Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (10 page)

It’s a very powerful special effect. We’re not only improving our characters; we’re improving the whole world. As one player writes in an enthusiastic review of the phasing content, “Whether this is achieved though technical wizardry or just straight-up magic is unclear. Its integration is seamless, and it’s incredibly satisfying. You feel like your actions are having a significant impact on the world around you.”
¹⁵

That is, after all, one of things we crave most in life. In his study
The Pleasures of Sorrow and Work
, Alain de Botton argues that work is “meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.”
¹⁶
In other words, we have to both be close enough to the action and see the results directly and quickly enough for work to satisfy our craving to make an impact. When we don’t have visible results that we can clearly link to our own efforts, it is impossible to take real satisfaction in our work. Unfortunately, for many of us this is true of our everyday work lives.

In
Shop Class as Soul Craft
, author and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford reflects on the psychological differences between manual labor and everyday office work. As he observes:

While it may not be the solution Crawford is referring to, games like
World of Warcraft
are just that: a more “real” alternative to the insubstantiality of so much everyday work. Although we think of computer games as virtual experiences, they do give us
real agency
: the opportunity to do something that feels concrete because it produces measurable results, and the power to act directly on the virtual world. And, of course, gamers are working with their hands, even if what they’re manipulating is digital data and virtual objects. Until and unless the real work world changes for the better, games like
WoW
will fulfill a fundamental human need: the need to feel productive.

That’s what it takes for work to satisfy us: it must present us with clear, immediately actionable goals as well as direct, vivid feedback.
World of Warcraft
does all of this brilliantly, and it does so
continuously
. As a result, every single day, gamers worldwide spend a collective 30 million hours working in
World of Warcraft
. With its thousands of potential quests, its ever-elusive endgame, and a server that generates more obstacles and opponents for you every time you log on, it is without a doubt one of the most satisfying work systems ever engineered. Even people who love their real jobs can be seduced by the blissful productivity it provokes in us—myself included
.

The first time I sat down to play the game, my friend Brian cheerfully warned me that “
World of Warcraft
is the single most powerful IV drip of productivity ever created.”

He wasn’t kidding. That weekend, I spent twenty-four hours playing
WoW
—which was about twenty-three more hours than I’d intended.

What can I say? There was a
lot
of world-saving work to do.

Every time I completed a quest, I racked up experience points and gold. But more important than the points or treasure, from the moment I entered the online Kingdom of Azeroth, I was rich with
goals
. Every quest came with clear, urgent instructions—where to go, what to do, and why the fate of the kingdom hung in the balance of my getting it done as soon as possible.

When Monday morning came around, I resisted the idea of going back to “real” work. I knew this wasn’t rational. But some part of me wanted to keep earning experience points, stacking up treasure, collecting my plus-ones, and checking off world-saving quests from my to-do list.

“Playing
WoW
just feels way more productive,” I remember telling my husband.

I did go back to real work, of course. But it took me a while to shake the feeling that I’d rather be leveling up. Part of me felt like I was accomplishing more in the Kingdom of Azeroth than I was in my real life. And that’s exactly the IV drip of productivity that
World of Warcraft
is so good at providing. It delivers a stream of work and reward as reliably as a morphine drip line.

When we play
WoW
, we get blissed out by our own productivity—and it doesn’t matter that the work isn’t real. The emotional rewards are real—and for gamers, that’s what matters.

 

 

WORLD OF WARCRAFT
is an example of
extreme-scale
satisfying work. Players commit to this work environment for extraordinary periods of time.

But there are also
microexamples
of games that generate the rewarding sense of capability and productivity. They’re called “casual games,” and they provide satisfying work in very quick bursts of productive play: as short as a few minutes to an hour. When interspersed with everyday work, they can be surprisingly boosting to everyday life satisfaction.

“Casual games” is an industry term for games that tend to be easy to learn, quick to play, and require far less computer memory and processing power than other computer and video games. (They’re often played online in Web browsers, or on mobile phones.)

These games require less of a commitment than most video games: a casual game player might play his or her favorite game for just fifteen minutes a day, a few times a week.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a gamer, you’ve probably played some casual games—including the versions of solitaire and
Minesweeper
that come preinstalled on so many computers. Other iconic casual games include
Bejeweled
, in which the goal is to rearrange brightly colored gems into sets of three;
Diner Dash
, a simulation of being a waitress; and one of my own personal favorites,
Peggle
, which requires you to aim and shoot balls to knock out pegs from a kind of psychedelic pachinko board.

Most casual games are single-player, allowing gamers to sneak in a few minutes of play for themselves whenever they need it most. And one of the places we seem to need the boost of gaming most is, perhaps not surprisingly, at the office.

A recent major survey of high-level executives, including chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and presidents, revealed that 70 percent of them regularly play casual computer games while working. That’s right: the vast majority of senior executives report taking daily computer game breaks that last on average between fifteen minutes and one hour.

