Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Jane McGonigal – How Games Make Life Better - [Invest Like the Best, EP.138]

Episode Date: July 16, 2019

Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games — or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is the Author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World and is the inventor and co-founder of SuperBetter, a game that has helped nearly a million players tackle real-life health challenges such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury. Our conversation is about how to design useful games, how games effect us and our kids, and what the future might hold. Please enjoy. For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag   Show Notes 1:22 - (First Question) – Her take on the history of gaming and studying the players themselves 3:44 – Where her passion for gaming really started 4:55 – Her take on flow states 7:47 – Kids and gaming 10:32 – Advice for parents when it comes to the role of games             11:06 – SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient--Powered by the Science of Games 13:53 – Types of games that develop the right skills for kids 16:20 – Four things all games share in common             16:23 – Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World    20:50 – Her take on Carse’s theory about infinite gaming             21:04 – Finite and Infinite Games 26:28 – How to understand gaming culture if you’ve never played a game before 28:28 – Amazon and gaming 31:18 – How fun makes anything more enjoyable 34:55 – How game designers calibrate feedback loops 39:14 – The good and bad of gamifying life 45:01 – What is the superbetter app 52:43 - Why powerups and bad guys are so important in games 57:03 – Secret identity 59:04 – Playing with boundaries 1:00:36 – Most worried about in the gaming world, and most exited about 1:07:32 – Kindest thing anyone has done for Jane   Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaunsi Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy asset management may maintain positions

and the securities discussed in this podcast. My guest this week is Jane McGonagall, who is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games or games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She's the author of Reality is Broken, why games make us better and how they can change the world, and is the inventor and co-founder of Superbetter, a game that has helped Neuros, nearly a million players tackle real-life health challenges like depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury. Our conversation is about how to design useful games, how games affect us and our kids, and what the future might hold.

Please enjoy. Well, I mean, in my spare time, one thing I do do is track the number of gamers globally. So we're at 2.6 billion people now who regularly play games on connected devices, which is really crucial because the tipping point in gaming culture really was when games started to be connected to the internet and gamers could connect to each other. And it really increased a number of games you can play. How many people can you play with? Not just one person in your living room or a few people at arcade, but you can play with hundreds of thousands or millions of people at the same time. We'd never had games like that before. I mean, I'm really, I'm interested in the history of gaming

and two things that have happened in the last decade or so compared to the thousands of years of human history is that games used to be smaller. You would sit across a table from somebody and two people would play a dice game or a chess game. And games were always competitive in that there was no form of game where all of the players were on the same side. So even you think about a big sports where you might have 20 people on one team, you are working together and collaborating, but there's always an opponent, a human opponent. And computer games essentially invented the idea of a massively collaborative game where we can all work together to go on a raid or do you have now collaborative board games where everybody who's playing wins or everybody loses. And that really

shifted the dynamics of what was possible to do in games. And when I started doing my research in 2001, that was actually the year that the field of game studies was formalized as an academic discipline. But most people were studying games as objects. Like you would study, I don't know, a sculpture in a museum. What are the formal properties of it? They were studying it as like a digital, I mean, I was really one of the only people saying it's the players that we need to study. I want to study the psychology of the players, the sociology of the players, how is it changing, how they relate to each other, what kinds of challenges they tackle in real life. And so I was lucky. I mean, it's always a good idea if you can be first to the scene of anything, whether you're starting a company or starting a research field.

I was kind of lucky that I was the first person out there. It means you spend a few years of people thinking that you're like a little bit. crazy, but that's an opportunity because it gives you time to build your case and make what your thinking might be possible real. You mentioned you were designing games at age 10, it sounds like, so very early. Computer games. My own board games are, if you go visit my parents, they still have in the house we were growing up in. You can see still masking tape remnants on the basement floor of human-sized board games that we were designing of seven. Do you remember what the first, maybe I'll narrow it to digital or video game, the first game that stands out in your memory as like

completely capturing your interest and attention. The one that changed me was a game called Load Runner, which I was playing on the Commodore 64. This was like 1986, 1987. It came with a level builder. So you would play the game and then you could just switch to level building mode. And you just like early Minecraft, I mean, just design your own worlds. And you had to learn how to create systems that were playable and survivable, but also interesting

and challenging, and I would fall asleep dreaming of the levels. My mind would process them in the land. I would wake up knowing, oh, I have to make that five squares across instead of four because he doesn't have enough. You would solve these problems in your sleep. And that was definitely for me what captured my imagination. How much of the early study of psychology was in and around like flow states? This is something that as it relates to games.

