This document discusses how gaming can provide solutions to make reality more engaging and meaningful. It outlines 14 "fixes" that games employ and how they could be applied to reality, such as: providing voluntary obstacles to challenge us, focusing our energy on things we enjoy, giving us a sense of purpose through clear goals and missions, improving our chances of success, and enabling stronger social connections and collaboration. The author argues that games reliably produce "flow" states and positive emotions that could help address issues like depression, hopelessness and disconnect in reality.

1. Engineering Happiness

2. Concern
The gamification bandwagon
& psuedo-gamification,
gamified learning,
edutainment

3. 50 billion collective hours (5.93 million years)

5. Jane McGonigal, PhD
Director of Games research and Development at the Institute of the Future
Reality is broken

6. Introduction
Herodotus – Lydia – Persian Wars

7. Collectively, the planet is now spending
more than 3 billion hours a week gaming.

8. Four defining traits of a game
Specific outcome that players will work to achieve.
Provides players with a sense of purpose.A goal
Places limitations on how players can achieve the
goal. Push players to explore previously uncharted
possibilities.
Rules
Tells players how close they are to achieving the goal.
(points, levels, scores, progress bar). Real-time
feedback serves as motivation.
A feedback
system
Requires that all players knowingly and willingly
accept the goals, rules and the feedback. The
freedom to enter or leave a game ensures that
intentionally stressful and challenging work is
experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.
Voluntary
participation

9. Playing a game (digital or not) is the
voluntary attempt to overcome
unnecessary obstacles
Bernard Suits, philosopher

10. Why do unnecessary obstacles make us happy?
Gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression
Playing a good game
Opportunity to focus our energy , with
relentless optimism, at something
we’re good at and enjoy
Real life hard work
Have to do it
Not hard enough
Repetitive
Fear of failure etc.
VS

11. Games offering diverse kinds of work
The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression
Brian Sutton-Smith, Psychologist of play
• High-stakes work
• Busywork
• Mental work
• Physical work
Eustress (positive stress) vs. stressExperience sampling
• Discovery work
• Teamwork
• Creative work

12. Fiero
What we feel when we triumph over adversity
”This isn’t a game”
VS
”This could be a game”
A good game has a unique
way of structuring experience
and provoking emotion

13. Genuine satisfaction during a state of consciousness called Flow.
Completely absorbed in an activity, especially an activity which involves creative
abilities. During this “optimal experience” you feel “strong, alert, in effortless control,
unselfconscious, and at the peak of you abilities.”
“The best moments in our lives are not the
passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best
moments usually occur if a person’s body or
mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary
effort to accomplish something difficult and
worthwhile.”
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
”Games are an obvious source of flow and play is the flow
experience par excellence”

14. Reinventing reality to work more like a game
The rise of positive psychology
(human flourishing and different
forms of happiness)
Explosion of the computer
and video game industry
Flow most reliably and most efficiently produced by the specific
combination of:
• self-chosen goals,
• personally optimised obstacles, and
• continuous feedback
that makes up the essential structure of gameplay.

15. Gaming Fixes for Reality
REALITY IS
(compared to games)
GAMES
FIX 1:
Unnecessary
Obstacles
FIX 2:
Emotional Activation
FIX 3:
More satisfying work
FIX 4:
Better hope of success
FIX 5:
Stronger Social
Connectivity
too easy
depressing
unproductive
hopeless
disconnected
challenge us with voluntary obstacles and
help us put our personal strengths to
better use.
focus on energy, with relentless optimism,
on something we’re good at and enjoy.
give us clearer missions and more
satisfying, hands-on work.
eliminate our fear of failure and improve
our chances for success
build stronger social bonds and lead to
more active social networks.

16. REALITY IS
(compared to games)
GAMES
trivial
hard to get into
meaningless and
unrewarding
lonely and
isolating
hard to swallow
make us a part of something bigger
and give epic meaning to our actions.
motivate us to participate more fully in
whatever we’re doing.
make us feel more rewarded for
making our best efforts.
help us band together and create
powerful communities from scratch
make it easier to take good advice and
try out happier habits
FIX 6: Epic scale
FIX 7: Wholehearted
participation
FIX 8: Meaningful rewards
when we need them most
FIX 9: More fun with
strangers
FIX 10: Happiness Hacks
Gaming Fixes for Reality

17. REALITY IS
(compared to games)
GAMES
FIX 11: A sustainable
engagement economy
FIX 12:More Epic Wins
FIX 13: Ten Thousand
hours collaboration
FIX 14: Massively
Multiplayer Foresight
unsustainable
unambitious
disorganised
and divided
stuck in the
present
The gratification we get from playing
games is an infinitely renewable
resource.
define awe-inspiring goals and tackle
seemingly impossible social missions
together.
help us make a more concerted
effort, they give us collaboration
superpowers.
help us invent the future world
together.
Gaming Fixes for Reality