When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.
The researchers worked with more than three thousand young gamers in total, and in all three studies they reached the same conclusion: young people who spend more time playing games in which they’re required to help each other are significantly more likely to help friends, family, neighbors, and even strangers in their real lives.
Even if you never increase your physical or social resilience, seeking out more positive emotions every day alone can add a full decade to your life.
People who know how to make games need to start focusing on the task of making real life better for as many people as possible.
Player investment design lead’ is a role that every single collaborative project or crowd initiative should fill in the future. When the game is intrinsically rewarding to play, you don’t have to pay people to participate – with real currency, virtual currency, or any other kind of scarce reward. Participation is its own reward, when the player is properly invested in his or her progress, in exploring the world fully, and in the community’s success.
Game developers know better than anyone else how to inspire extreme effort and reward hard work. They know how to facilitate cooperation and collaboration at previously unimaginable scales. And they are continuously innovating new ways to motivate players to stick with harder challenges, for longer, and in much bigger groups. These crucial twenty-first-century skills can help all of us find new ways to make a deep and lasting impact on the world around us.
An optimistic sense of our own capabilities and an invigorating rush of activity.
Or, worse, our real-world work isn’t hard enough. We’re bored out of our minds. We feel completely underutilized. We feel unappreciated. We are wasting our lives.
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes.
We have to make our own happiness – by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.
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.
Work ethic is not a moral virtue that can be cultivated simply by wanting to be a better person. It’s actually a biochemical condition that can be fostered, purposefully, through activity that increases dopamine levels in the brain.
Over time, even the tiniest meaningful actions add up, each one bringing you closer to a life that is truer to your dreams and free of regret.
The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”6 When we’re depressed, according to the clinical definition, we suffer from two things: a pessimistic sense of inadequacy and a despondent lack of activity.
A crowd carries the social authority to redefine norms.
T. S. Eliot famously wrote, “If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
In order to turn a group of strangers into a community, you have to follow two basic steps: first, cultivate a shared interest among strangers, and, second, give them the opportunity and means to interact with each other around that interest.
Studies have found that we also think more creatively and set higher, “maximal,” goals for ourselves when we’re in rooms with higher ceilings or outside in a wide-open environment.
What matters is whether your brain perceives an abundance of time. So give it a try. Give yourself luxurious ten-year deadlines. You might be surprised at how much faster and more happily you do things you’d otherwise put off when you feel time-rich, and therefore more in control of your timeline.
Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.