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

by Jane McGonigal

  And so we have our fifth fix for reality:FIX #5: STRONGER SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY

  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.”

  Prosocial emotions—including love, compassion, admiration, and devotion—are feel-good emotions that are directed toward others. They’re crucial to our long-term happiness because they help create lasting social bonds.

  Most of the prosocial emotions that we get from gaming today aren’t necessarily built in to the game design; they’re more of a side effect of spending more time playing together. Case in point: my husband and I first fell in love when we spent six weeks in each other’s apartments playing a mystery adventure game called Grim Fandango on my laptop. Falling in love wasn’t so much anything about that game in particular as it was a result of spending so much time working together to solve puzzles—not to mention negotiating who got to control the mouse and keyboard, and when—in order to lead us through the virtual world. Similarly, any pair or group of people who consistently play a game together, online or face-to-face, will have increased opportunities to express admiration for each other, to devote themselves to a common goal, to express sympathy for others’ losses, and even to fall in love. (Which reminds me of the most interesting comment I’ve eavesdropped on by browsing Lexulous screenshots: “Quite a close game again. Loser has to marry the winner?”15)

  But beyond this kind of all-purpose social benefit to playing games together, there are two specific prosocial emotions that games give us: happy embarrassment and vicarious pride. Let’s take a look at why these two prosocial emotions matter, and how online games generate them better than real-world interaction.

  Happy Embarrassment

  If there’s one thing Lexulous players do even better than making obscure words out of random letters, it’s gently teasing each other in a way that makes them feel good. And the most effective way they tease each other is through trash-talking.

  Trash-talking, when it’s a playful way to insult your competition, is almost as important to our enjoyment of social network games as the actual core gameplay. We crave the distinctly rewarding feeling we get from a good game when we soundly beat, or are beaten, by people we really like. More importantly, we crave the experience of teasing each other about it, in private and in public.

  Consider, for example, the following public status updates from Lexulous players. These statements are visible to all members of their social network (including, no doubt, the people they are playing against), and sometimes to the whole world (which is how I happened to see them):“Playing Lexulous on Facebook with my mom. I’m winning. Hee hee hee!”16

  “I so pwnd my mom!”17

  If you’ve never pwned your mom, you’re clearly missing out.

  To pwn someone—pronounced “pone” or “pawn,” though most people just type it—means to achieve such a major victory you can’t help but gloat afterward. It originates from a common typo of the word “own,” since the letters p and o are next to each other on a standard keyboard; “own” has long been a popular gamer shorthand for the boastful comment “I’m so good at this game, I own it.”18

  Why is game pwning such an increasingly popular form of social interaction? And why, when we’re on the receiving end, do we happily put up with it?

  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

  “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.

  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.

  This is the essence of happy embarrassment and, according to Keltner’s research, we’re hardwired to feel it. He has documented the physiological basis for this complicated social effect in studies of face-to-face playful teasing and trash-talking. According to Keltner’s findings, the recipient of the tease almost invariably showed signs of lowered status, followed by an effort at reconciliation: gaze aversion, bowed head, nervous smile, hand touching the face, and so on. All of this is followed by a fleeting smile, a microexpression that indicates we actually enjoy being teased by people we trust. Meanwhile, the more obvious the display of lowered status, the more the teasers reported liking the teased afterward.

  None of this is a conscious process, Keltner’s research shows. We mostly tease and let ourselves be teased because it feels good. But the reason why it feels good is that it builds trust and makes us more likable. Most of us might not realize exactly why it enhances our social connection, but we definitely feel the emotional net positive after a teasing exchange. And this emotional reward encourages us to practice and repeat the behavior.

  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.

  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.

