I’m not much of a gamer. But after listening to Jane McGonigal speak, I’m convinced of the importance of games. Instead of making games more like reality, McGonigal of the Institute for the Future is trying to make reality more like a game. In her keynote at SXSW Interactive she said that happiness studies, which is grounded in positive psychology, is exploding. The study of happiness is all over the popular press and its importance is evident in the communities starting to form around lifestyle. For these communities, as McGonigal put it “Wellbeing is the new capital.” Software and game developers, then, need to be explicitly generating quality of life. The goal of happiness studies is not some touchy-feely nonsense, but rather a nascent discipline concerning brain optimization. It looks at our brains not as things that can only malfunction, but as things we can proactively hack to become more efficient, productive or, well, happy. Games are one way of doing this.
As McGonigal puts it, happiness is characterized by:
- Having satisfying work to do
- Being good at something
- Being with people we like
- Being a part of something bigger than the individual
Games, then, are happiness engines. McGonigal says that she believes that gamers often feel like life is not sufficiently designed. In contrast, games are set up in such a way to make participants successful. This might be one reason gamers retreat to gaming consoles; they provide for a higher quality of life. Participants have constant feedback. They have better instructions than in real life. They have the ability to focus their attention. And they have a better community because everyone has agreed to play by the same rules. So there’s real collaboration.
This has led to a “global mass exodus into virtual worlds.” But McGonigal doesn’t see this as a negative because “it is economically a rational decision to spend more time in virtual environments because the environment is set up for one to succeed.” So we can keep building these virtual worlds. But we can also take what we’ve learned in games and port it to RL so that we can address quality of life issues. This isn’t an escape from reality; it’s an augmented reality. Here are a few games that are blurring the lines between RL and alternate realities:
McGonigal argues that we need to “embed happiness engines into everyday life” and she gives 10 collaboration superpowers that are necessary for success in gaming. Finally, she ended the presentation with a dance.