How do these executives explain their tendency to play while working? Most of them say they turn to games to feel “less stressed out.” This makes perfect sense—casual games are undoubtedly more effective than more passive ways of decreasing stress at work, like browsing the Web. By tackling an unnecessary obstacle in the middle of the workday, these executives are triggering a sense of self-motivation. They’re shifting their mental awareness from the externally applied pressures of real work, or negative stress, to the internally generated pressure of game work, or positive stress. The executives reported feeling “more confident, more energetic, and more mentally focused” after playing a quick computer game—all hallmarks of eustress.

But even more interestingly, more than half of these gameful executives say they play during work in order “to feel more productive.”
¹⁸
Now this is a statement that sounds crazy on the face of it—playing games to feel more productive at work? But this speaks to how much we all crave simple, hands-on work that feels genuinely productive. We turn to games to help us alleviate the frustrating sense that, in our real work, we’re often not making any progress or impact.

As de Botton writes: “Long before we ever earned any money, we were aware of the necessity of keeping busy: we knew the satisfaction of stacking bricks, pouring water into and out of containers and moving sand from one pit to another, untroubled by the greater purpose of our actions.”
¹⁹
In casual games, there is no greater purpose to our actions—we are simply enjoying our ability to make something happen.

 

 

WHETHER IT’S A SHORT
, simple burst of video game productivity or entering into sprawling worlds designed to engage us in endless campaigns of satisfying activity, playing games can give us a taste of that elusive sense of individual agency and impact in a world where the work we do may be challenging, but our efforts often seem fruitless.

The best-designed game work feels more productive because it feels more
real
: the feedback comes stronger and faster, and the impact is more visible and vivid. And for many of us who aren’t gratified enough by our day-to-day jobs or don’t feel like our work is having a direct impact, gameful work is a real source of reward and satisfaction.

On the other hand, as gratifying as it is to rack up achievements and get the job done, it can be equally energizing—but in a very different way—to fail, fail, fail. This brings us to our next intrinsic reward, which is a kind of counterbalance to the experience of satisfying work. It’s the
hope
—but not necessarily the achievement—of success.

N
o one likes to fail. So how is it that gamers can spend 80 percent of the time failing, and still love what they’re doing?”

Games researcher Nicole Lazzaro likes to stump audiences with tough questions, and this is one of her favorites. Lazzaro, an expert on game-play emotions, has been working in the game industry for twenty years as a design consultant. She reports her research findings and design recommendations to the industry annually at the Game Developers Conference. And perhaps her most significant finding yet is this: gamers spend nearly all of their time failing. Roughly four times out of five, gamers don’t complete the mission, run out of time, don’t solve the puzzle, lose the fight, fail to improve their score, crash and burn, or die.
¹

Which makes you wonder: do gamers actually
enjoy
failing?

As it turns out, yes.

Lazzaro has long suspected that gamers love to fail, and a team of psychologists at the M.I.N.D. Lab in Helsinki, Finland, recently confirmed it with scientific evidence. 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

If that finding surprises you, then you’re not alone—the Finnish researchers weren’t expecting that result, either. But today, the “fun failure” study is considered one of the most important findings in the history of video game research.
³
It helped pinpoint for the first time exactly how a well-designed game helps players develop exceptional mental toughness.

The M.I.N.D. Lab is a state-of-the-art psychophysiology research center, packed with biometric systems designed to measure emotional response: heart rate monitors, brain wave monitors, electrical sensors, and more.

In 2005, to kick off a new research effort focused on emotional response to video games, the lab invited thirty-two gamers to play the highly popular
Super Monkey Ball 2
while hooked up to the biometric monitors. In the bowling-style game, players roll “monkey balls,” or transparent bowling balls with monkeys inside them, down crooked bowling lanes that happen to be floating in outer space. Throw a gutter ball at any point, and the monkey rolls right off the edge of the lane, whirling off into the atmosphere.

While the gamers played, the researchers measured three indicators of emotional engagement: heart rate, because we pump blood faster when we’re emotionally aroused; skin conductivity, because we sweat more when we’re under stress; and electrical activation of the facial muscles, because we move certain muscles like the zygomaticus major muscle, which pulls the corners of the mouth back and up into a smile, when we’re happy.

After collecting all of this physiological data, the researchers compared it against a log of key gameplay events—just before rolling the monkey ball, the moment of a successful strike, just after a gutter ball, and so on. Their goal: to identify what triggered the strongest emotional reactions, both positive and negative.

The M.I.N.D. Lab team expected that gamers would exhibit the strongest positive emotion when they earned high scores or when they completed difficult levels—in other words, during the triumphant fiero moments. The players did indeed show peaks of excitement and satisfaction during these moments. But the researchers noticed another set of positive emotion peaks that caught them off guard. They found that players exhibited the most potent combination of positive emotions when they made a mistake and sent the monkey ball veering off the side of the lane. Excitement, joy, and interest shot through the roof the second they lost their monkey ball.

Initially, the researchers were perplexed by the gamers’ positive emotional reaction to “complete and unquestionable failure in the game.” When we fail in real life, we are typically disappointed, not energized. We experience diminished interest and motivation. And if we fail again and again, we get more stressed, not less. But in
Super Monkey Ball 2
, failure seems to be more emotionally rewarding than success.

What was so interesting about failure in
Super Monkey Ball 2
? And why would it make gamers happier than winning?