eventually. (Location 1203)
games are “fun” only as long as we haven’t mastered them. He writes, “Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension… . With games, learning is the drug.” (Location 1218)
When we practice flexible optimism, we see more opportunities for success—but we don’t overstate our abilities, and we don’t overestimate the amount of control we have over an outcome. And we reduce our optimism when we get feedback that we’re pursuing unattainable goals or operating in a low-control environment. We recognize that our time and energy would be better spent elsewhere. Games are perfect environments for practicing flexible optimism. (Location 1246)
During this period of mild depression, Nesse theorizes, we can conserve our resources and search for new, more realistic goals. But if we persist in pursuing unattainable goals? Then, Nesse proposes, the mechanism kicks into overdrive, triggering severe depression. (Location 1257)
But games can take us out of this depressive loop. They give us a good reason to be optimistic, satisfying our evolutionary imperative to focus on attainable goals. (Location 1264)
Good games provide a steady flow of actionable goals in environments we know are designed for our success— (Location 1267)
“The greatest source of happiness is other people—and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house and, if we’re really wealthy, to an estate. We think we’re moving up, but really we’re walling off ourselves.” (Location 1437)
Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “prosocial emotions.” (Location 1472)
Teasing each other, recent scientific research has shown, is one of the fastest and most effective ways to intensify our positive feelings for each other. Dacher Keltner, a leading researcher of prosocial emotions at the University of California, has conducted experiments on the psychological benefits of teasing, and he believes that teasing plays an invaluable role in helping us form and maintain positive relationships.19 (Location 1507)
“The tease is like a social vaccine,” Keltner explains. “It stimulates the recipient’s emotional system.” Teasingly trash-talking allows us to provoke each other’s negative emotions in a very mild way—we stimulate a very small amount of anger or hurt or embarrassment. This tiny provocation has two powerful effects. First, it confirms trust: the person doing the teasing is demonstrating the capacity to hurt, but simultaneously showing that the intention is not to hurt. Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really would, hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being. (Location 1510)
By letting someone tease us, we’re also helping them feel powerful. We’re giving them a moment to enjoy higher status in our social relationship—and humans are intensely attuned to shifts in social status. By letting someone else experience higher status, we intensify their positive feelings for us. Why? Because we naturally like people more when they enhance our own social status. (Location 1517)
With all the pwnage and trash-talking happening in our favorite social networking games, it’s clear that they are giving us a perfect and much needed space to practice and perform the good tease. Competitive games in particular give us an excuse to adopt playful postures of superiority, and to let our friends and family get away with the same. (Location 1529)
We can also lower our status to strengthen our relationships by acting silly. This helps explain the appeal of the popular video game genre known as “party games.” A party game is a game that’s meant to be played socially, face-to-face, and is easy to pick up the first time you try. Rock Band is one of the most popular party games, and performing like a rock star—not to mention failing a set—in front of friends and family definitely qualifies as a status-raising or potentially happy-embarrassing moment. (Location 1531)
Naches, a Yiddish word for the bursting pride we feel when someone we’ve taught or mentored succeeds, ranked just below surprise and fiero. (Location 1552)
The happiness we get from cheering on friends and family ensures our personal investment in other people’s growth and achievements. It encourages us to contribute to someone else’s success, and as a result we form networks of support from which everyone involved benefits. (Location 1561)
Sometimes we want company, but we don’t want to actively interact with anybody. That’s where the idea of playing alone together comes in. (Location 1597)
The researchers conducted interviews to explore these findings and found that players enjoyed sharing the virtual environment, even if there was little to no direct interaction. They were experiencing a high degree of “social presence,” a communications theory term for the sensation of sharing the same space with other people.31 Although the players were not fighting each other or questing together, they still considered each other virtual company. The Stanford and PARC research team dubbed this phenomenon “playing alone together.” (Location 1603)
