Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (7 page)

At first, this work was easy: your paddle was big, the ball fell slowly, and there were plenty of bricks to hit. But as you knocked out more and more bricks, the ball fell faster and bounced off the wall more erratically, and your paddle shrank to half its original size. It became increasingly difficult to keep the ball in play, and it took better and better aim to guide the ball toward the few remaining bricks. Once you missed five balls, the game was over.

As primitive a video game as it was, it nevertheless made for a perfect little voluntary workload. It had everything you’d want from an unnecessary obstacle: a clear goal (destroy a prison wall), arbitrary restrictions (use only a paddle and five balls), and instant feedback, both visual and audio (the bricks disappeared from the screen one at a time, always with a satisfying beep). The computer algorithms continuously adjusted the difficulty level to keep you playing at the very edge of your own abilities.

As Sudnow put it, “Here’s all the motivation you’d ever want . . . and the prize seemed to be just holding on.”
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The game completely sustained his attention, even when he wasn’t in front of the Atari console. “When I wasn’t at the TV, I was practicing the sequence in my imagination, walking down the street, sitting in a café twirling a salt shaker, looking up during dinner in a Japanese restaurant at a bamboo and rice paper trellis with
Breakout
-like rectangles on the ceiling . . . just waiting to get back to the game.”
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The better he got at the game, the more he wanted to play, and the more he played, the better he got. Sudnow was so taken aback by the intensity of this continuous feedback loop, he felt compelled to write an entire book to understand it. It’s an extended, poetic meditation on the emotions of game-play. He says almost everything we need to know about the emotional power of early video games in just these two famous sentences:

What Sudnow describes is the extreme neurochemical activation that happens in our brains and bodies when we start to play a good computer or video game. He was intensely focused, highly motivated, creatively charged, and working at the very limits of his abilities. Immersion was almost instant. Flow was fast and virtually guaranteed.

From zero to peak experience in thirty seconds flat—no wonder video games caught on. Never before in human history could this kind of optimal, emotional activation be accessed so cheaply, so reliably, so quickly.

In the past, the deepest experiences of flow had required years of practice to achieve, or extraordinary settings. When Csíkszentmihályi first wrote about it, he was studying
expert
players of chess, or basketball, or rock climbing, or partner dancing. Flow was typically the result of years, if not decades, of learning the structure of an activity and strengthening the required skills and abilities. Otherwise, it required being immersed in a truly spectacular and unusual context, like dancing in the crowded streets during carnival or skiing down an exceptionally challenging mountainside.

Flow wasn’t supposed to come easy. But, as Sudnow and millions of other early gamers discovered, video games made it possible to experience flow almost immediately. Video games took the traditional properties of potentially flow-inducing activities—a goal, obstacles, increasing challenge, and voluntary participation—and then used a combination of direct physical input (the joystick), flexible difficulty adjustment (the computer algorithms), and instant visual feedback (the video graphics) to tighten the feedback loop of games dramatically. And this faster, tighter feedback loop allowed for more reliable hits of the emotional reward fiero: each microlevel of difficulty you survived prompted a split-second emotional high.

The result was a much faster cycle of learning and reward, and ultimately a sense of perfect and powerful control over a “microworld” on the screen. As Sudnow described, “The joystick-button box feels like a genuine implement of action.
Bam, bam, bam,
got you . . . Please don’t miss, come on, do it, get that brick, easy does it, no surprises, now stay cool, don’t panic, take it in stride, get it now. Get that closure. Video-game action. You know when you’ve got it like you know your first drunk.”
¹⁰

It was this fast, reliable fix of flow and fiero that kept Sudnow and all the earliest gamers coming back for more. It’s no exaggeration to say that for many gamers, it probably felt like they had been waiting their whole lives for something like this: a seemingly free and endless supply of invigorating activity and every reason in the world to feel optimistic about their own abilities.

Then and now, faster, more reliable flow and fiero separates computer and video games from all the games that came before them. And that’s what makes Sudnow’s memoir of playing
Breakout
such an important historical artifact. He was the first to express what was so new and emotionally riveting about digital games, before the spectacular graphics, before the epic stories, and before the massively multiplayer worlds. Back then,
all
the emotional power of video games stemmed from the fact that they were interesting obstacles with better feedback and more adaptive challenges. As a result, they excelled at one thing and pretty much one thing only: provoking so much flow and fiero, they were nearly impossible to stop playing.

In fact, that was the whole point of these early video games: to keep playing as long as possible. One of the original and best-known Atari slogans was “Discover how far you can go.” It was a constant battle just to stay in the game, but that was also the primary satisfaction of playing. Flow and fiero are the original rewards of video gameplay, and by playing against the tireless machine, we could endlessly produce them for ourselves.

Well, almost endlessly.

After three months, Sudnow finally exhausted his seemingly infinite source of flow. He played a perfect game of
Breakout
, destroying all the walls with just one ball. It was one of the biggest fiero moments of his life. But on that day, when he earned the highest possible score, his
Breakout
obsession ended. He had gone as far as flow and fiero could take him.

Fortunately for gamers, that’s not the end of the story.

