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

by Jane McGonigal

  Why design a game, instead of issuing an open invitation to design for the museum? There are two good reasons. Because it was a “game” and not a serious art competition, people who wouldn’t normally feel capable of contributing artwork were free to try without risking embarrassment. The game structure, with its clues and narratives, also gave a larger and more atypical museum membership—in this case, mostly students and teenagers—an opportunity to participate in the making of the exhibit, through online discussion and analysis of the artworks, even if the members didn’t contribute art themselves. These players helped serve as virtual “curators” for the Ghosts of a Chance exhibit.

  To become a member of any community, you need to understand the goals of the community and the accepted strategies and practices for advancing those goals. Participating in Ghosts of a Chance educates museumgoers about both. Although it was a game, the participating players were treated seriously as both artists and curators. As Nina Simon, a leading expert on the use of technology in museums, reported at the time, “The game artifacts [were] officially entered into the collection database and stored (and accessed) the way other artifacts are—via appointment, white gloves, that sort of thing. In this way, the secret rules of museums become new hoops for the gamers to jump through—hoops that will likely add a level of delight as they expose the inner workings of the museum.”6 In other words, the gameplay knocks down the “fourth wall” that usually separates the work of the museum’s curators and the visitors. And in doing so, it completely reinvents the idea of museum membership, making it possible for a real museum community to emerge.

  We have become accustomed to viewing museums as spaces of consumption—of knowledge, of art, of ideas. Ghosts of a Chance shows how we can turn them into spaces of meaningful social participation, driven by the three fundamental components of gaming communities: collaboration, creation, and contribution toward a larger goal.

  Bounce: A Game to Close the Generation Gap

  What would it take to convince young people to call their grandparents more often? Better yet, what would it take to convince young people to call someone else’s grandparents while they’re at it?

  Those were the twin goals of a project called Bounce—a telephone conversation game designed to support cross-generational social interaction.

  Bounce takes just ten minutes to play. When you call the game, you’re connected live on the phone with a “senior experience agent”—someone at least twenty years older than yourself. You follow a series of computer prompts to swap stories about your past, in order to discover life experiences you have in common. For example: What is something you both have made with your own two hands? What is a useful skill that you were both taught by a parent? What is a faraway place you both have visited? Your goal: find out how many points of connection you can make with your senior experience agent before time runs out.

  Bounce was the effort of a four-person team of computer scientists and artists at the University of California, myself included. We set out to design a computer game that would spark a stronger feeling of community across the generation gap.

  There is a significant need for a game like this as retirement communities, senior centers, and continuous care homes can be very socially isolating. This is partly an environmental problem: they are typically single-use spaces, without significant cross-traffic, and there’s little opportunity for the mingling of different age groups. But it’s also partly a cultural problem: major studies at Harvard and Stanford have demonstrated that a prejudice against the elderly is one of the most widespread and intractable social biases, particularly in the United States and especially among people under the age of thirty.7 Young people commonly associate older age with negative traits like diminished power, status, and ability, leading them to avoid interacting with people they perceive as elderly, even their own loved ones.

  Our team spent the better part of a summer brainstorming potential concepts for a game to help bridge the generation gap more gamefully, and as part of that process I personally spent quite a lot of time on the phone with two important seniors in my life: my grandfather Herb, who was ninety-two years old that summer, and my husband’s grandmother Bettie, who was eighty-seven. I was doing “user research” with them, figuring out what kind of game-play might be fun and easy to grasp quickly—particularly for older people who are not used to playing computer games—as well as to figure out the best way to get them to interact with the game technologies.

  It was immensely rewarding to spend so much time on the phone with them. Phones were, of course, a familiar technology for both parties, easy for all concerned to access and use anytime. Talking on the phone was so rewarding and easy, in fact, that it eventually became obvious that giving young people a fun reason to call seniors on the phone should be the objective of our game.

  But how do you build a computer game around making a phone call? We decided that we would make the game for two players at a time, since phone calls are most satisfying between two parties. The only rule? The players should be at least twenty years apart in age. Both players would need to be on the phone, of course, but since seniors are less likely to have constant access to a personal computer, we decided that only one of the two players should need to be in front of a computer. That player would log in to the game website, then call the other player.

  We called the game Bounce, after the kind of exchanges we hoped to inspire: a quick, easy bouncing of life stories off each other.

  The website prompts the players with collaborative interview questions: What’s a body of water you’ve both swum in? What’s a book you’ve both recommended to a friend? What’s an experience that has made both of you nervous? The challenge is to discover a single answer for each question that is true for both players. Answers could include, for example, “We’ve both swum in the Pacific Ocean” or “We’ve both been nervous going on a first date.” When you come up with a shared answer, one player types it into the game database. You have ten minutes to answer up to ten different questions total from the database of one hundred possible questions, and you can pass on any question. The game website counts down the ten minutes and reveals your score at the end.