I'm just curious your take on the relationship between flow and if that's the reason, that kind of subjective feeling that makes people like games so much. For sure, it's what makes people like games so much. I mean, that's sort of a given. If you go to a game developer's conference, the book everybody has read is Flo by Mike Chixat Mihai. That's a given. By the way, we have a great story about the first time I got to meet Chikset Mihai, because he, for me, was also the guru, the legend.

He was able to explain that games are just uniquely designed to put us in that perfect state between feeling bored and feeling overwhelmed? What is that perfect state of challenge that brings out the best in us? So we're fully focusing our attention, feeling optimistic that we can succeed, but also curious because we're not sure and we feel like there's room for growth and personal development. And so being in that moment of personal development and trying our hardest just to get better, one teeny tiny micro skill ability at a time, whether you're climbing the mountain or learning choreographed dances.

I mean, she excited me how he was interested in a bunch of things. He said he thought games were really perfectly designed for that. So game designers are very interested in that. From my work, what I'm especially interested in is why do people who play games look for the opportunity to apply those skills in their real lives? Or why would you feel empowered in this holistic way where you're not just thinking, I'm good at Minecraft or I'm good at Pokemon Go, but you're thinking, I'm a really creative problem solver.

I'm a great team leader. Or I'm somebody who doesn't give up when things are tough. How does it become part of your identity that you bring to real life? And the experience of being in flow, it gives you evidence that you were somebody who can not be good at something the first time you try it. Games are designed for you to be bad at them the first time you try. That's where the interest comes from. I'll imagine the first time you play golf.

Everybody needs a terrible mess at it, of course, because it's been designed to completely frustrate and alienate you from normal ways of doing things. So you have this experience of not being good at it. Oh, frustrated. How am I going to figure this out? and then you build that evidence. You go into that flow state where the game is designed to help you focus your attention and tackle that challenge just a little bit harder than your skill level.

And as you accumulate all that evidence of, I can get better through my own effort, through my own attention, my own desire to grow, I can build skills, I can improve. And that growth pattern that you experience, it's a growth mindset, but it's also actual growth of real new abilities, that's really sticky to your brain. Your brain says this is my superpower. This is my talent. So it kind of helps explain why the game brain doesn't just stay in the game for most people, that it starts looking for other opportunities.

What else can I learn and get better at? Now that I have built all these skills, what can I do with them? We can thank Flow for that. It's almost like games as engineered flow is this really interesting concept. And I remember reading that book very distinctly, a favorite book early on in my life, and wondering sort of like, how do you engineer? this. And I think often people think of games as like a rot your brain syndrome for kids. But my fondest memories were long losing yourself in a game sessions. Maybe that's one interesting

definition of flow is that you lose track of time or something like that. Yeah, I always say that you lose track of time and space. I mean, the thing about kids in gaming that is so misunderstood by parents. And I understand this because I have four-year-old daughters. And I too live in fear of the day that VR is the new social media and I can't see my kids' face because they always got the I mean, I can understand parents don't want to have any kind of separation. And so when kids are playing games that the parents aren't playing, I don't understand Fortnite. I'm not good at it. I get killed right away. I can't really participate in this culture. You get anxious because you can't be there with them and you don't understand it. But what is being missed in a lot of the anxiety about

