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Tag: video games

Reverse Hack Video Game Psychology to Increase Real Life Motivation (and Why We Play Video Games Instead of Living Life)

Is it time to uprez your game?

Well-designed games, more than any other form of entertainment, directly hack into our motivational substructures.  They play into our desire to achieve status, collect things, complete tasks, explore the unknown, solve mysteries, be powerful, and make tangible progress (otherwise known as “leveling up”).

Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker

Video game theorist Ian Bogost explores and satirizes this aspect of games with his Facebook metagame Cow Clicker.  The game is maximally minimalistic; all you do is click on a virtual cow at regular intervals (the game that Cow Clicker satirizes, Farmville, is a mass social networking game phenomena with more users than Twitter, netting hundreds of millions in revenue for its creators).  Bogost states that his game “distills the social game genre down to its essence.”  His point is that game architecture can be distilled into simple psychological tricks the designer uses to engage the player.  In a well designed game, these tricks are used with brutal (or in some cases, subtle) effectiveness, and the game is hard to stop playing.  Some game designers have even been accused of making their games too addictive.

A good game cleverly manipulates us, playing on our various urges (competition, avarice, curiosity, desire for completion or closure).  In the context of the game, our skills are a good match for the tasks at hand, and rewards are frequent and well-timed.  Real life, on the other hand, is messier.  Our skills are often a poor match for the tasks at hand; what we need to do is often too easy (and therefore boring) or too hard (and therefore intimidating).  Rewards come unevenly and sometimes apparently randomly; we can work diligently for years or even decades and the world will basically shrug at us.  At other times, we can’t believe our good luck, and don’t feel worthy of the good fortune life bestows upon us.

Are there ways we can apply the motivational energy (or dirty tricks, depending on how you look at it) used by video games to our real lives?  This is one area where I completely agree with game designer/theorist Jane McGonigal (I discussed her recent thesis in my last post); I think we can.  McGonigal gives a brilliant example of this technique when she describes how she recovered from a debilitating concussion.  What else can we do to “reverse hack” the tricks video games play on our minds?

On Video Games, Motivation, and The Psychedelic Realization

Is the cake a lie?

Jane McGonigal has some provocative ideas about the potential benefits of video games.  Her TED talk is a good introduction to her thinking, which can be summarized as follows:

  • Young people in countries with strong “gaming cultures” (think U.S. or South Korea) put some serious hours into gaming (especially MMORPGs like World of Warcraft) — hours roughly equivalent to total secondary school education.
  • The massive amount of time invested in virtual game worlds causes a permanent shift in psychological makeup, generally for the positive.
  • The qualities developed in these uber-gamers include a sense of “urgent optimism,” the ability to “weave a strong social fabric,” the enjoyment of “blissful productivity,” and the experience of “epic meaning” (she explains all of these terms in the TED talk linked above).  All in all video games create “super-empowered hopeful individuals” (at least in the context of their games worlds).
  • These positive qualities can be harnessed and used to solve real-world problems, via the use of “world-saving” games that promote social awareness and include real life actions (one example is a “peak oil” game designed by McGonigal that encourages players to make changes in their real lives that will reduce their real life oil consumption).

I found McGonigal’s talk to be thought-provoking and refreshing.  I think she may be on to something, but overall I find her views to be Panglossian.  McGonigal sees the millions of hours we collectively spend in game worlds as an escape from real-world problems and suffering.   She seems to overlook the possibility that video games themselves might be a causing real problems.

Gamers, hard at work solving the world's problems.

Well-designed video games can be so addictive that susceptible types (myself included) can be pulled in to a degree that will appear, to any dispassionate outside observer, to be excessive, destructive, and possibly demented.  More so than other forms of entertainment (novels, movies, magazines, etc.), it is easy to lose entire work-weeks to video gaming.

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