Csíkszentmihályi was right about the need to reinvent reality to work more like a game. He was just too early. In 1975, the rest of the field of modern psychology was still largely focused on understanding mental illness and negative emotions, not optimal human experience. There wasn’t enough critical momentum among his peers to pick up the problem of everyday happiness. Meanwhile, the tools we had in 1975 for inventing and sharing new games with mass audiences were still in their infancy. Pong, the first commercial video game, was just three years old. The Atari home console was still two years away from being released. And only one major research book had been published on the psychology of gameplay: a 1971 book titled, appropriately, The Study of Games.5
Today, however, we are in a very different position. Since Csíkszentmihályi’s breakthrough study, two crucial things have happened, making it suddenly much more practical to improve quality of life with games: the rise of positive psychology and the explosion of the computer and video game industry.
Positive psychology is the relatively new field of science that studies “human flourishing,” or how we achieve different kinds of happiness. For just over a decade now, positive-psychology researchers have been accumulating a formidable body of knowledge about how our brains and bodies work to help us achieve well-being and life satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the commercial game industry is putting all that knowledge to use. Game developers today understand that games become hits and make money in direct proportion to how much satisfaction they provide and how much positive emotion they provoke—in other words, how happy they make their players. As a result, game designers have been taught to relentlessly pursue happiness outcomes, including flow—and they’ve innovated a wide range of other happiness strategies along the way.
Happiness, of course, hasn’t always been the explicit goal of the game industry, and not all game developers today share it. Plenty of game developers today still think more about fun and amusement than well-being and life satisfaction. But since the rise of positive psychology, the creative leaders of the industry have increasingly focused on the emotional and psychological impact of their games. More and more, the directors and designers of major game studios are drawing directly on research findings from positive psychology to make better games. The game industry has even produced a number of scientific research labs expressly devoted to investigating the neurobiology of gameplay emotions.
On the whole, a shift is clearly happening. As one journalist put it, the Microsoft game-testing lab “looks more like a psychological research institute than a game studio.”6 This is no accident. Game designers and developers are actively transforming what once was an intuitive art of optimizing human experience into an applied science. And as a result, they are becoming the most talented and powerful happiness engineers on the planet.
Today, these two historical trends—the science of happiness and the emotional evolution of the game industry—are intersecting. Thanks to positive psychologists, we know better than ever what kinds of experiences and activities really make us happy. And thanks to game developers, we have more and more powerful, and increasingly mobile, systems for providing intense, optimistic engagement and the emotional rewards we crave most.
That gives us our second fix for reality:FIX # 2 : EMOTIONAL ACTIVATION
Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.
We are finally perfectly poised to harness the potential of games to make us happy and improve our everyday quality of life.
Let’s take a look at how we got here.
IN 1983, a jazz pianist and sociologist named David Sudnow published a video game memoir, the first of its kind. It was a 161-page chronicle of his efforts to master one of the original home video games: the Atari ping-pong-style game Breakout.
Sudnow wasn’t your stereotypical teen hanging out in an arcade. He was a forty-three-year-old professor with a successful side career in music and a full life by any objective measure. No one would have predicted that playing a video game would become more satisfying work for him than doing research or making music—least of all Sudnow himself. But to his great surprise, that’s exactly what happened. For three months, Sudnow played Breakout as if it were his full-time job: “Fifty hours, a good five hours a day for ten days, in the afternoon, the evening, at three o’clock in the morning.”
What was so captivating about Breakout? It was basically single-player Pong: you’d rotate a joystick knob to move a flat paddle along the bottom of the screen and wait for a falling ball to hit the paddle. Move the paddle, wait for the ball; move the paddle, wait for the ball. Your goal was to aim the ball using the paddle to knock bricks out of a wall at the top of the screen.
At first, this work was easy: your paddle was big, the ball fell slowly, and there were plenty of bricks to hit. But as you knocked out more and more bricks, the ball fell faster and bounced off the wall more erratically, and your paddle shrank to half its original size. It became increasingly difficult to keep the ball in play, and it took better and better aim to guide the ball toward the few remaining bricks. Once you missed five balls, the game was over.
As primitive a video game as it was, it nevertheless made for a perfect little voluntary workload. It had everything you’d want from an unnecessary obstacle: a clear goal (destroy a prison wall), arbitrary restrictions (use only a paddle and five balls), and instant feedback, both visual and audio (the bricks disappeared from the screen one at a time, always with a satisfying beep). The computer algorithms continuously adjusted the difficulty level to keep you playing at the very edge of your own abilities.
