Jane McGonigal - SuperBetter - How a gameful life can make you stronger, happier, braver and more resilient

Let’s go get superbetter.

Part 1

Why Games Make Us Superbetter

The evidence that games can make us stronger is all around us. Over the past decade, thousands of scientists and researchers working at hospitals and universities across the globe have documented an astonishing range of real-life positive impacts of video games and virtual worlds.

In this part of the book, you will discover games that:

increase your motivation and willpower

block the feeling of physical pain more powerfully than morphine

help you overcome anxiety and depression

make you a better learner

inspire you to exercise more

help prevent post-traumatic stress disorder

make you more likely to come to a stranger’s rescue

forge stronger, happier relationships with friends and family

Chances are, you’ve already played one or more of these potentially life-changing games—from Tetris to Words with Friends to Call of Duty to Candy Crush Saga . But even if you play games regularly, you’re probably not getting all the benefits. That’s because when it comes to unlocking the benefits of games, it’s not just what you play or how much you play—it’s why you play, when you play, and who you play with that really matter. In other words, you need to play with purpose.

As you’ll learn in Part 1, when you play games with purpose, you tap into three core psychological strengths:

Your ability to control your attention and therefore your thoughts and feelings

Your power to turn anyone into a potential ally and to strengthen your existing relationships

Your natural capacity to motivate yourself and supercharge your heroic qualities, like willpower, compassion, and determination

These strengths exist inside you already. Games are just an incredibly reliable and efficient way to discover and practice them—so you’re better able to access them in everyday life.

Playing games isn’t the only way to tap into these strengths. But the scientific research on why games make it so much easier to do so will help you understand these strengths more clearly.

Let me be clear: the point of Part 1 is not to persuade you to spend more time playing video games. You do not have to become an ardent game player to benefit from games research. Instead, I want to help you learn from the science of games how to be stronger, happier, braver, and more resilient— whether you ever play any of these games or not .

One important thing to note: although all kinds of games develop these gameful strengths, including sports, puzzles, board games, and card games, Part 1 focuses primarily on digital games, for several reasons.

More than one billion people on this planet currently play digital games for, on average, at least one hour a day. 1This number will undoubtedly rise in the future; according to a Pew Internet Life study, in the United States, 99 percent of boys under eighteen and 92 percent of girls under eighteen report playing video games regularly (on average thirteen hours a week for boys and eight hours a week for girls). 2The sheer time and energy poured into digital games by such a vast and growing number of people make it crucial to understand how digital games in particular impact us psychologically. The science of games can help us minimize the potential harms and maximize the potential benefits.

Equally important is the fact that over the past two decades, scientific research on the psychology of games has focused almost exclusively on digital games, largely for the reasons stated above. This book is grounded in the science of games, which means it necessarily focuses on the kinds of games that scientists have dedicated the most time and energy to understanding.

Finally, as you will see in the next four chapters, digital technology can actually heighten and accelerate many of the psychological benefits we experience from all games. For example, all games teach us to be comfortable with failure, because loss is always a possibility. However, digital games tend to have a higher and more rapid rate of failure. In digital games, we fail as much as 80 percent of the time, on average twelve to twenty times an hour. 3This extremely high and rapid rate of failure helps players more quickly cultivate the strengths of grit and perseverance, as well as the ability to learn effectively from mistakes. You can build these same strengths by failing at basketball or Scrabble or chess, but the capability of digital games to automatically adjust the difficulty level upward so you are constantly playing at the edge of your ability helps you develop them faster.

This is just one example of the kind of research you’ll read about in this part of the book. But before we dive deeper into the science of games, you have a special quest to complete.

Chapter 1 has some of the most surprising and eye-opening information in the entire book. It contains some very unexpected scientific findings.

I want you to be fully prepared to absorb these findings and act on them in your own life, no matter how surprised you are by them! So here’s a quest to help you get ready.

QUEST 5: Palms Up!

Trying to solve a problem? Want to learn something new? You can prime your brain to be more open to creative solutions and more receptive to surprising ideas. Here’s how.

What to do:Turn your palms up, and leave them that way. You should start to notice a more open mindset in as little as fifteen seconds.

Why it works:Turning our palms up triggers a powerful mind-body response. With our palms up, we adopt an “approach and consider” mindset. We’re less likely to reject or dismiss new information or ideas, and we’re better able to spot new opportunities and solutions. With palms down, however, we adopt a “refuse and resist” mindset. We’re more likely to reject new information and overlook creative ideas.

It sounds like a simple action to have such a big effect, but the evidence is compelling: peer-reviewed research published by the American Psychological Association shows that out of seven different experiments on the palms-up phenomenon, all seven showed the same mind-opening effect. 4

Researchers theorize that this mind-body link stems from physical behaviors we exhibited thousands of years ago before we invented language. 5When we offer someone a helping hand, our palm is upturned. When we ask for help ourselves, or when we prepare to receive something, we also turn our hands up. And when we welcome someone into our arms, our palms are facing up. But when we want to reject something, we slap it away with our hands turned downward. When we push someone away, the palms are turned away from us as well.

Through thousands of years of these gestures, we are biologically primed to associate upward palms with receptiveness and openness, downward palms with rejection and closing ourselves off.

So before you read the next chapter, turn your palms upward for at least fifteen seconds.Do this right now. 15 . . . 14 . . . 13 . . .

Quest complete:All done? Good job. You’re ready for some surprising science! And in the future, whenever you’re brainstorming, problem solving, or trying to wrap your head around some new information, remember the power you have to open your mind with a simple palms up.