SuperBetter: How a gameful life can make you stronger, happier, braver and more resilient. Jane McGonigal
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Seeker
A few weeks ago I heard from my good friend Calvin. He’s thirty-five years old, married, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. We’ve known each other since graduate school at UC Berkeley. Over the past decade, Calvin has worked both in the tech industry and in university research labs. Recently, he decided to take a leap of faith and look for a full-time academic position.
“Career adventures are coming fast and frequent at this point,” he wrote me in an email. “I’ve landed interviews at five universities.” He sounded upbeat in the letter, but he admitted to being pretty stressed out about one of his interviews at a top research university.
“A friend of mine who interviewed there last year said he was practically crying by the end of the meeting. Apparently, this one professor had started the interview by telling my friend that his dissertation work was complete crap, and that the university had made a huge mistake in inviting him to interview.” Not the most encouraging story, considering that Calvin was slated to meet with the same professor!
Job interviews are stressful even in the best circumstances, but when Calvin got to campus for the two-day interview, the tension only increased. “The first few people I met with all warned me about my upcoming interview with this same professor, telling me how notoriously vicious he is with junior researchers. Everyone had a war story about meeting with him. Even the chair of the hiring committee said they had second thoughts about including him on my schedule.
“Needless to say, the night before that day I was pretty nervous. I had to get a grip. I thought ‘How can I make this meeting into a game, rather than into something I’m dreading?’ So I decided to create a bingo game. I tried to predict the worst possible things he could say to me, whatever would upset me most. I wrote them down, plus the ‘free square’ in the middle. I folded that bingo card and put it in my pocket when I went in for the interview.”
Calvin sent me a photo of the card so I could see his gameful solution for myself. His custom bingo squares included the kinds of moments that would make any interviewee cringe: “Personal attack/critique,” “Tests my knowledge/skills,” “Points out flaw/error/mistake in my work,” “Cites references I’m not familiar with,” “Says my work is derivative, obvious,” “Dismisses it as not important,” “Accuses me of being unprincipled.”
And did it help? Unequivocally, yes. “Turns out, he did say lots of those negative things to me, but it didn’t bother me at all,” Calvin said. “Every time he tried to make me feel small, I got to mentally check off a bingo square. It brought a lot of humor to a really stressful situation.”
Calvin won twice. First, he scored a bingo. “The professor got the whole middle horizontal row,” he told me. “He really was as bad as everyone said!” But later Calvin scored the real victory: he got a job offer from the university. Ultimately, he decided to take a job somewhere else, but having multiple offers helped him negotiate the best deal.
I’m so impressed by Calvin’s clever solution to a nerve-racking situation. He might not have been intentionally hacking into his dopamine pathway, but he was definitely giving himself a dopamine boost every time he filled in a bingo square. And because the mere act of making a prediction heightens attention and boosts dopamine, just creating the bingo board put Calvin in a much more determined and optimistic state of mind.
“Worst-case-scenario bingo” may not be a game you look forward to playing—because really, who wants to be in a stressful or unpleasant situation? But if you do need to tap into your determination and grit, this gameful intervention is a brilliant way to prepare your brain for resilience and success. While you’re at it, why not create a “best-case-scenario” bingo card for your next big day? Think of all the good things that could happen to you on a trip, or at a big work event, or on a special occasion. After all, you can benefit from determination and optimism on fun days just as much as on tough ones!
Now you know: game play supercharges self-efficacy, work ethic, and determination. So what kinds of real-life goals can you accomplish with these gameful strengths?
One leading-edge research lab at Stanford University has dedicated the past ten years to investigating this question. The Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), founded and directed by cognitive psychologist Dr. Jeremy Bailenson, specializes in research on how virtual reality experiences can change our real-life attitudes and behaviors for the better. Through dozens of ingenious experiments, they’ve discovered that just a few minutes in the right virtual environment can increase our willpower and compassion, changing how we think and act for the next twenty-four hours or even the next week.
Here are a few of their most intriguing findings.
Want to exercise more, but can’t quite seem to summon up the willpower? There may be a gameful way to trick your brain into moving your body. It’s called vicarious exercise. All you have to do is watch a video game doppelgänger, or an avatar designed to look just like you, exercising in the virtual world.
It’s true. You can build exercise-related self-efficacy without doing a single push-up or taking a single step. You just need to spend a few minutes watching your avatar do all the hard work.
In a study conducted by the VHIL, researchers found that participants who watched their virtual doppelgängers running on a treadmill reported feeling significantly higher confidence that they could exercise effectively. More important, after they left the lab, they exercised a full hour more than participants who watched their virtual doppelgänger stand around doing nothing. Over the next twenty-four hours, the participants with running avatars walked more city blocks, climbed more stairs, and spent more time in the gym.21
However, this technique worked only when the avatars were specially created to look like the participants. Watching a generic male or female avatar exercise had zero effect on participants’ real-life movement.
Can seeing a virtual version of yourself succeed trick your brain into believing you’ve actually done it yourself? This study suggests it can, and that it’s an effective shortcut to boost self-efficacy. The Stanford researchers theorize that the virtual doppelgängers create a “mirror neuron effect.”22 (As you’ll recall from Chapter 2, our mirror neurons mimic the neural activity of people around us, particularly when we are doing the same activity or feel closely connected to them.) Because participants felt more closely connected to avatars that looked just like them, the mirror neuron effect was stronger. It’s quite an astonishing finding—we can create mirror neurons not just with other people but with virtual people as well!
On the heels of this promising study, the same lab decided to try to create an even more effective exercise booster. They kept the virtual doppelgängers and added a new, interactive element. This time participants were asked to lift weights while observing their avatars. Every time they completed a successful lift in real life, their virtual avatar changed shape, appearing more muscular and fit. During mandated breaks in the participants’ exercise, however, the avatars changed shape again, becoming heavier and flabbier.
After just a few minutes of this interactive workout, participants were invited to stay for up to thirty minutes and continue their workout. Compared with a group that lifted weights without a virtual doppelgänger, they completed ten times as many exercises. Imagine if you could motivate yourself to do ten times as many push-ups, or climb ten times as many steps, every time you exercised—just by spending a few minutes working out with a virtual version of yourself!
Like many of the other studies we’ve looked at in this chapter, dopamine bursts seem to be a major factor in creating this positive change. Dr. Bailenson calls it the “instant gratification” of immediate virtual weight loss. “Working out with a virtual doppelgänger means you can see physical rewards of exercise right away,” he says, “which is something that doesn’t typically happen in the real world. In the real world, it takes days or weeks to notice any positive physical changes.” But game avatars that respond to physical activity right away can trigger dopamine boosts that trick the brain into feeling rewarded immediately. This process enables players to build self-efficacy much