SuperBetter: How a gameful life can make you stronger, happier, braver and more resilient. Jane McGonigal
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Part 2, you’ll meet people who have used the SuperBetter method to grow stronger, healthier, and happier in the face of challenges like anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and PTSD. You will hear stories from people who have adopted a gameful mindset to find a better job, have a more satisfying love life, run a marathon, start their own company, and simply enjoy life more. And because everything in this book is grounded in research, you will discover the science behind these success stories—more than two hundred studies from the fields of psychology, medicine, and neuroscience that explain exactly why living by these seven gameful rules builds mental, emotional, physical, and social strengths.
If you’re facing a major challenge in your life, and you want to start using the SuperBetter method right now, you can skip directly to Part 2. Come back to Part 1 whenever you want. (I think that once you see for yourself how well SuperBetter works, you’ll be even more curious to understand the science behind it!)
Part 3, “Adventures,” brings it all together with three SuperBetter journeys I’ve created so that you can continue practicing your new gameful skills. Each journey is full of targeted power-ups, bad guys, and quests to help you achieve a major resilience breakthrough. On the “Love Connection” adventure, you’ll build your social resilience with ten quests designed to help you find love in the most surprising ways and places. In “Ninja Body Transformation,” you’ll learn twenty-one sneaky ways to increase your physical resilience. And on your final adventure, you’ll discover what it means to be “Time Rich”—the feeling that you have abundant free time to spend on all the things that matter most to you. Getting time rich is an excellent way to build your emotional and mental resilience.
Taken together, these three adventures contain just enough quests for you to keep playing SuperBetter for six weeks. That’s an important number—because six weeks is exactly how long participants followed the SuperBetter rules in our clinical trial and randomized controlled study. In those cases, playing SuperBetter for six weeks resulted in significantly better mood, stronger social support, more optimism, less depression and anxiety, and higher self-confidence. If you complete all three of these adventures—by tackling just one quest a day—you’ll have achieved a full, life-changing dose of the game.
Together, the stories and the science in this book will reveal how adopting a gameful mindset can change your life for the better. They will not only change what you think games are capable of. They will change what you think you are capable of.
Let’s go get 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.1 This 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).2 The 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.3 This 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