navigation
miete ("thought") + lause ("phrase")
count: 77
filter: title = Reality is Broken clear
The goal of history is uncovering the moral problems and moral truths in the concrete data of experience.
page: 6
tags:
history
truth
The people who continue to write off games will be at a major disadvantage in the coming years.
page: 11
tags:
games
When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.
page: 21
tags:
games
The freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as a safe and pleasurable activity.
page: 21
tags:
eustress
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
page: 22
tags:
obstacles
Freedom to work in the most logical and efficient way possible is the very opposite of gameplay.
page: 23
tags:
work
logic
efficiency
gaming
In a good computer or video game you're always playing on the very edge of your skill level, always on the brink of falling off. When you do fall off, you feel the urge to climb back on. This is the state of flow. Both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes.
page: 24
tags:
flow
Competition and winning are not defining traits of games--nor are they defining interests of the people who love to play them. May gamers would rather keep playing than win--thereby ending the game.
page: 24
tags:
winning
In most computer and video games today, players begin each game by tackling the obstacle of not knowing what to do and not knowing how to play. A well-designed game should be playable immediately, with no instruction whatsoever.
page: 27
tags:
game design
'The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression.' When we're depressed, we have a pessimistic sense of inadequacy and a despondent lack of activity.
page: 28
tags:
depression
inactivity
pessimism
When we don't choose hard work for ourselves, it's usually not the right work, at the right time, for the right person. It's not perfectly customized for our strengths, we're not in control of the flow, we don't have a clear picture of what we're contributing to, and we never see how it all pays off in the end.
page: 29
tags:
work
All of the neurological and physiological systems that underlie happiness--our attention systems, our reward center, our motivation systems, our emotion and memory centers--are fully activated by gameplay.
page: 28
tags:
happiness
Seeking 'relaxing fun', such as watching TV, is our way of balancing the negative stress we encounter. But most often, this relaxing fun moves us too far in the other direction, to slight depression, making us less motivated, less engaged, and less confident overall.
page: 32
tags:
confidence
engagement
motivation
stress
The failure of schools, offices, factories, and other everyday environments to provide flow is a serious moral issue, one of the most urgent problems facing humanity.
page: 36
tags:
school
flow
morality
problems
humanity
Our most pressing problems--depression, helplessness, social alienation, and the sense that nothing we do truly matters--could be effectively addressed by integrating more gameful work into our everyday lives.
page: 36
tags:
depression
meaning
gameful work
"This was a whole different business, nothing like I'd ever known, like night and day... Thirty seconds of play, and I'm on a whole new plane of being, all my synapses wailing."
page: 40
tags:
games
We can't experience flow all the time. It uses up our physical and mental resources. So we have to find ways to enjoy the world and relish life even when we're not operating at our peak human potential. Too much flow can lead to happiness burnout.
page: 42
tags:
flow
energy
potential
burnout
Found happiness--happiness we get from external rewards, such as money, material goods, status, or praise--doesn't last very long. We build up a tolerance for our favorite things and start to want more. It takes bigger and better rewards just to trigger the same level of satisfaction and pleasure.
page: 45
tags:
hedonism
We are wrong in believing that we need life to be a certain way in order for us to be happy, and that the easier life is the happier we are. The relationship between hard work, intrinsic reward, and lasting happiness has been verified and confirmed through hundreds of studies and experiments.
page: 46
tags:
work
happiness
Every time we engage in autotelic activities, the very opposite of hedonic adaptation occurs. We wean ourselves off consumption and acquisition as sources of pleasure and develop our hedonic resilience.
page: 46
tags:
hedonism
autotelic
resilience
These are four common themes that contribute to your happiness in intrinsic ways: We crave: satisfying work; the experience, or at least the hope, of being successful; social connection; meaning.
page: 49
tags:
intrinsic rewards
Gamers aren't escaping their real lives by playing games. They're actively making their real lives more rewarding.
page: 51
tags:
rewards
gaming
Blissful productivity is the sense of being deeply immersed in work that produces immediate and obvious results. The clearer the results, and the faster we achieve them, the more blissfully productive we feel.
page: 53
tags:
productivity
results
There's nothing wrong with having interesting problems to solve, but it doesn't necessarily lead to satisfaction. In the absence of actionable steps, our motivation to solve a problem might not be enough to make real progress. Well-designed work, on the other hand, leaves no doubt that progress will be made.
page: 56
tags:
problems
satisfaction
motivation
work
The fastest way to improve someone's everyday quality of life is to "bestow on a person a specific goal, something to do and to look forward to." When a clear goal is attached to a specific task, it gives us an energizing push, a sense of purpose.
