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Evidence shows that having even weak social connections in a stressful situation is really good for your health and your ability to handle that situation.
I see a future in which games once again are explicitly designed to improve quality of life, to prevent suffering, and to create real, widespread happiness.
When we play a game, we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we're more likely to reach out to others for help.
Game designers are obsessed with emotion. How do we create the emotions that we want gamers to feel, and how can we really make it this intense, emotional experience?
The idea of the 'lone gamer' is really not true anymore. Up to 65 percent of gaming now is social, played either online or in the same room with people we know in real life.
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.
Any time I consider a new project, I ask myself, is this pushing the state of gaming toward Nobel Prizes? If it's not, then it's not doing anything important enough to spend my time.
There is no problem that doesn't have some underlying need for more optimism, stamina, resilience and collaboration. And games are, I believe, the best platform we have for providing that.
It may have once been true that computer games encouraged us to interact more with machines than with each other. But if you still think of gamers as loners, then you’re not playing games.
If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion … you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing.
When my life is stressful, my favorite game is called 'Pop It,' where you pop balloons and prizes fall out. It's a five-minute game that focuses my mind and gives me extra attention when I'm stressed.
A game is an opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, at something we’re good at (or getting better at) and enjoy. In other words, gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression.
We've been playing games since humanity had civilization - there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It's so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.
I remember the first year at the Game Developers Conference I wore these big red giant knee-high boots. Nobody cared. You can wear anything you love, because that's what you do in games. You make yourself who you want to be.
I'm not a fan of simulations. Where, 'Oh, we'll go play a simulation of world peace and figure out how to make peace' and then somehow magically that will get translated into the real world. No, that's not the kind of games that I make.
When we're in game worlds, I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves: the most likely to help at a moment's notice. The most likely to stick with a problem as long as it takes. To get up after failure and try again.
When we're in game worlds, I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves - the most likely to help at a moment's notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again.
'Superbetter' looks more like a social media platform or a social network than a typical video game. You know, there aren't any 3-d spaces to explore. You don't have this avatar that you're building up. It's more about thinking like a gamer.
I ran through most of college and ran through most of grad school. When I was writing my dissertation for my Ph.D., it was literally the only hour of the day that I wasn't working. It was nine months of torture, but I made sure I got out to run.
Positive health means becoming whole-heartedly engaged with our own health care. It means not outsourcing our health to the health care system. It means getting rid of the fear and paralysis we too often feel, and instead cultivating a sense of agency.
The Gamifaction Movement is trying to help companies engage their audience and community by using game mechanics and wrapping them around shopping or achievements, so you get achievements for coming to a store or purchasing things, like rewarding activities.
'SuperBetter' is fundamentally about a mind shift. It's about claiming your power to be in charge of how you spend your time and energy, and focusing it on the things that matter the most to you. Focusing on things that will bring real happiness, real well-being.
It seems like what happens when we play games is that we go into a psychological state called eustress, or positive stress. It's basically the same as negative stress in the sense that we get our adrenaline up, you know, our breathing rate quickens, our pulse quickens.
Scientists have demonstrated that dramatic, positive changes can occur in our lives as a direct result of facing an extreme challenge - whether it's coping with a serious illness, daring to quit smoking, or dealing with depression. Researchers call this 'post-traumatic growth.'
Although I'm perceived as very optimistic and upbeat, it comes out of being the opposite of that - feeling isolated or lonely, looking for meaning and the kinds of things that ease that suffering in life, and finding them in large-scale social interaction, like theater and games.
In the future, I think it's pretty plausible that collective intelligence tools and skills will be important in order to be a part of global dialog, global business, and global creativity. People who know how to negotiate collective intelligence networks are going to be in a good position to contribute to global society.
Surveys of thousands of gamers have shown that they're more likely to play real music if they play a music videogame. So it's an interesting relationship where the games aren't replacing something we do in real life, they're serving as a springboard to a goal we might have in real life, like learning to play an instrument.
The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.
For most people, an hour a day playing our favorite games will power up our ability to engage whole-heartedly with difficult challenges, strengthen our relationships with the people we care about most - while still letting us notice when it's time to stop playing in virtual worlds and bring our gamer strengths back to real life.
It's a bit counter-intuitive to think about the future in terms of the past. But...I've learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. Technologies, cultures, and climates may change, but our basic human needs and desires - to survive, to care for our families, and to lead happy, purposeful lives - remain the same.' p 5
Cory Doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the details of alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling, new vision of how these games might play out in the high-stakes context of a terrorist attack. Little Brother is a brilliant novel with a bold argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country's best hope for the future.
If you are a gamer, it’s time to get over any regret you might feel about spending so much time playing games. You have not been wasting your time. You have been building up a wealth of virtual experience that, as the first half of this book will show you, can teach you about your true self: what your core strengths are, what really motivates you, and what make you happiest.
I want gaming to be something that everybody does, because they understand that games can be a real solution to problems and a real source of happiness. I want games to be something everybody learns how to design and develop, because they understand that games are a real platform for change and getting things done. And I want families, schools, companies, industries, cities, countries, and the whole world to come together to play them, because we’re finally making games that tackle real dilemmas and improve real lives.