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

by Jane McGonigal

  In real life, if someone gave you a task that normally took five hundred hours of work to finish, and then gave you a way to complete it in half that, you would probably be pretty pleased. But in game life, where the whole point for so many players is to get their hands on as much satisfying work as possible, two hundred fifty hours of work is a disappointment. For these dedicated MMO players, the possibility of reaching the highest level is simply justification for what they really love most: getting better.

  No wonder Nick Yee, a leading researcher of MMOs and the first person to receive a PhD for studying WoW, has argued that the MMOs are really massively multiplayer work environments disguised as games. As Yee observes, “Computers were made to work for us, but video games have come to demand that we work for them.” This is true—but, of course, we are really the ones who are asking to have more work. We want to be given more work—or rather, we want to be given more satisfying work.

  This brings us to our next fix for reality:FIX # 3 : MORE SATISFYING WORK

  Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.

  Satisfying work always starts with two things: a clear goal and actionable next steps toward achieving that goal. Having a clear goal motivates us to act: we know what we’re supposed to do. And actionable next steps ensure that we can make progress toward the goal immediately.

  What if we have a clear goal, but we aren’t sure how to go about achieving it? Then it’s not work—it’s a problem. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having interesting problems to solve; it can be quite engaging. But it doesn’t necessarily lead to satisfaction. In the absence of actionable steps, our motivation to solve a problem might not be enough to make real progress. Well-designed work, on the other hand, leaves no doubt that progress will be made. There is a guarantee of productivity built in, and that’s what makes it so appealing.

  WoW offers a guarantee of productivity with every quest you undertake. The world is populated by thousands of characters who are willing to give you special assignments—each one presented on an individual scroll that lists a clear goal, and why it matters, followed by actionable steps: where to go, step-by-step instructions for what to do when you get there, and a concrete measure of proof you’re expected to gather to demonstrate your success. For example, here is an annotated version of a typical WoW quest:QUEST: A Worthy Weapon

  Bring the Blade of Drak’Mar to Jaelyne Evensong at the Argent Tournament Grounds. (This is your goal.)

  Of all the times to have such rotten luck! My tournament blade has gone missing and I need it for a match this afternoon. (And this is why your goal matters.)

  One of the bards tells me that travelers used to present winter hyacinths to a lonely maiden in return for gifts. Those hyacinths grow only on the ice flowing from the Ironwall Dam, on Crystalsong Forest’s northwestern border with Icecrown. (This is where to go.)

  Gather the flowers and take them to Drak’Mar Lake in northeastern Dragonblight, near its border with Zul’Drak and Grizzly Hills. (These are your step-by-step instructions.)

  Return to Jaelyne Evensong in Icecrown and deliver the Blade. (This is your proof of completion.)

  When you’re on a WoW quest, there’s never any doubt about what you’re supposed to do, or where or how. It’s not a game that emphasizes puzzle solving or trial-and-error investigation. You simply have to get the job done, and then you will collect your rewards.

  Why do we crave this kind of guaranteed productivity? In The How of Happiness , Sonja Lyubomirsky writes that the fastest way to improve someone’s everyday quality of life is to “bestow on a person a specific goal, something to do and to look forward.”10 When a clear goal is attached to a specific task, she explains, it gives us an energizing push, a sense of purpose.

  That’s why receiving more quests every time we complete one in World of Warcraft is more of a reward than the experience points and the gold we’ve earned. Each quest is another clear goal with actionable steps.

  The real payoff for our work in WoW is to be rewarded with more opportunities for work. The design of the work flow is key here: the game constantly challenging you to try something just a little bit more difficult than what you’ve just accomplished. These microincreases in challenge are just big enough to keep sparking your interest and motivation—but never big enough to create anxiety or the sense of an ability gap. As one longtime World of Warcraft player explains, “When accepting a quest, you rarely have to question if you can complete it; you just need to figure out when you can fit it into your jam-packed hero schedule.”11 This endless series of goals and actionable steps is exactly what makes World of Warcraft so invigorating.

  MOTIVATION AND REASONABLY assured progress: this is the start of satisfying work. But to be truly satisfied, we have to be able to finish our work as clearly as we started it. To finish work in a satisfying way, we must be able to see the results of our efforts as directly, immediately, and vividly as possible.

  Visible results are satisfying because they mirror back to us a positive sense of our own capabilities. When we can see what we’ve accomplished, we build our sense of self-worth. As Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, argues, “The most important resource-building human trait is productivity at work.”12 The key here is resource building: we like productive work because it makes us feel that we are developing our personal resources.

  The famous heads-up display of World of Warcraft, which shows us our improvement in real time, is all about making our own resource building more visible. It constantly flashes positive feedback at players: +1 stamina, +1 intellect, +1 strength. We can count our own internal resources by these points, watching as we become more and more resourceful with every effort we make: able to inflict or sustain more damage, or able to cast more powerful spells.

  We can also see the self-improving results of our game work just by looking at our avatar, which visibly bears more impressive armors, weapons, and jewels over time. And many players install a game modification that can show them a complete history of every quest they’ve completed—the ultimate, tangible record of work well done.

  And it’s not just self-improvement. At the highest levels of the game, during the most collaborative game missions, the raids, collective improvement is the focus. Players may join what are called “guilds,” or long-term alliances with other players, to complete the most difficult raids. One popular WoW guide explains, “Raiding is about building and maintaining a team, a close-knit group of players who progress together.”13 As the guild’s raid statistics and achievement statistics measurably improve, the satisfaction of resource building is amplified by celebrating it with so many others.

  But perhaps the most compelling form of feedback we get from working in the World of Warcraft isn’t strictly about us. It’s a visual effect called phasing, which is designed to vividly show us our impact on the world around us.

  This is how phasing works: When I play an MMO on my computer, most of the game content isn’t on my hard drive. It’s on a remote server that’s processing the game experiences for me and thousands of other players at the same time. For the most part, if I’m in one part of the game world on my computer, and you’re in the same part of the game world on your computer, and we’re both playing on the same server, we see exactly the same world. The game server sends us exactly the same visual data about who’s there, what they’re doing, and what the environment looks like.

  But in phasing, the server compares the game histories of different players in the environment and shows each player a different version of the world depending on what they’ve accomplished. When you complete a heroic quest or a high-level raid, your virtual world literally changes—you see different things from someone who hasn’t finished the quest or raid. As one WoW FAQ explains: “Did you help a faction conquer an area? When you next return they’ll have a camp set up with vendors and other services, and all the bad guys are gone! The same area
now serves a different purpose reflecting your earlier work.”14

  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:Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive.... Is there a more “real” alternative?17

  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 somet
hing 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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fun Failure and Better Odds of Success

  No 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