As Sudnow put it, “Here’s all the motivation you’d ever want . . . and the prize seemed to be just holding on.”7 The game completely sustained his attention, even when he wasn’t in front of the Atari console. “When I wasn’t at the TV, I was practicing the sequence in my imagination, walking down the street, sitting in a café twirling a salt shaker, looking up during dinner in a Japanese restaurant at a bamboo and rice paper trellis with Breakout-like rectangles on the ceiling . . . just waiting to get back to the game.”8
The better he got at the game, the more he wanted to play, and the more he played, the better he got. Sudnow was so taken aback by the intensity of this continuous feedback loop, he felt compelled to write an entire book to understand it. It’s an extended, poetic meditation on the emotions of game-play. He says almost everything we need to know about the emotional power of early video games in just these two famous sentences:This was a whole different business, nothing like I’d ever known, like night and day.... Thirty seconds of play, and I’m on a whole new plane of being, all my synapses wailing.9
What Sudnow describes is 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.
From zero to peak experience in thirty seconds flat—no wonder video games caught on. Never before in human history could this kind of optimal, emotional activation be accessed so cheaply, so reliably, so quickly.
In the past, the deepest experiences of flow had required years of practice to achieve, or extraordinary settings. When Csíkszentmihályi first wrote about it, he was studying expert players of chess, or basketball, or rock climbing, or partner dancing. Flow was typically the result of years, if not decades, of learning the structure of an activity and strengthening the required skills and abilities. Otherwise, it required being immersed in a truly spectacular and unusual context, like dancing in the crowded streets during carnival or skiing down an exceptionally challenging mountainside.
Flow wasn’t supposed to come easy. But, as Sudnow and millions of other early gamers discovered, video games made it possible to experience flow almost immediately. Video games took the tradi
tional properties of potentially flow-inducing activities—a goal, obstacles, increasing challenge, and voluntary participation—and then used a combination of direct physical input (the joystick), flexible difficulty adjustment (the computer algorithms), and instant visual feedback (the video graphics) to tighten the feedback loop of games dramatically. And this faster, tighter feedback loop allowed for more reliable hits of the emotional reward fiero: each microlevel of difficulty you survived prompted a split-second emotional high.
The result was a much faster cycle of learning and reward, and ultimately a sense of perfect and powerful control over a “microworld” on the screen. As Sudnow described, “The joystick-button box feels like a genuine implement of action. Bam, bam, bam, got you . . . Please don’t miss, come on, do it, get that brick, easy does it, no surprises, now stay cool, don’t panic, take it in stride, get it now. Get that closure. Video-game action. You know when you’ve got it like you know your first drunk.”10
It was this fast, reliable fix of flow and fiero that kept Sudnow and all the earliest gamers coming back for more. It’s no exaggeration to say that for many gamers, it probably felt like they had been waiting their whole lives for something like this: a seemingly free and endless supply of invigorating activity and every reason in the world to feel optimistic about their own abilities.
Then and now, faster, more reliable flow and fiero separates computer and video games from all the games that came before them. And that’s what makes Sudnow’s memoir of playing Breakout such an important historical artifact. He was the first to express what was so new and emotionally riveting about digital games, before the spectacular graphics, before the epic stories, and before the massively multiplayer worlds. Back then, all the emotional power of video games stemmed from the fact that they were interesting obstacles with better feedback and more adaptive challenges. As a result, they excelled at one thing and pretty much one thing only: provoking so much flow and fiero, they were nearly impossible to stop playing.
In fact, that was the whole point of these early video games: to keep playing as long as possible. One of the original and best-known Atari slogans was “Discover how far you can go.” It was a constant battle just to stay in the game, but that was also the primary satisfaction of playing. Flow and fiero are the original rewards of video gameplay, and by playing against the tireless machine, we could endlessly produce them for ourselves.
Well, almost endlessly.
After three months, Sudnow finally exhausted his seemingly infinite source of flow. He played a perfect game of Breakout, destroying all the walls with just one ball. It was one of the biggest fiero moments of his life. But on that day, when he earned the highest possible score, his Breakout obsession ended. He had gone as far as flow and fiero could take him.
Fortunately for gamers, that’s not the end of the story.
Flow, as positive psychologists have documented, is only one part of the overall happiness picture. It was the first kind of happiness these psychologists studied, but the science has progressed significantly since then. As Corey Lee M. Keyes, a psychology professor at Emory University, explains, “Flow is considered part of the science of happiness but not all.... It is more of a temporal state than a trait or condition of human functioning. While there are studies on how to prolong it, flow is not seen as something that people can live within all the time.”11
Flow is exhilarating in the moment. It makes us feel energized. A major flow experience can improve our mood for hours, or even days, afterward. But because it’s such a state of extreme engagement, it eventually uses up our physical and mental resources.
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. It can’t just be all flow, all the time. We have to find ways to enjoy the world and relish life even when we’re not operating at our peak human potential.
This is true in games as well as in life.
