Happiness Engineers

Chapter 2 of Jane McGonigal's book, Reality is Broken

1. It is an undeniable fact that reality is broken compared with games. Game world is somehow so much more fulfilling and pleasurable than the real world. They give us a task, provide characters that entrust themselves to us for this mission, and provide feedback which tells us that we are doing well.  games give us an opportunity to feel important and successful. They make us happy! In this chapter, McGonigal explains the idea of why games create this kind of happiness in us. 
2. An American psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was the first to coin the word flow. Flow is "the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning." All games contain some element of flow, whether they are video games or games like basketball or ballroom dancing. Games with flow allow us to experience pure enjoyment while participating in a task with a clear goal, well-established rules, and potential for increased difficulty and improvement over time. When we are able to experience flow, we feel fully satisfied and full of life, potential, and purpose.
3. Csiksgentmihalyi could not comprehend why humans would waste their times doing things that seemed meaningless or monotonous. Why not structure real life to resemble gameplay, he mused. He said that if our society continued to fail to be involved with something full of flow that gives us life, potential, and purpose, we would suffer greatly.
4. From his ideas, positive psychology began to emerge. This is the scientific field of the study of how we, as humans, are able to achieve happiness. It may seem simple, but achieving happiness actually becomes more difficult the more you focus and work on it. Game developers have essentially become positive psychologists by experimenting with how they can make their games affect their players' levels of happiness.
5. McGonigal shared the story of David Sudnow, a musician and sociologist, who began playing a simple video game almost 40 hours a week. Although he never admitted it was an addiction, it was undeniably affecting his life. When he was not playing the game, he was thinking about the game and relating things in his real life to the game. He continually craved the game, and was immersed in to his game instantaneously.  Yes, he was experiencing flow, but at a supersonic rate. To experience flow in basketball, one must practice and train for sometimes years to become good at the sport and feel successful.  Even then, it may take an incredible victory or unseen comeback in a game to truly experience a high.  Sudnow discovered that in video games, the flow was instant. It required hard work, yes, but there was no need to train years and years! The discovery that flow could be accessed so quickly, cheaply, and reliably was literally a game changer.
6. However, as most people have experienced, flow can be exhausting. It is impossible to constantly experience flow in our lives. It exhausts our physical, mental, and emotional resources. McGonigal comments that "Too much flow can lead to happiness burnout." Astounding to me, is that game designers actually try to avoid this overexposure to flow!  I always believed that game designers had one specific purpose: to make games which guarantee that their players will become addicted to. Why? To make money of course! However, McGonigal says that this is not the case. Game designers know that if their players become to addicted, they will eventually burn out and stop playing all together.
7. Accompanying the feeling of burnout is the feeling that maybe they are wasting their lives. Gamers have second thoughts all the time about the amount of hours they have spent playing games.  They are often plagued with a sense of emptiness. It is important for game developers to take this into consideration by creating games that are more meaningful and that create flow for their players, but not complete addiction.
8. McGonigal next makes her main point: We can not find happiness, but rather, we must make our own happiness. She claims that this is completely possible to do. For example, our bodies are able to produce certain chemicals in our brains based on what we experience that trigger other chemicals and sensations directly liked to the "happy feeling." She says that we should not just sit around and wait for life circumstances to bring us happy feelings, but instead, biologically we should be able to create our own happiness through participating in autotelic work with intrinsic rewards.
9. Autoletic work is work that engages us. It satisfies us completely and creates meaningfulness in our lives.  So many people try to live the American Dream by gaining money and other material things or rising up in the corporate world or by receiving status and praise. However, the happiness these things bring are short lived. They are external rewards that actually do not contribute to true happiness at all, regardless of the fact that our culture has wired us to think this way. Instead, McGonigal suggests, we should chase after intrinsic rewards that come from within ourselves. She says, "When the source of positive emotion is yourself, it is renewable."
10. Finally, she mentions 4 intrinsic rewards that are most essential to happiness.
1. Satisfying Work
2. The Feeling of Being Successful
3. Social Connection
4. Meaning
11. All of the above rewards are found in games. So, the idea that gamers play games to escape life may actually be false. Instead, they are making their real lives more rewarding!