page: 57
tags:
goals
purpose
Until and unless the real work world changes for the better, games like WoW will fulfill a fundamental human need: the need to feel productive.
page: 60
tags:
productivity
We turn to games to help us alleviate the frustrating sense that, in our real work, we're often not making any progress or impact.
page: 62
tags:
work
In casual games, there is no greater purpose to our actions--we are simply enjoying our ability to make something happen.
page: 62
tags:
control
success
A well-designed game helps players develop exceptional mental toughness.
page: 65
tags:
mental toughness
In real life, it's rare to feel sincere, unabashed hope in the face of daunting challenges. But in games, the opposite can be true, so long as we have agency, the feedback is clear, and the game is fair. We know we could overcome that goal with just one more shot at it.
page: 67
tags:
hope
agency
challenge
Being really good at something is less fun than being not quite good enough--yet.
page: 68
tags:
flow
Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain.
page: 68
tags:
skill
Flexible Optimism: continually assessing our abilities to achieve a goal, and intensifying or reducing our efforts accordingly. When practiced, we see more opportunities for success, but don't overstate our abilities. and we don't overestimate the amount of control we have over the outcome.
page: 68
tags:
optimism
self-assessment
goals
effort
opportunity
success
ability
control
We reduce our optimism when we get feedback that we're pursuing unattainable goals or operating in a low-control environment. We recognize that our time and energy would be better spent elsewhere.
page: 70
tags:
energy
optimism
time
goals
work
When we have no clear way to make productive progress, our neurological systems default to a state of low energy and motivation.
page: 70
tags:
progress
motivation
When we don't pay attention to our real skills and abilities, don't put efforts toward the goals we are capable of achieving, and are distracted by extreme dreams (fame, fortune, glory), our evolutionary mechanism, depression, kicks in, signaling our ill-fated efforts.
page: 70
tags:
depression
goals
Teasing each other is one of the fastest and most effective ways to intensify our positive feeling for each other.
page: 85
tags:
teasing
When we see success or failure as an entirely individual affair, we don't bother to invest time or resources in someone else's achievements.
page: 88
tags:
failure
success
resources
Meaning is the feeling that we're a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's the belief that our actions matter beyond our own individual lives.
page: 97
tags:
meaning
purpose
Our ability to feel awe in the form of chills, goose bumps, or choking up serves as a kind of emotional radar for detecting meaningful activity. Whenever we feel awe, we know we've found a potential source of meaning.
page: 99
tags:
awe
meaning
emotion
The more we focus on ourselves and avoid a commitment to others, the more we suffer from anxiety and depression.
page: 113
tags:
avoidance
anxiety
depression
It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.
page: 114
tags:
goals
purpose
Having specific positive actions to take increases the odds of doing something that will break the cycle of feeling negative stress or depression.
page: 139
tags:
action
Trying to improve an already enjoyable activity by adding points, levels, and achievements has its risks. Offering people an extrinsic reward for something they're already doing--and already enjoying--actually makes them feel less motivated and less rewarded. However, having measurable feedback can help us improve our skill in performing the activity.
page: 153
tags:
feedback
reward
extrinsic
Having systematic positive feedback based on your behavior will help keep you motivated.
page: 162
tags:
feedback
motivation
Monitor writing stats. "Writing+". Achievements based on things like days in a row, most words written in a day personal best, complexity of writing--words per sentence, sentences per paragraph. Use the data to improve clarity of writing and vary its structure.
page: 163
tags:
writing
"The pervasive belief that happiness is inauthentic is a profound obstacle" to putting positive psychology into action.
page: 185
tags:
martin seligman
There are almost no good ways to be happy alone for long.
page: 186
tags:
solitude
happiness
It is only when we shake free our fear of death that we can truly enjoy life.
page: 203
tags:
death
Touch is one of the fastest ways to build social bonds--holding hands, touching someone's back, and patting a shoulder all release the oxytocin chemical that makes us like and trust each other.
page: 205
tags:
trust
One of the most vital powers of gameplay is that it gives us explicit permission to do things differently.
page: 206
tags:
permission
We have to set concrete goals, and in the pursuit of those goals, we capture happiness as a kind of by-product. We have to approach it sideways, like a crab. We can't let it know we're coming. We just kind of sneak up on it from the side.
page: 214
tags:
goals
happiness
If we are paid to do something we would otherwise done out of interest--such as reading, drawing, participating in a survey, or solving puzzles--we are less likely to do it in the future without being paid.
page: 242
tags:
enjoyment
Positive emotions are the ultimate reward for participation.
page: 243
tags:
emotion
participation
To truly engage, the experience of participation should be rewarding on its own merits, and not through some extrinsic compensation.