David Sudnow, it turns out, was so exhausted by the three months he spent suspended in nearly continuous Breakout flow that he subsequently stayed far away from video games for quite some time.
Too much flow can lead to happiness burnout. Meanwhile, too much fiero can lead to addiction—a word that Sudnow never once used in his memoir but which nevertheless inescapably leaps to mind. Fiero taps into some of our most primal hardwiring, and our emotional response can be extreme.
Recently, Allan Reiss, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford, led a team of researchers in a study of the neurochemistry of fiero in gamers. His laboratory captured MRIs of gamers’ brains while they were playing particularly challenging video games. The researchers observed exceptionally intense activation of the addiction circuitry of the brain when gamers experienced moments of triumph. And as a result, the researchers identified fiero as the most likely underlying cause of why some gamers feel “addicted” to their favorite games.12
Gamer addiction is a subject the industry takes seriously—it’s a frequent topic at industry conferences and on game developer forums: what causes gamer addiction, and how can you help your players avoid it? This might at first seem surprising: doesn’t the industry want gamers to spend more time (and money) playing games, not less? And it’s true: more gaming by more people is the primary goal of the industry. But the industry wants to create lifelong gamers: people who can balance their favorite games with full and active lives. And so we have what is perhaps the central dilemma of the game industry over the past thirty years: how to enable gamers to play more without diminishing their real lives. The industry knows that gamers crave flow and fiero—and the more game developers give it to them, the more time and money gamers will spend on their favorite games. But beyond a certain playing threshold—for most gamers, it seems to be somewhere around twenty hours a week—they start to wonder if they’re perhaps missing out on real life.
Technology journalist Clive Thompson has a name for this phenomenon: gamer regret.13 And he’ll be the first to admit that he suffers from it as much as any other gamer. Thompson recalls checking his personal statistics one day—many games keep track of how many hours you’ve spent playing—and was shocked to see that he had clocked in thirty-six hours playing a single game in one week—as he described it, “a missing-time experience so vast one would normally require a UFO abduction to achieve it.” He found himself vacillating between pride in what he’d accomplished in the virtual game environment and wondering if all that hard work had really been worth it.
As Thompson writes: “The dirty secret of gamers is that we wrestle with this dilemma all the time. We’re often gripped by . . . a sudden, horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we could have done with our game time.” He admits: “The elation I feel when I finish a game is always slightly tinged with a worrisome sense of hollowness. Wouldn’t I have been better off doing something that was difficult and challenging and productive?”
This internal conflict plays out in discussion forums all over Web. The twin questions “How much time do you spend playing games?” and “How much time is too much?” are ubiquitous in the gaming community.
As a partial solution to gamer regret, many of the most addictive online games have implemented a “fatigue system.” These systems are most commonly used in online games in South Korea and China, where the rates of online gaming for young men can average up to forty hours a week.14 After three hours of consecutive online play, gamers receive 50 percent fewer rewards (and half the fiero) for accomplishing the same amount of work. After five hours, it becomes impossible to earn any rewards. In the United States, a softer touch is more commonly employed: World of Warcraft players, for example, accumulate “resting bonuses” for every hour they spend not playing the game. When they log back in, their avatar can earn up to double rewards until it’s time to rest again.
But these measures are a stopgap at best. Trying to stop people from playing the
ir favorite games will never work; motivated gamers hungry for flow and fiero will find a way around the restrictions and limitations. What’s needed instead is for games to go beyond flow and fiero, which make us happy in the moment, to provide a more lasting kind of emotional reward. We need games that make us happier even when we’re not playing. Only then will we find the right balance between playing our favorite games and making the most of our real lives.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what’s happening in the computer and video game market today. Games are increasingly teaching us the four secrets of how to make our own happiness—and they’re giving us the power to make it anytime, anywhere.
The Four Secrets to Making Our Own Happiness
Many different competing theories of happiness have emerged from the field of positive psychology, but if there’s one thing virtually all positive psychologists agree on, it’s this: there are many ways to be happy, but we cannot find happiness. No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us. We have to make our own happiness—by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.15
When we try to find happiness outside of ourselves, we’re focused on what positive psychologists call “extrinsic” rewards—money, material goods, status, or praise. When we get what we want, we feel good. Unfortunately, the pleasures of found happiness don’t last very long. We build up a tolerance for our favorite things and start to want more. It takes bigger and better rewards just to trigger the same level of satisfaction and pleasure. The more we try to “find” happiness, the harder it gets. Positive psychologists call this process “hedonic adaptation,” and it’s one of the biggest hindrances to long-term life satisfaction. 16 The more we consume, acquire, and elevate our status, the harder it is to stay happy. Whether it’s money, grades, promotions, popularity, attention, or just plain material things we want, scientists agree: seeking out external rewards is a sure path to sabotaging our own happiness.
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World Page 5