  Or consider WarioWare: Smooth Moves for the Wii, a game that is even more physical than Rock Band. (The Wii remote controller has an accelerometer that detects hand movements, as well as optical sensors to know where you’re pointing the device.) Like most party games for the Wii, to play it you have to perform it. Smooth Moves consists of more than two hundred different “microgames” that require you to do a silly physical movement quickly: flap your arms like a bird’s wing, mime twirling a hula hoop, shove virtual dentures into a virtual grandma’s mouth. You have five seconds to figure out what you’re supposed to do, based on the images on the screen. Trying to think and move that quickly usually results in flailing around, goofy-looking gestures, and occasionally falling over.

  Promotion screenshot and gameplay image of WarioWare: Smooth Moves.

  (Nintendo Corporation, 2007)

  One reviewer reasonably asks: “Games this crazy shouldn’t be this popular, should they?”20 But they are hugely popular. Smooth Moves has sold more than 2 million copies. They are easy to learn and quick to deliver emotion
al rewards—if you’re willing to pick your virtual nose by shoving your game controller up and down, you really do trust the people around you.

  Vicarious Pride

  In a recent major study of more than one thousand gamers, a little-known prosocial emotion called “naches” ranked number eight on the top ten list of emotions that gamers say they want to feel while playing their favorite games. Naches, a Yiddish word for the bursting pride we feel when someone we’ve taught or mentored succeeds, ranked just below surprise and fiero.21

  The term “naches” hasn’t caught on in the gamer world the way “pwn” or “fiero” has. But players in the study frequently described a kind of vicarious pride from playing over someone else’s shoulder, and giving advice and encouragement—especially on games they themselves had already mastered. The author of the study, Christopher Bateman, an expert in both cognitive psychology and game design, adopted the term “naches” to describe this phenomenon, reporting, “Players seem to really enjoy training their friends and family to play games, with a whopping 53.4 percent saying it enhances their enjoyment.”22

  It’s no surprise that mentoring our friends and family in gameplay makes us happy and brings us closer together. Paul Ekman, a pioneering emotions researcher and an expert on the phenomenon of naches, explains that this particular emotion is also likely an evolved mechanism, designed to enhance group survival. 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.23 And because naches is so strongly correlated with survival, Ekman says, we feel it intensely. We don’t describe ourselves as “bursting with pride” over our own success, but we do for others; this language suggests that the feeling of naches is even more explosive than personal fiero.

  However, we don’t naturally explode with pride at someone else’s success if we haven’t helped and encouraged them; too often, we feel jealousy or resentment. If we aren’t actively contributing to the achievement with our support, then our emotional systems don’t register vicarious pride. To generate the emotional reward of naches, we have to throw ourselves into the act of mentoring.

  Most parents live in an almost constant state of naches. Unfortunately, outside of parenthood, we aren’t always alert to opportunities for naches—among friends, between husband and wife, or from children toward their parents—because we don’t have significant incentive or encouragement to mentor each other in everyday school or work. For the most part, we live in a culture of individual achievement, or what Martin Seligman calls “the waxing of the self” and “the waning of the commons.”24 He explains, “The society we live in takes the pleasures and pains, the successes and failures of the individual with unprecedented seriousness.”25 And when we see success or failure as an entirely individual affair, we don’t bother to invest time or resources in someone else’s achievements.

  We need more naches, which helps explain the rise in single-player games being played with two or more people in the same room. Game researchers who study industry trends report that, increasingly, one person will play a game while another, or others, watch, encourage, and advise.26 What makes this scenario attractive—and here is a big difference between ordinary life and games—is that computer and video games are perfectly replicable obstacles, we know in advance that our support will be useful, and we know exactly what our friends and family members are getting themselves in for.

  The notoriously difficult puzzle game Braid, by independent game developer Jonathan Blow, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Players must work their way through thirty-seven monster-filled puzzle rooms in order to rescue a princess. Early reviews of the single-player game were raves, but many reviewers worried that the reliance on puzzles would limit the replay value of the game. Once you’d solved a puzzle, one reviewer wrote, “there is little incentive to come back for seconds.”27

  But a large amount of anecdotal evidence from gamer blogs and forums suggests that gamers are revisiting Braid—in order to generate naches. Players seem absolutely tickled to watch friends and family work out the a-ha moments for each puzzle, lending their advice and positive morale in the face of the game’s frustrating mental challenges. “Just finished the game, now I’m watching my wife work through it and it’s a delight,” one husband-turned-mentor writes.28 Another says, “I finished the game last night and only needed help from my kids on two of the very final puzzle pieces. I think they were very proud of their mom!”29 Games give us the opportunity to learn and master new challenges, and usually we learn skills that we can pass on to the other gamers in our lives.

