Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (18 page)

When our everyday work feels trivial, or when we can’t easily be of direct service to a larger cause, games can fulfill an important need for us. As we play games at an epic scale, we’re increasing our ability to rise to the occasion, to inspire awe, and to take part in something bigger than ourselves.

Earlier in this chapter I quoted a
Halo
player who wondered, “Imagine what we could do with the full force of six billion humans!!”

Of course, there aren’t enough Xboxes in the world to do it. Nor could everyone afford them, of course. But it does make for an interesting thought experiment: What
could
you do in a game like
Halo 3
if you had the full force of humanity playing together?

On one hand, this is an absurd idea to even consider. What would be the point of assembling 6 billion people to wage a fictional war?

But on the other: can you imagine what it would feel like to have 6 billion people fighting
on the same side
of a fictional war?

I think it’s pretty clear that such an effort would have real meaning, even if it failed to generate any real-world value. If you were able to focus the attention of the entire planet on a single goal, even if just for one day, and even if it just involved dispatching aliens in a video game, it would be a truly awe-inspiring occasion. It would be the single biggest collective experience ever undertaken in the whole of human history. It would give the whole earth goose bumps.

That’s
the epic scale that gamers are capable of thinking on. That’s the scale gamers are ready to work at.

Gamers can imagine 6 billion people coming together to fight a fictional enemy, for the sheer awe and wonder of it. They are ready to work together on extreme scales, toward epic goals, just for the spine-tingling joy of it. And the more we seek out that kind of happiness as a planet, the more likely we are to save it—not from fictional aliens, but from apathy and wasted potential.

Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology and the author of
Generation Me
, has persuasively argued that the youngest generations today—particularly anyone born after 1980—are, in her words, “more miserable than ever before.” Why? Because of our increased cultural emphasis on “self-esteem” and “self-fulfillment.” But real fulfillment, as countless psychologists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have shown, comes from fulfilling commitments to others. We want to be esteemed in the eyes of others, not for “who we are,” but rather for what we’ve done that really matters.

The more we focus on ourselves and avoid a commitment to others, Twenge’s research shows, the more we suffer from anxiety and depression. But that doesn’t stop us from trying to make ourselves happy alone. We mistakenly think that by putting ourselves first, we’ll finally get what we want. In fact, true happiness comes not from thinking
more
of ourselves, but rather from thinking
less
of ourselves—from seeing the truly small role we play in something much bigger, much more important than our individual needs.

Joining any collective effort and embracing feelings of awe can help us unlock our potential to lead a meaningful life and to leave a meaningful mark on the world.

Even if it’s a virtual world we’re leaving our mark on, we’re still learning what it feels like to be of service to a larger cause. We’re priming our brains and bodies to value and to seek out epic meaning as an emotional reward. And as recent research suggests, the more we enjoy these rewards in game worlds, the more likely we may be to seek them out in real life.

Three scientific studies published in 2009 by a consortium of researchers from eight universities in the United States, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia studied the relationship between time spent playing games that require “helpful behavior” and the gamers’ willingness to help others in everyday life. One study focused on children age thirteen and younger, another on teenagers, and the third on college students. 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.
³³

Although these studies weren’t specifically looking at epic-scale games, the core findings seem likely to remain consistent, or even increase, at larger scales. As Brad Bushman, one coauthor of the studies and a professor of communications and psychology at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, puts it, “These findings suggest there is an upward spiral of prosocial gaming and helpful behavior.”
³⁴
In other words, the more we help in games, the more we help in life. And so there’s good reason to believe that the more we learn to enjoy serving epic causes in game worlds, the more we may find ourselves contributing to epic efforts in the real world.

 

 

THE PSYCHOLOGIST
Abraham Maslow famously said, “It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
³⁵
But today’s best games give us a powerful tool for achieving exactly that rare kind of self-knowledge.

Games are showing us exactly what we want out of life: more satisfying work, better hope of success, stronger social connectivity, and the chance to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. With games that help us generate these four rewards every day, we have unlimited potential to raise our own quality of life. And when we play these games with friends, family, and neighbors, we can enrich the lives of people we care about.

So games are teaching us to see what really makes us happy—and how to become the best versions of ourselves. But can we apply that knowledge to the real world?

By supporting our four essential human cravings, and by providing a reliable source of flow and fiero, the gaming industry has gone a long way toward making us happier and more emotionally resilient—but only up to a point. We haven’t learned how to enjoy our
real lives
more thoroughly. Instead, we’ve spent the last thirty-five years learning to enjoy our
game lives
more thoroughly.

Instead of fixing reality, we’ve simply created more and more attractive alternatives to the boredom, anxiety, alienation, and meaninglessness we run up against so often in everyday life. It’s high time we start applying the lessons of games to the design of our everyday lives. We need to engineer
alternate
realities: new, more gameful ways of interacting with the real world and living our real lives.

Fortunately, the project of making alternate realities is already under way.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

W
henever I walk through the front door of my apartment, I enter an alternate reality. It looks and works just like regular reality, with one major exception: when I want to clean the bathroom, I have to be
really
sneaky about it.

If my husband, Kiyash, thinks I’m going to scrub the tub on Saturday morning, he’ll wake up early, tiptoe out of the bedroom and silently beat me to it. But I’ve lived in this alternate reality long enough to have developed a highly effective counterstrategy: I clean the bathroom at odd hours in the middle of the week, when he’s least expecting it. The more random the hour, the more likely I am to complete the chore before he does. And if this strategy ever starts to fail? Well, let’s just say that I am not above hiding the toilet brush.