page: 245
tags:
engagement
participation
extrinsic
The emphasis must be on making the content and experience intrinsically rewarding, rather than on providing compensation for doing something that would otherwise feel boring, trivial, or pointless.
page: 245
tags:
rewards
Gamers who have grown up being intensely engaged by well-designed virtual environments are hungry for better forms of engagements in their real lives.
page: 245
tags:
engagement
We don't have an endless stream of opportunities to do something that matters right now, presented with clear instructions, and finely tuned to our moment-by-moment capabilities. That makes it hard to get epic wins.
page: 249
tags:
opportunity
capabilities
Gamers practice shared concentration and synchronized engagement. They actively focus their attention on the game, and they agree to ignore everything else for as long as they're playing.
page: 269
tags:
engagement
attention
Typically, we think of practice as moving us from a zero-skill level to basic competency and then, if we keep practicing, to proficiency and ultimately to mastery.
page: 277
tags:
practice
mastery
competance
Principle of emergence: bigger isn't more, it's different. It's impossible to predict what will happen at scale until you get there, and it's likely to be vastly more complex than you expected.
page: 278
tags:
emergence
complexity
Taking the long view: working at scales far larger than we would ordinarily encounter in our day-to-day lives. Players of god games have to consider the impacts of their actions across the entire game.
page: 297
tags:
decisions
Ecosystems thinking: a way of looking at the world as a complex web of interconnected interdependent parts. A good ecosystems thinker will study and learn how to anticipate the ways in which changes to one part of an ecosystem will impact other parts.
page: 297
tags:
ecosystems
Pilot experimentation: designing and running many small tests of different strategies and solutions in order to discover the best course of action to take, and then scaling what works.
page: 298
tags:
scaling
experimentation
"The human imagination is an amazing thing. We're able to build models of the world around us, test out hypothetical scenarios, and, in some sense, simulate the world. I think this ability is probably one of the most important characteristics of humanity."
page: 300
tags:
humanity
imagination
modeling
simulation
"Most of the really bad stuff that's happening right now is the result of very short-term thinking."
page: 301
tags:
planning
Our collective inability to focus on negative futures is our culture's biggest blind spot. We are very good at positive thinking, but we tend to avoid articulating worst-case scenarios, which unfortunately makes us more vulnerable to them and less resilient if they occur.
page: 309
tags:
planning
optimism
By turning a real problem into a voluntary obstacle, we can activate more genuine interest, curiosity, motivation, effort, and optimism than we can otherwise. We can change our real-life behaviors in the context of a fictional game precisely because there isn't any negative pressure surrounding the decision to change.
page: 311
tags:
motivation
effort
optimism
change
obstacles
"Games are the most elevated form of investigation."
page: 313
tags:
investigation
Future self questions: 1. Where do you live? 2. Who do you live with? 3. What do you do? Where do you work? 4. What matters to you most? 5. How did you get to be this person? Was there a particular turning point for you in the past ten years? 6. What do you know more about than most people? Tell us about your skills and abilities. 7. Who do you know? Tell us about the communities and groups you belong to, and what kinds of people are in your social and professional networks.
page: 323
tags:
self-assessment
Games are a way of creating new civic and social infrastructure. They are the scaffold for coordinated effort.
page: 350
tags:
social structure
The closer we pay attention to the real and completely renewable rewards we get from games, the better we understand: games are a sustainable way of life.
page: 350
tags:
rewards
games
The great challenge for us today, and for the remainder of the century, is to integrate games more closely into our everyday lives, and to embrace them as a platform for collaborating on our most important planetary efforts.
page: 354
tags:
collaboration
Whenever you play more than twenty-one hours a week, the benefits of gaming start to decline sharply.
page: 366
tags:
gaming
Children who play video games at home with their parents report feeling much closer to them, and demonstrate significantly lower levels of aggression, behavior problems, and depression.
page: 367
tags:
depression
parenting
gaming
Any game that makes you feel bad is no longer a good game for you to play.
page: 368
tags:
gaming
This book has good messages and good ideas, and I gleaned some useful insight into why I feel what I feel about games. However, the middle to late sections didn't really land with me, and most of the solutions proposed and implemented are either now defunct or changed completely. I would be interested in reading followup coverage of the topic to see any long-term studies and impacts of the implementations mentioned in this book.
There was a heavy emphasis on social engineering and interaction and how we can use both to leverage the gaming community into solving real world problems. The focus almost seemed to be around how we can coerce people who play video games for fun into working for free without realizing they are doing work. My cynical side says there will always be someone there to turn that free work into a profit and corrupt any goal of leveraging this creative bandwidth in the first place.
tags:
review