  Not all the social rewards we get from playing games are about strengthening bonds with people we already know. Social contact with strangers can offer different kinds of emotional reward, at the right times. One of these rewards that is unique to massively multiplayer online game environments is something researchers call “ambient sociability.” It’s the experience of playing alone together, and it’s a kind of social interaction that even the most introverted among us can enjoy.

  Ambient Sociability

  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.

  MMOs are famous for their collaborative quests and group raids. But it turns out that a majority of players prefer to play the game solo. An eight-month study of more than 150,000 World of Warcraft players discovered that players were spending on average 70 percent of their time pursuing individual missions, barely interacting with other players.30 The researchers, based at Stanford University and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), found this surprising and counterintuitive. Why bother paying a monthly subscription to participate in a massively multiplayer game world if you are going to ignore the masses?

  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.”32

  One World of Warcraft player explains on her blog why she prefers to play alone together: “It’s the feeling of not being alone in the world. I love being around other real players in the game. I enjoy seeing what they’re doing, what they’ve achieved, and running across them out in the world ‘doing their thing’ while I’m doing mine.”33 What she describes here is actually a special kind of social presence: a presence enhanced by sharing goals and engaging in the same activities. The players can recognize each other because they have a common understanding of what they’re doing and why. Their actions are intelligible and meaningful to each other.

  Ambient sociability is a very casual form of social interaction; it may not create direct bonds, but it does satisfy our craving to feel connected to others. It creates a kind of social expansiveness in our lives—a feeling of inclusion in a social scene, and access to other people if we want it. The Stanford and PARC researchers posited that introverted players were more likely to enjoy playing alone together, and recent cognitive science studies support this theory. The best explanation scientists have for why some people are extroverted while others are introverted has to do with two differences in brain activity.

  First, introverts in general tend to be more sensitive to external sensory stimulus: the cortical region of the brain, which processes the external world of objects, spaces, and people, reacts strongly in the presence of any stimulus. Extroverts, on the other hand, have lower cortical arousal. They require more stimulus to feel engaged with the external world. This makes extroverts more likely to seek higher level
s of social stimulation, while introverts are more likely to feel mentally exhausted after lower levels of social engagement.

  Meanwhile, extroverts tend to produce more dopamine in response to social rewards—smiling faces, laughter, conversation, and touch, for example. Introverts, in turn, are less sensitive to these social reward systems but highly sensitive to mental activity, such as problem solving and puzzling and solo exploration. Researchers say this explains why extroverts seem happier around other people and in stimulating environments: they are feeling significantly more intense positive emotions than introverted people.

  But some game researchers, including Nicole Lazzaro, believe that ambient sociability and lightweight social interaction can actually train the brain to experience social interaction as more rewarding. Lazzaro proposes that since introverts are so sensitive to the rewards of mental activity, which gaming provides, doing these activities in online social settings can create new, positive associations for introverts about social experience. In other words, games like WoW may make introverts feel more comfortable with social interaction in general.

  Studies have yet to be conducted to offer concrete support to this theory, but initial interviews and anecdotal evidence suggest it is worth further investigation. Our solo WoW player describes how she can be drawn into lightweight social interaction even as she makes her own way in the online world: “Chuck a heal there, apply a buff here, kill that thing that’s about to kill that player, ask for some quick help or information, join up for a spontaneous quick group.”34 She remains open to these unexpected social interactions, and they are an essential part of why she likes to play alone together. She craves the possibility of “the spontaneous adventures that erupt between real people.”