  We ran the game as an experiment for one week, based out of a senior recreation center in San Jose, California. With this kind of game, you don’t want an open invitation to play; there needs to be a level of trust that the people calling will participate with a positive attitude. So we distributed the senior center’s phone number via e-mail and social networks to trusted friends, family, and colleagues. We also gave out the phone number to attendees of an art and technology festival in nearby downtown San Jose, expecting that anyone who participated in the festival was more likely to be a positive player, and not a “griefer”—someone looking to spoil the game, rather than play it. We used a live matchmaker at the senior center to pair off the phone-in players with the seniors.

  It was a bit of a risky proposition for both the seniors and the younger players. After all, talking with a stranger can be awkward, but the game provided a clear structure and set topics for conversations. The fact that both parties on the call were working toward the same goal—a high score—created an instant connection.

  The players’ strategies varied. One kind of player would rush to list every place they’d been swimming, for example, while another would prompt their partner with inquiries like, “Where did you grow up? Were you near any lakes? Have you taken any trips to any oceans?” Common answers often prompted rushes of recognition, “Oh my god, wait—I do know that river! My parents took my sister and me rafting there when we were kids!” Uncommon answers just as often led to a chatty diversion from the gameplay: “You went swimming in Alaska? Did it hurt?”

  Our prototype was highly successful. Nearly everyone who played once came back (or called back) to play again, and the senior players reported much higher moods after playing the game. The simple fact that they were described as “senior experience agents” in the
game seemed to play an important role in their enjoyment. It set a playful tone and gave them confidence that they could participate. But perhaps the most successful design element was the score, which was both a number—your total answers out of a possible ten—and a poem.

  We wanted both players to leave feeling like they had not only talked to each other, but created something together. So at the end of the game, the website turned the players’ answers into a simple, free-verse poem. Players could print the poem out or e-mail it. Poems are also captured and viewable online. Here’s an example of one of the free-verse poems that two players created as their final score together: Rougemont, making wedding pictures, tango in a barn,

  Bend paper clips, cinnamon buns, tongue of a cow,

  In a skirt, in the Pacific, putting together a darkroom.

  Each phrase of this poem represents something two strangers, at least twenty years apart in age, shared in common so far in their lives.

  Now, I’ve never met the two players who both bend paper clips when they’re nervous and have both tangoed in a barn, but I can imagine them, meeting each other for the first time on the phone and realizing how many shared events had led up to this moment in their lives.

  In the end, the fun of the game is quite simple: the phone rings, and it’s a stranger, and just by chance you get to discover someone very different from you who has nevertheless lived a similarly fascinating life. Of course, the game can also be played with relatives and neighbors, and more than once, because it can produce thousands of unique interview sessions.

  When you start to realize how many interesting life experiences you might already share with someone from a completely different generation, there’s no limit to the number of connections you can make. And a game like Bounce makes it much easier to reach out to someone whose life might benefit greatly from knowing you better.

  THE THREE GAMES described in this chapter demonstrate how quickly and effectively a game can help us band together to experience a burst of communitas and participate more actively in the social commons.

  Community games have important benefits to our real lives. They may lead us to new interests—public spaces or public institutions we discover we care about more than we’d thought, or activities like storytelling and art that we want to pursue with others. Even when the game ends, we may find ourselves participating more in these spaces, institutions, and activities than before.

  On the other hand, the communitas we feel may be just a short spark of social connection, nothing more. But even playing a very short game together, we are reminded of how much we share with even the strangest of strangers. We gain confidence that we can connect with others when we want to, and when we need to.

  And with that confidence, there is no reason to ever feel alone in the world—virtual, real, or otherwise.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Happiness Hacking

  HOW ALTERNATE REALITIES CAN HELP US ADOPT THE DAILY HABITS OF THE WORLD’S HAPPIEST PEOPLE

  Shout compliments at strangers on the sidewalk.

  Play poker in a cemetery.

  Dance without moving your feet.

  Maybe these aren’t exactly your typical doctor’s orders. In fact, I’m pretty sure no psychologist has ever prescribed these activities. But each of these three unusual instructions is directly inspired by practical recommendations taken straight from positive-psychology manuals. For example:• Practice random acts of kindness twice a week. (The reward center of the brain experiences a stronger “dopamine hit” when we make someone else smile than when we smile first.)

  • Think about death for five minutes every day. (Researchers suggest that we can induce a mellow, grateful physiological state known as “posttraumatic bliss” that helps us appreciate the present moment and savor our lives more.)

  • Dance more. (Synchronizing physical behavior to music we like is one of the most reliable—not to mention the safest—ways to induce the form of extreme happiness known as euphoria.)

  These three guidelines represent some of the most commonly prescribed happiness activities today; the first set of instructions just offers more gameful interpretations of them.