kids in gaming, as you said, it's rotting their brain. It's hijacking their brain is it is the most powerful, real esteem builder where kids get the experience. of having to teach themselves a new skill, having to pick up these new abilities, because nobody uses instruction manuals anymore. You just fly into the game. You have to figure it out. You have to use all the educational materials around you, whether it's going to a wiki or a forum or YouTube walkthroughs. They're teaching themselves how to do something new. And it feels so good and they build so much self-confidence that it's the ultimate learning simulator. And you realize that if you can teach yourself, then you can learn anything. And it's why we see a lot of what's going

on in education today is trying to shift more towards this just in time learning. What do you need to know to be able to do what you want to do? It's project-based. It's peer teaching to teaching because the way that kids are learning through games is they want to learn the skill they need right when they need it, and they believe that they can pick it up quickly and easily from their peers. I saw a headline the other day that it was like eight-year-old boy drives himself to McDonald's after learning how to drive on YouTube. That's the future of education right there because you know that kid was going on YouTube to learn how to build stuff in Minecraft. And then he just was like, well, if I can learn how to build stuff in Minecraft, I can learn how to drive. So it's great. Who doesn't want kids to feel

empowered to learn and improve on their own? But that's who you're trying to build for the real world. So I'm going to try to be the parent who even as the technology changes and everybody always gets scared about new immersive technologies no matter how cool you think you are. The next generation is always cooler and readier to adopt it. I'm going to try to keep that in mind. So just selfishly, because I've got two kids roughly the same age, five and three. And I just had the experience of playing Sonic the Hedgehog with my son for the first time and just having a blast together. But finding myself feeling guilty that I was playing it with him, I'm curious you're just more general take on this, your stance towards your own kids, maybe advice you might have for parents of

younger kids out there who are worried about the role that games might play and whether or not there's good empirical research on this. Yeah. Oh, there's so much good empirical research on it. And I think you've seen my more recent book Super Better. There's one chapter on it that I always point parents towards, which is how to make the leap from games to gameful, meaning it's particularly focused on parents looking, I did a meta-analysis of more than 500 papers published over the last decade, looking specifically at kids and young adults predicting who benefit from games and who kind of are harmed by them, who might have negative impacts to their physical health or their peer relationships or their grades go down or they become kind of pathological

and obsessive about playing versus why do some kids seem their grades go up the more they play? They're less likely to do illegal drugs or drink. They have more social support amongst their friends. I mean, it's super weird. It's like this weird dichotomy. Half the gamers seem to get all these benefits and the other half seem to not get benefits or be harmed. And it's a pretty simple predictor, like the number one thing that can predict whether your kids are going to like reap all these gaming benefits or possibly be harmed by them.

And parents, when you know this, you can start intervening as soon as three years old, four years old, five years old. The predictor is, are the kids able to talk about the real skills and strengths that they're building in the games as part of who they are? Or do they see games as separate from reality? Do they see them as escapist and completely unrelated? So it turns out the worst thing you can do as a parent is say to a kid, stop playing and do something real or stop wasting your time. Because then all of those amazing skills and abilities are building up in games, they would never feel like they could transfer to school or to their personal development goals, their future ambitions. What you can do as a parent at a very early age. My kids have just started playing Pokemon Go with us.

After school, preschool, they like to do the Pokemon walks. and my one daughter has only caught two Pokemon ever, and the other one has never caught any, and their motor skills are not there yet. But they walk around with us and they tell us what to do. And you start asking questions like, what's hard about this? Like, what makes this challenging? Well, you want to try again?

That's great. It's great that you don't give up when things are hard. But you ask them, what do you think it takes to be good at this game? What do we have to do in order to actually be able to catch these Pokemon? You just start to ask questions that help them articulate real skills, real, real strategies that are not just existing in the virtual world. You have to be willing to try lots of different things. You can't be stuck on one idea.

You try 100 different ways until you figure it out. Whatever it is that they feel is necessary to be good at it, that starts that conversation. So then you can reflect it back to them in real life when they're struggling with a problem that's not in a game. If you can reflect back, oh, it's like in Pokemon Go. We have to be willing to try different ways or we're not going to give up the first time. then they start to bridge between games in the real world and be that best fully realized inflow version of themselves in multiple contexts.