Flow, as positive psychologists have documented, is only one part of the overall happiness picture. It was the first kind of happiness these psychologists studied, but the science has progressed significantly since then. As Corey Lee M. Keyes, a psychology professor at Emory University, explains, “Flow is considered
part
of the science of happiness but not all.... It is more of a temporal state than a trait or condition of human functioning. While there are studies on how to prolong it, flow is not seen as something that people can live within all the time.”
¹¹

Flow is exhilarating in the moment. It makes us feel energized. A major flow experience can improve our mood for hours, or even days, afterward. But because it’s such a state of extreme engagement, it eventually uses up our physical and mental resources.

We can’t sustain flow indefinitely—as much as we might want to. That’s why, according to Keyes, human flourishing requires a more “continuous” approach to well-being. It can’t just be all flow, all the time. We have to find ways to enjoy the world and relish life even when we’re not operating at our peak human potential.

This is true in games as well as in life.

David Sudnow, it turns out, was so exhausted by the three months he spent suspended in nearly continuous
Breakout
flow that he subsequently stayed far away from video games for quite some time.

Too much flow can lead to happiness burnout. Meanwhile, too much fiero can lead to addiction—a word that Sudnow never once used in his memoir but which nevertheless inescapably leaps to mind. Fiero taps into some of our most primal hardwiring, and our emotional response can be extreme.

Recently, Allan Reiss, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford, led a team of researchers in a study of the neurochemistry of fiero in gamers. His laboratory captured MRIs of gamers’ brains while they were playing particularly challenging video games. The researchers observed exceptionally intense activation of the addiction circuitry of the brain when gamers experienced moments of triumph. And as a result, the researchers identified fiero as the most likely underlying cause of why some gamers feel “addicted” to their favorite games.
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Gamer addiction is a subject the industry takes seriously—it’s a frequent topic at industry conferences and on game developer forums: what causes gamer addiction, and how can you help your players avoid it? This might at first seem surprising: doesn’t the industry want gamers to spend
more
time (and money) playing games, not less? And it’s true: more gaming by more people
is
the primary goal of the industry. But the industry wants to create
lifelong gamers
: people who can balance their favorite games with full and active lives. And so we have what is perhaps the central dilemma of the game industry over the past thirty years: how to enable gamers to play more without diminishing their real lives. The industry knows that gamers crave flow and fiero—and the more game developers give it to them, the more time and money gamers will spend on their favorite games. But beyond a certain playing threshold—for most gamers, it seems to be somewhere around twenty hours a week—they start to wonder if they’re perhaps missing out on real life.

Technology journalist Clive Thompson has a name for this phenomenon:
gamer regret
.
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And he’ll be the first to admit that he suffers from it as much as any other gamer. Thompson recalls checking his personal statistics one day—many games keep track of how many hours you’ve spent playing—and was shocked to see that he had clocked in thirty-six hours playing a single game in one week—as he described it, “a missing-time experience so vast one would normally require a UFO abduction to achieve it.” He found himself vacillating between pride in what he’d accomplished in the virtual game environment and wondering if all that hard work had really been worth it.

As Thompson writes: “The dirty secret of gamers is that we wrestle with this dilemma all the time. We’re often gripped by . . . a sudden, horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we could have done with our game time.” He admits: “The elation I feel when I finish a game is always slightly tinged with a worrisome sense of hollowness. Wouldn’t I have been better off doing something that was difficult and challenging
and
productive?”

This internal conflict plays out in discussion forums all over Web. The twin questions “How much time do you spend playing games?” and “How much time is too much?” are ubiquitous in the gaming community.

As a partial solution to gamer regret, many of the most addictive online games have implemented a “fatigue system.” These systems are most commonly used in online games in South Korea and China, where the rates of online gaming for young men can average up to forty hours a week.
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After three hours of consecutive online play, gamers receive 50 percent fewer rewards (and half the fiero) for accomplishing the same amount of work. After five hours, it becomes impossible to earn any rewards. In the United States, a softer touch is more commonly employed:
World of Warcraft
players, for example, accumulate “resting bonuses” for every hour they spend
not
playing the game. When they log back in, their avatar can earn up to double rewards until it’s time to rest again.

But these measures are a stopgap at best. Trying to stop people from playing their favorite games will never work; motivated gamers hungry for flow and fiero will find a way around the restrictions and limitations. What’s needed instead is for games to go beyond flow and fiero, which make us happy in the moment, to provide a more lasting kind of emotional reward. We need games that make us happier even when we’re not playing. Only then will we find the right balance between playing our favorite games and making the most of our real lives.

Fortunately, that’s exactly what’s happening in the computer and video game market today. Games are increasingly teaching us the four secrets of how to make our own happiness—and they’re giving us the power to make it anytime, anywhere.

Many different competing theories of happiness have emerged from the field of positive psychology, but if there’s one thing virtually all positive psychologists agree on, it’s this: there are many ways to be happy, but we cannot
find
happiness. No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us. We have to
make our own
happiness—by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.
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When we try to find happiness outside of ourselves, we’re focused on what positive psychologists call “extrinsic” rewards—money, material goods, status, or praise. When we get what we want, we feel good. Unfortunately, the pleasures of found happiness don’t last very long. We build up a tolerance for our favorite things and start to want more. It takes bigger and better rewards just to trigger the same level of satisfaction and pleasure. The more we try to “find” happiness, the harder it gets. Positive psychologists call this process “hedonic adaptation,” and it’s one of the biggest hindrances to long-term life satisfaction.
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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.