SuperBetter: How a gameful life can make you stronger, happier, braver and more resilient. Jane McGonigal
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“His mom and my mom were in closer time zones, so I guess it was just easier for them to do missions together than to wait until we were awake in the United States.”
By this point in the story, Anna’s eyes were welling up. “You have to understand, this was the first social interaction my mom and his mom had willingly had together in three years. It felt like a miracle.”
Before they knew it, Anna’s parents were regularly inviting Aadil’s parents to do cooperative missions together in the game. “They started leaving notes on each other’s Facebook pages to plan their missions. And then, I guess since they were already on their pages, they started liking each other’s updates and leaving nice little comments. It went from just being about the game to being something more.”
The families aren’t playing Farmville anymore, now that their initial mania for it has died down. But the good news is, they don’t need to. “This game has changed everything for us. I don’t think we’ll ever go back. We’re not two families anymore. We’re all family to each other now.”
Playing games online with extended friends and family helps ensure you have strong social ties and social support when you need it. People you play with are more likely to have your back—and you, theirs. But what if you want to reap the same benefits with people in your life who aren’t on your favorite social network, or who might not want to play a game? Although social network games make it easier to establish common ground, model reciprocity, and increase familiarity, you can still use these three techniques to strengthen any relationship—with or without a game.
Here’s a quest to help you explore how to translate the power of social network games into the rest of your life.
QUEST 10: Plus-One Better
Pick three people:
1. Someone who would like to hear from you
2. Someone you would like to hear from
3. Someone who might be surprised to hear from you
Do you have your three people in mind? Good. Now—you have a choice. You can complete this quest on a difficulty setting of easy, medium, or hard. “Easy” means you’re going to send a message to the first person on your list. “Medium” means you’re going to message the first and second person on your list. “Hard” means you’re going to message all three.
What to do: Ask each of the three people, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how is your day going?”
It may feel a bit out of the blue to the person who receives it. That’s okay. In fact, it’s good. Your goal is to catch someone off guard with a signal that you care, and that you’re thinking about them. Meanwhile, asking for a number from 1 to 10 prompts more reflection than simply asking “How’s it going?”—and it often gets you a more honest and interesting reply. (You’ll see what I mean as soon as you give it a try!)
Send your message now. Make sure you send it privately—through email, text, or Facebook, for example.
Now you wait—and if they message back a number from 1 to 10, here’s what you’re going to reply: “Is there anything I could do to help move it from a 6 to a 7?” (or . . . “from a 3 to a 4” or “from a 10 to an 11”—you get the idea).
I learned this habit from my friend Michael, a philanthropist and entrepreneur who likes to ask this question (and make this offer) to almost everyone he talks to, day in and day out. He asks me to rate my day every single time I see him. He asks it of servers at restaurants when we eat out. He asked my husband the first time they met, too. After a while, I came to the conclusion that this question is completely awesome. You really can ask it of virtually anyone, close friend or stranger. And it’s easy to answer—everyone can think of a number from 1 to 10.
Sometimes they’ll answer with just a number. Sometimes they’ll offer details to explain their number. It’s amazing how much you can learn about what’s on someone’s mind by how they explain their 1, 5, or 10. And when you offer to do something to bump their number up by just +1, it pretty much always makes them smile. You’ll be surprised by how surprised other people are when you take the time to explicitly offer your support. Consider this reply from my friend Chris, when I sent him the “1 to 10” question the other day: “Better now that you asked. Truly makes a difference. Was a 5, just became a 7.”
Why it works: This quest is designed to adapt the best features of social games to everyday life. It’s quick and easy, and like online games, you don’t have to be face to face to do it. It models reciprocity: by offering to make someone’s day +1 better, you’re communicating that you care and that they can count on you for support. And it increases common ground—if they explain their number to you, you’ll know a little bit more about what’s going on, which gives you something to talk about. If they don’t explain their number, you’ve still checked in—and every check-in helps increase the familiarity that leads to stronger relationships.
Tip: Don’t do this quest just once—do it often. Whenever I find myself thinking about someone I haven’t talked to in a while, I text them the “1 to 10” question. It’s an easy and fun habit to develop and a great way to spark conversation. And if it becomes a playful tradition with some of your friends and family, all the better!
There are some ways of playing games that do not cultivate closer ties and stronger bonds. I want to caution here against one kind of game play in particular: excessive competition against strangers online. This style of game play can actually make it harder for you to cultivate positive relationships in the rest of your life.
Winning a game against a stranger—particularly when playing a video game with strong themes of domination and destruction, like Call of Duty—creates distinct physiological and neurological changes. Your testosterone surges, and as a result, you have a diminished neural capacity for empathy.22 You feel more powerful and aggressive, and you’re less likely to be kind or sympathetic to anyone you perceive as weak.23 (Men, it seems, are particularly vulnerable to this effect; women tend to see a smaller spike in testosterone after winning.)24 Note: This happens only when you play against strangers, not when you play against friends or family.
You might be wondering, what’s so bad about feeling hostile toward strangers you’ll never meet in real life? It turns out that the feelings of aggression aren’t limited to the period of play. Studies show that the effects of a testosterone surge can impact your decisions and behavior for hours afterward.25 This means that your antisocial feelings toward strangers can spill over and make you more hostile or aggressive toward your real-life friends, family, and coworkers.
It gets worse: while winning against strangers online can temporarily turn you into a bit of a jerk, losing against a distant stranger isn’t particularly good for your everyday relationships, either. The most recent game research suggests that much of the aggression that has long been associated with “violent video games” is actually related to feelings of incompetence after losing.26 Players who feel embarrassed and frustrated after losing a game are more likely to display anger and hostility toward others. This can happen when you play a game alone, or with friends and family, but it’s much more likely to happen when you play against strangers whom you’re unable to synchronize with, mentally or physically.
It’s important to be clear: games like Call of Duty have not been shown to increase hostility or decrease empathy when you play with people you know in real life. In fact, a recent study showed that playing Call of Duty competitively against other players in the same physical space actually decreased aggression and hostility and increased empathy, as much as playing cooperatively did (just as with Hedgewars, the game you read about at the beginning of this chapter).27 For this reason, you don’t