Free Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal Page A
Authors: Jane McGonigal
everyone on the planet is being sold the same dream of extrinsic reward. This is especially true in emerging economies like China, India, and Brazil, where more and more people are being ushered onto the global hedonic treadmill, encouraged to consume more and to compete for limited natural resources as a way to increase their quality of life.
But there is cause for hope. One group is opting out of this soul-deadening, planet-exhausting hedonic grind, and in larger and larger numbers: hard-core gamers.
Games, after all, are the quintessential autotelic activity. We only ever play because we want to. Games don’t fuel our appetite for extrinsic reward: they don’t pay us, they don’t advance our careers, and they don’t help us accumulate luxury goods. Instead, games enrich us with intrinsic rewards. They actively engage us in satisfying work that we have the chance to be successful at. They give us a highly structured way to spend time and build bonds with people we like. And if we play a game long enough, with a big enough network of players, we feel a part of something bigger than ourselves—part of an epic story, an important project, or a global community.
Good games help us experience the four things we crave most—and they do it safely, cheaply, and reliably.
Good games are productive. They’re producing a higher quality of life.
When we realize that this reorientation toward intrinsic reward is what’s really behind the 3 billion hours a week we spend gaming globally, the mass exodus to game worlds is neither surprising nor particularly alarming. Instead, it’s overwhelming confirmation of what positive psychologists have found in their scientific research: self-motivated, self-rewarding activity really does make us happier. More importantly, it’s evidence that gamers aren’t escaping their real lives by playing games.
They’re actively making their real lives more rewarding.
CHAPTER THREE
More Satisfying Work
P laying World of Warcraft is such a satisfying job, gamers have collectively spent 5.93 million years doing it.
It sounds impossible, but it’s true: if you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing World of Warcraft since the massively multiplayer online (MMO) role-playing game (RPG) first launched in 2004, you get a grand total of just over 50 billion collective hours—or 5.93 million years. 1
To put that number in perspective: 5.93 million years ago is almost exactly the moment in history that our earliest human ancestors first stood upright. 2 By that measure, we’ve spent as much time playing World of Warcra ft as we’ve spent evolving as a species.
No other computer game has ever made so much money keeping so many players occupied for so long. Each WoW player spends on average between seventeen and twenty-two hours per week in the virtual world, more time than any other computer game attracts. 3 And the number of subscribers has steadily grown from 250,000 in January 2004 to more than 11.5 million in January 2010, making it the single largest paying game community in the world. (Like many MMORPGs, WoW requires players to pay a monthly fee—on average, fifteen dollars—in order to access the virtual world.) WoW developer Activision Blizzard currently reaps an estimated $5 million every single day in global subscription fees alone. 4
What accounts for World of Warcraft ’s unprecedented success? More than anything else, it’s the feeling of “blissful productivity” that the game provokes. 5
Blissful productivity is the sense of being deeply immersed in work that produces immediate and obvious results. The clearer the results, and the faster we achieve them, the more blissfully productive we feel. And no game gives us a better sense of getting work done than WoW.
Your primary job in World of Warcraft is self-improvement—a kind of work nearly all of us find naturally compelling. You have an avatar, and your job is to make that avatar better,
But there is cause for hope. One group is opting out of this soul-deadening, planet-exhausting hedonic grind, and in larger and larger numbers: hard-core gamers.
Games, after all, are the quintessential autotelic activity. We only ever play because we want to. Games don’t fuel our appetite for extrinsic reward: they don’t pay us, they don’t advance our careers, and they don’t help us accumulate luxury goods. Instead, games enrich us with intrinsic rewards. They actively engage us in satisfying work that we have the chance to be successful at. They give us a highly structured way to spend time and build bonds with people we like. And if we play a game long enough, with a big enough network of players, we feel a part of something bigger than ourselves—part of an epic story, an important project, or a global community.
Good games help us experience the four things we crave most—and they do it safely, cheaply, and reliably.
Good games are productive. They’re producing a higher quality of life.
When we realize that this reorientation toward intrinsic reward is what’s really behind the 3 billion hours a week we spend gaming globally, the mass exodus to game worlds is neither surprising nor particularly alarming. Instead, it’s overwhelming confirmation of what positive psychologists have found in their scientific research: self-motivated, self-rewarding activity really does make us happier. More importantly, it’s evidence that gamers aren’t escaping their real lives by playing games.
They’re actively making their real lives more rewarding.
CHAPTER THREE
More Satisfying Work
P laying World of Warcraft is such a satisfying job, gamers have collectively spent 5.93 million years doing it.
It sounds impossible, but it’s true: if you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing World of Warcraft since the massively multiplayer online (MMO) role-playing game (RPG) first launched in 2004, you get a grand total of just over 50 billion collective hours—or 5.93 million years. 1
To put that number in perspective: 5.93 million years ago is almost exactly the moment in history that our earliest human ancestors first stood upright. 2 By that measure, we’ve spent as much time playing World of Warcra ft as we’ve spent evolving as a species.
No other computer game has ever made so much money keeping so many players occupied for so long. Each WoW player spends on average between seventeen and twenty-two hours per week in the virtual world, more time than any other computer game attracts. 3 And the number of subscribers has steadily grown from 250,000 in January 2004 to more than 11.5 million in January 2010, making it the single largest paying game community in the world. (Like many MMORPGs, WoW requires players to pay a monthly fee—on average, fifteen dollars—in order to access the virtual world.) WoW developer Activision Blizzard currently reaps an estimated $5 million every single day in global subscription fees alone. 4
What accounts for World of Warcraft ’s unprecedented success? More than anything else, it’s the feeling of “blissful productivity” that the game provokes. 5
Blissful productivity is the sense of being deeply immersed in work that produces immediate and obvious results. The clearer the results, and the faster we achieve them, the more blissfully productive we feel. And no game gives us a better sense of getting work done than WoW.
Your primary job in World of Warcraft is self-improvement—a kind of work nearly all of us find naturally compelling. You have an avatar, and your job is to make that avatar better,
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