Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (13 page)

The addictiveness of the game pushes us to initiate social interaction with members of our extended social network whom we might ordinarily leave out of our daily life online. Indeed, starting a new game with someone is making a commitment to interact with them at least a dozen or so times in the near future. And when you’ve got five or ten or twenty games going at once, you’ve effectively scheduled hundreds of microinteractions with people you like into your everyday routine.

According to user metrics reported in an article in the
Wall Street Journal
, on average one-third of registered Lexulous players at any given time have logged in at least thirty straight days in a row.
¹¹
This is a measure of the remarkable
stickiness
of social network gaming—it capitalizes brilliantly on the increased motivation we feel when we play a good game. It leverages our increased interest and optimism to help us satisfy our often otherwise thwarted desire to feel more connected with friends and family.

Simply put, social network games make it both
easier
and
more fun
to maintain strong, active connections with people we care about but who we don’t see or speak to enough in our daily lives.

Eric Weiner, an independent foreign correspondent and author of
The Geography of Bliss,
has covered happiness trends throughout the world. His research has confirmed for him that “our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors.... Happiness is not a noun or verb. It’s a conjunction. Connective tissue.”
¹²
Games like Lexulous are intentionally designed to strengthen the connective tissue within our social networks. Each move we make in the game is a conjunction.

We clearly need more social conjunctions in our lives. As numerous economists and positive psychologists have observed, globally we make the mistake of becoming less social the richer we become as individuals, and as a society. As Weiner observes: “The greatest source of happiness is other people—and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house and, if we’re really wealthy, to an estate. We think we’re moving up, but really we’re walling off ourselves.”
¹³

Games like Lexulous can help us start chipping away at those walls. Lexulous was the first breakthrough social network game, but since its success, the genre has experienced dramatic growth—particularly on Facebook. In early 2010, a virtual farming game called FarmVille hit an astonishing benchmark: 90 million active players on Facebook, nearly 30 million of whom log in on any given day to harvest their virtual crops and tend to their virtual livestock.
¹⁴

It’s an unprecedented scale of participation in a single online game. Roughly one in seventy-five people on the planet is currently playing FarmVille, and one in two hundred people on the planet logs in on any given day to manage and grow their virtual farm. What accounts for this global popularity? FarmVille is the first game to combine the blissful productivity of
World of Warcraft
with the easy gameplay and social connectivity of Lexulous.

Half the fun of FarmVille is earning experience points and gold in order to level up and earn access to better crops and farm equipment, more exotic animals, and a bigger land plot. Every time you log in to the game, you can improve your stats by undertaking a series of simple, point-and-click tasks: plow the soil, buy and plant the seeds, harvest the crops, pet your farm animals. Each crop takes between twelve hours and four days in real time to yield a harvest, so checking in every day or so becomes a regular habit. You start the game able to harvest just strawberries and soybeans on a humble two-by-six-square plot. Over time, you can work your way up to a “mighty plantation” plot of twenty-two by twenty-two squares, on which you can grow lilies, yellow melons, and coffee—not to mention care for bunny rabbits, pinto horses, and golden chickens.

But the real genius of FarmVille is the social layer on top of this immensely satisfying self-improvement work. The first time you log in to the game, you see a list of your real-life Facebook friends who are already tending their own virtual farms. You can make any or all of them your “neighbors” in the game and visit their farms whenever you want to see how they’re doing.

You don’t interact directly with these neighbors—instead, like most Lexulous play, FarmVille is an entirely asynchronous experience. While you’re tending your own farm, pop-up windows nudge you to pay attention to your friends’ and families’ farms: “Chelsea could use help on her farm. Can you give her a hand?” or “Ralph’s crops are looking a little puny. Could you please fertilize them?” Most players spend up to half their time in FarmVille helping others: raking up their leaves, shooing away raccoons, or feeding their chickens. You can also send your neighbors one free gift every day—a virtual avocado tree, a bale of hot pink hay, or a duck, for instance. Meanwhile, whenever you log back in to the game, you’ll see a list of neighbors who have helped your farm, and you’re likely to find a pile of presents to accept.

The gifts aren’t real, of course. The favors don’t help you in your everyday life. But the gesture isn’t an empty one. Every gift or favor someone bestows upon you helps you achieve your goals in the game. And it’s a virtuous circle. Every time you see that someone has helped your farm, you feel the urge to reciprocate. Over time, you build up a rhythm of checking in and helping others in your social network every single day.

It’s not a good substitute for real interaction, but it helps keep extended friends and family in our daily lives when we might otherwise be too busy to stay connected. Games like Lexulous and FarmVille ensure we’ll show up and do our part to nurture our relationships daily, and make a gesture of friendship whenever it’s our turn.

And so we have our fifth fix for reality:

Prosocial emotions—including love, compassion, admiration, and devotion—are feel-good emotions that are directed toward others. They’re crucial to our long-term happiness because they help create lasting social bonds.