  What, exactly, are happiness activities? They’re like the daily multivitamins of positive psychology: they’ve been clinically tested and proven to boost our well-being in small doses, and they’re designed to fit easily into our everyday lives. There are dozens of different happiness activities in the scientific literature to choose from in addition to the three listed above, ranging from expressing our gratitude to someone daily to making a list of “bright-side” benefits whenever we experience a negative life event. And they all have one thing in common: they are backed by multiple million-dollar-plus research studies, which have conclusively demonstrated that virtually anybody who adopts one as a regular habit will get happier.

  Of course, if it were that easy, we’d all be a lot happier already. In fact, by nearly all measures, we’re not substantially happier as a planet than we were before the rise of positive psychology in the 1990s. Rates of both clinical depression and mild depression globally are increasing so quickly, the World Health Organization recently named depression the single most serious chronic threat to global health, beating out heart disease, asthma, and diabetes.1 In the United States, where we frequently put on happy faces for each other in public, we admit in private to surprisingly low levels of life satisfaction. In one recent nationwide survey, more than 50 percent of U.S. adults recently reported that they “lack great enthusiasm for life” and “don’t feel actively and productively engaged with the world.”2 This is despite the fact that we have—more than ever before—better and wider access to evidence-based self-help tools in the form of best-selling positive-psychology books, not to mention countless magazine articles and blog posts.

  So what’s the problem? It turns out that knowing what makes us happy isn’t enough. We have to act on that knowledge, and not just once, but often. And it’s becoming increasingly obvious that it is just not that easy to put scientific findings into practice in our everyday lives.

  We need help implementing new happiness habits—and we can’t just help ourselves. In fact, when it comes to improving our collective happiness levels, self-help rarely works. Outside the structure and social support of a clinical trial or classroom, these self-help recommendations are surprisingly hard to implement on our own. Depending on the activity, we either can’t or won’t do them solo—and there are three big reasons why.

  The first and most important reason is summed up best by Sonja Lyubomirsky, who laments, “Why do many of the most powerful happiness activities sound so . . . well, hokey?”3 Lyubomirsky earned a million-dollar research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to test a dozen different happiness activities—and she discovered that despite their incontrovertible effectiveness, many people resist even trying them. The most common complaint, according to Lyubomirsky? Happiness activities sound “corny,” “sentimental,” or Pollyannaish.4

  “Such reactions are authentic, and I can’t dispute them,” Lyubomirsky admits.5 We instinctively resist activities that feel forced and inauthentic, and many people are deeply suspicious of unadulterated feel-goodness. Shouldn’t expressions of gratitude be spontaneous, not scheduled? Isn’t it naive to constantly look for silver linings? What if I just plain don’t feel like making a gesture of kindness today? When it comes to doing good and feeling good, we seem to think it’s more “real” if we wait for inspiration to strike, rather than committing to doing it whether we “feel like it” or not. On top of that, there’s just plain suspicion and skepticism of these unabashedly positive activities. There’s an undeniable tendency toward irony, cynicism, and detachment in popular culture today, and throwing ourselves into happiness activities just doesn’t fit that emotional climate.

  Positive psychologist Martin Seligman explains that “the pervasive belief that happiness is inauthentic is a profound obstacle” to putting positive psychology in
to action.6 Science just doesn’t have a chance against our instinctive, visceral reactions—and, unfortunately, the best advice that positive psychologists have to offer seems to push all our cynical, skeptical buttons. For many people, happiness activities will need to be embedded in a more instinctively appealing—and less overtly do-good, feel-good—package.

  The second obstacle to practicing simple happiness activities on our own is what I call the “self-help paradox.” Self-help is typically a personal, private activity. When it comes to some activities—overcoming fears, identifying career goals, coping with chronic pain, starting a fitness routine—there’s certainly reason to believe that self-help can work. But when it comes to everyday happiness, there’s just no way personal, private activity can work—because, according to most scientific findings, there are almost no good ways to be happy alone for long.

  As the author Eric Weiner, who has studied worldwide happiness trends, reports: “The self-help industrial complex hasn’t helped. By telling us that happiness lives inside us, it’s turned us inward just when we should be looking outward . . . to other people, to community and to the kind of human bonds that so clearly are the sources of our happiness.”7 Weiner makes an excellent point here: self-help isn’t typically social, but so many happiness activities are meant to be. Moreover, positive psychology has shown that for any activity to feel truly meaningful, it needs to be attached to a much bigger project or community—and self-help just doesn’t usually unfold collectively, particularly when self-help advice comes in the form of books.

  Approaching happiness as a self-help process runs counter to virtually every positive-psychology finding ever published. Even if we can get ourselves past the hokiness problem, thinking of happiness as a self-help process will doom us to failure. Ideally, happiness needs to be approached as a collective process. Happiness activities need to be done with friends, family, neighbors, strangers, coworkers, and all the other people who make up the social fabric of our lives.