Why exactly are we competing with each other to do the dirty work? We’re playing a free online game called Chore Wars. And it just so happens that ridding our real-world kingdom of toilet stains is worth more experience points, or XP, than any other chore in the Land of the 41st-Floor Ninjas, which is what we’ve dubbed our apartment in the game. (We live on the forty-first floor, and my husband has a thing for
ninjutsu
.)

Chore Wars is an alternate reality game (ARG), a game you play in your real life (and not a virtual environment) in order to enjoy it more. Chore Wars is essentially a simplified version of
World of Warcraft
, with one notable exception: all of the online quests correspond with real-world cleaning tasks, and instead of playing with strangers or faraway friends online, you play the game with your roommates, family, or officemates. Kevan Davis, a British experimental game developer who created Chore Wars in 2007, describes it as a “chore management system.”
¹
It’s meant to help you track how much housework people are doing—and to inspire everyone to do more housework, more cheerfully, than they would otherwise.

To play Chore Wars, you first have to recruit a “party of adventurers” from your real-life household or office. That means getting your roommates, family members, or coworkers to sign up online, where together you’ll name your kingdom and create avatars to represent everyone in the game.

Anyone who creates an avatar is eligible to undertake any of the custom “adventures” that you create in the game’s database—in my household, these include emptying the dishwasher and brewing the first pot of coffee. And because it’s a role-playing game, you’re encouraged to write up the chores with a fantastical spin. In the Land of the 41st-Floor Ninjas, for example, brushing out our Shetland sheepdog is “Saving the dog-damsel in distress from clumps and shedding,” and doing the laundry is “Conjuring clean clothes.”

Whenever you complete one of these chores, you log in to the game to report your success. Every chore grants you a customized amount of experience points, virtual gold, treasure, avatar power-ups, or points that increase your virtual skills and abilities: plus ten dexterity points for dusting without knocking anything off the shelves, for example, or plus five stamina points for taking out all three kinds of recycling. And because you get to craft the adventures from scratch yourself, you can customize the in-game rewards to make the least popular chores more attractive—hence, the battle in my apartment to clean the bathroom first. It’s worth a whopping one hundred XP.

The more chores you finish, the more experience points and virtual gold you earn, and the faster you level up your online avatar’s powers. But Chore Wars isn’t just about tracking your avatar development; it’s also about earning real rewards. The game’s instructions encourage households to invent creative ways to redeem the virtual gold in real life. You could exchange the gold for allowances if you’re playing with your kids, or for rounds of drinks for roommates, or coffee runs for workmates, for example. My husband and I share a single car, so we use our gold pieces to bid on what music to play in the car whenever we’re driving somewhere together.

But even more satisfying than all of my avatar powers, accumulated gold, and music privileges is the fact that after nine months of playing Chore Wars together, my husband’s avatar has earned more overall experience points than I have. And avatar stats don’t lie: for nearly a year now, Kiyash has definitely put in more effort cleaning the apartment than I have.

Clearly, this is a game that you win even if you lose. Kiyash has the satisfaction of being the best ninja on the forty-first floor, and I have the pleasure of doing fewer chores than my husband—at least until my competitive spirit kicks back in. Not to mention, it’s more enjoyable to be partners in crime when it comes to housework, instead of nagging each other about chores. And, of course, as an added bonus, our place is cleaner than it ever has been before. Chore Wars has transformed something we both normally hate doing into something that feels creative and fun. The game has changed our reality of having to do housework, and for the better.

We’re not alone. Chore Wars is one of the best reviewed and most beloved, if little known, secrets on the Internet.

A mom in Texas describes a typical Chore Wars experience: “We have three children, ages nine, eight, and seven. I sat down with the kids, showed them their characters and the adventures, and they literally jumped up and ran off to complete their chosen tasks. I’ve never seen my eight-year-old son make his bed! And I almost fainted when my husband cleaned out the toaster oven.”

The experience apparently works as well for twentysomethings as it does for kids. As another player reports: “I live in a house in London with one other girl and six guys. A lot of the time I’m the only one tidying up, which was driving me slowly insane. I set up an account for us last night, and set some ‘adventures,’ and when I got up this morning
everyone in the house was cleaning
. I honestly could not believe what I was seeing. All we had to do is make it a competition! Now the guys are obsessed with beating each other!”
²

How, exactly, does Chore Wars do it?

We typically think of chores as things we have to do. Either someone is nagging us to do them or we do them out of absolute necessity. That’s why they’re called chores: by definition, unpleasant tasks. The brilliant master-stroke of Chore Wars is that it convinces us that we
want
to do these tasks.

More important, however, is the introduction of
meaningful choice
into the housework equation. When you set up your party, your first task is to create a large pool of adventures to choose from. No player is assigned a particular adventure. Instead, everyone gets to pick their own. There are no
necessary
chores. You are volunteering for every adventure you take. And this sense of voluntary participation in housework is strengthened by the fact that you’re encouraged to apply strategy as you choose your own housework adventures. Should you go for lots of chores that are fast and easy to complete, and try to rack up as many XP as possible that way? Or should you go for the harder, bigger chores, blocking other players from getting all that gold?