Most of the prosocial emotions that we get from gaming today aren’t necessarily built in to the game design; they’re more of a side effect of spending more time playing together. Case in point: my husband and I first fell in love when we spent six weeks in each other’s apartments playing a mystery adventure game called
Grim Fandango
on my laptop. Falling in love wasn’t so much anything about that game in particular as it was a result of spending so much time working together to solve puzzles—not to mention negotiating who got to control the mouse and keyboard, and when—in order to lead us through the virtual world. Similarly, any pair or group of people who consistently play a game together, online or face-to-face, will have increased opportunities to express admiration for each other, to devote themselves to a common goal, to express sympathy for others’ losses, and even to fall in love. (Which reminds me of the most interesting comment I’ve eavesdropped on by browsing Lexulous screenshots: “Quite a close game again. Loser has to marry the winner?”
¹⁵
)

But beyond this kind of all-purpose social benefit to playing games together, there are two specific prosocial emotions that games give us:
happy embarrassment
and
vicarious pride
. Let’s take a look at why these two prosocial emotions matter, and how online games generate them better than real-world interaction.

If there’s one thing Lexulous players do even better than making obscure words out of random letters, it’s gently teasing each other in a way that makes them feel good. And the most effective way they tease each other is through trash-talking.

Trash-talking, when it’s a playful way to insult your competition, is almost as important to our enjoyment of social network games as the actual core gameplay. We crave the distinctly rewarding feeling we get from a good game when we soundly beat, or are beaten, by people we really like. More importantly, we crave the experience of teasing each other about it, in private
and
in public.

Consider, for example, the following public status updates from Lexulous players. These statements are visible to all members of their social network (including, no doubt, the people they are playing against), and sometimes to the whole world (which is how I happened to see them):

If you’ve never pwned your mom, you’re clearly missing out.

To
pwn
someone—pronounced “pone” or “pawn,” though most people just type it—means to achieve such a major victory you can’t help but gloat afterward. It originates from a common typo of the word “own,” since the letters
p
and
o
are next to each other on a standard keyboard; “own” has long been a popular gamer shorthand for the boastful comment “I’m so good at this game, I
own
it.”
¹⁸

Why is game pwning such an increasingly popular form of social interaction? And why, when we’re on the receiving end, do we happily put up with it?

Teasing each other, recent scientific research has shown, is one of the fastest and most effective ways to intensify our positive feelings for each other. Dacher Keltner, a leading researcher of prosocial emotions at the University of California, has conducted experiments on the psychological benefits of teasing, and he believes that teasing plays an invaluable role in helping us form and maintain positive relationships.
¹⁹

“The tease is like a social vaccine,” Keltner explains. “It stimulates the recipient’s emotional system.” Teasingly trash-talking allows us to provoke each other’s negative emotions in a very mild way—we stimulate a very small amount of anger or hurt or embarrassment. This tiny provocation has two powerful effects. First, it confirms trust: the person doing the teasing is demonstrating the capacity to hurt, but simultaneously showing that the intention is not to hurt. Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really
would,
hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being.

By letting someone tease us, we’re also helping them feel powerful. We’re giving them a moment to enjoy higher status in our social relationship—and humans are intensely attuned to shifts in social status. By letting someone else experience higher status, we intensify their positive feelings for us. Why? Because we naturally like people more when they enhance our own social status.

This is the essence of happy embarrassment and, according to Keltner’s research, we’re hardwired to feel it. He has documented the physiological basis for this complicated social effect in studies of face-to-face playful teasing and trash-talking. According to Keltner’s findings, the recipient of the tease almost invariably showed signs of lowered status, followed by an effort at reconciliation: gaze aversion, bowed head, nervous smile, hand touching the face, and so on. All of this is followed by a fleeting smile, a microexpression that indicates we actually enjoy being teased by people we trust. Meanwhile, the more obvious the display of lowered status, the more the teasers reported liking the teased afterward.

None of this is a conscious process, Keltner’s research shows. We mostly tease and let ourselves be teased because it feels good. But the reason
why
it feels good is that it builds trust and makes us more likable. Most of us might not realize exactly why it enhances our social connection, but we definitely feel the emotional net positive after a teasing exchange. And this emotional reward encourages us to practice and repeat the behavior.

With all the pwnage and trash-talking happening in our favorite social networking games, it’s clear that they are giving us a perfect and much needed space to practice and perform the good tease. Competitive games in particular give us an excuse to adopt playful postures of superiority, and to let our friends and family get away with the same.

We can also lower our status to strengthen our relationships by acting silly. This helps explain the appeal of the popular video game genre known as “party games.” A party game is a game that’s meant to be played socially, face-to-face, and is easy to pick up the first time you try.
Rock Band
is one of the most popular party games, and performing like a rock star—not to mention failing a set—in front of friends and family definitely qualifies as a status-raising or potentially happy-embarrassing moment.

Or consider
WarioWare: Smooth Moves
for the Wii, a game that is even more physical than
Rock Band
. (The Wii remote controller has an accelerometer that detects hand movements, as well as optical sensors to know where you’re pointing the device.) Like most party games for the Wii, to play it you have to perform it.
Smooth Moves
consists of more than two hundred different “microgames” that require you to do a silly physical movement quickly: flap your arms like a bird’s wing, mime twirling a hula hoop, shove virtual dentures into a virtual grandma’s mouth. You have five seconds to figure out what you’re supposed to do, based on the images on the screen. Trying to think and move that quickly usually results in flailing around, goofy-looking gestures, and occasionally falling over.