I love this idea of portable skills as a sort of litmus test. Are there, I'm sure this is a hard answer because I'm sure it's nuanced and there's a little bit of each maybe in every game. But are there interesting markers of games themselves that might lend themselves to one, the purely escapist alternate reality type versus the kind of portable skill type of game? Yeah. I mean, I always say it's the right game. for the right purpose. The only type of game that I would say we tend to see more problematic

consequences where I would say you got to be really careful about how this is being played. Are games where you can compete against anonymous strangers that you have no ongoing relationship to and it's a particularly aggressively themed content. So we call it this kind of testosterone poisoning where your testosterone levels can change when you're playing a game, and they change differently depending on whether you're playing with someone you know or a stranger that you have kind of dehumanized or depersonalize. We could be doing a super intense shoot-em-up game at a tournament, and I have to see you and shake your hand, and it's totally cool. Or I could be online and not see you or hear you,

but I know I'm playing against you because you're my friend from school. Totally fine. But if I don't know who you are, you're just an anonymous person online, and I will never see you. see you again and I have no kind of social fabric around our relationship. We do see a lot of players will dehumanize those opponents and they wind up being angrier after a game, whether they win or lose, they can be more frustrated and they can basically, it reduces their empathy for people they perceive as weaker than them. And this kind of spills over into real life. It doesn't make you violent. It doesn't make you punch people or pick up a gun. It can kind of make you a jerk to people in your life that are not playing the games with you because you just get so jacked up on this.

It's too much testosterone pointed against people instead of being used to pursue a goal that matters to you. So anyway, I'd say if you're going to play a really kind of violent themed game online, try to play against people you know. Or go out to these tournaments or go out to these gaming centers where the same is going on a soccer field with somebody. You're going to have a different physiological and mental reaction when it's a real person that you can't treat them as, subhuman, which will bring up all these negative emotions. Good rule of thumb. Good one of this test. So I'd love to get into some of these very basic frameworks for games.

And in your first book, reality is broken. I think it was a four-part framework, sort of four things that all games share in common. Maybe we could start there and maybe not list all four, but just start to get into these ideas of what it means to be a game in the first place. And then game design is honestly the thing that drew me to your work more than anything because this just seems like something, obviously we're not going to be video game designers. But everyone can design games in their own way and their own lives for the betterment of themselves, for the betterment of their family. So just like the very basics of what it takes

to be a game would be interesting. Okay, great. I mean, even apart from the four-part structure, I think people who want to understand what makes a game a game and not just a challenge or hard work. The core ingredient for game is an unnecessary obstacle that you agree to try to tackle with your whole heart. And so what's an unnecessary obstacle? It's something that that has been arbitrarily chosen to make your goal harder to achieve. And golf is, I think, the perfect example because when you think about it, you realize how ridiculous a way to pursue the goal of getting a small ball in a small hole the game of golf is. Like if your goal were to get a small ball in a small hole in real life or if this was your job, you would just go right up

to the hole and make sure you got it in or maybe you'd build a robot to do it for you and you can automate it and sit back and relax. I mean, but you would find an efficient an effective way to do it. And what the game of golf says is, we're going to make this super inefficient and super ineffective. You're going to stand super far from the hole and you got to use a club. I mean, it's a completely absurd way to go about achieving that goal. But what it does is at first it provokes curiosity. Can I do this? What will it feel like? I want to try. I want to see if I can do this. And it provokes creativity. You have to try different techniques and different methods. In golf, it's a very physical kind of creativity and other types of games, more mental.

creativity or social engineering creativity. And then because it was a totally arbitrary obstacle that you've never had to encounter before, this is where you get that growth experience, where you get the opportunity to be terrible at something and then little by little improve your skills. And you can think about a game like chess, the first time two people sat down across a chess board from each other, imagine how bad that game was, like how missing the strategy was and how kind of, I don't know, just basic the, the, uh, might have been, you have now hundreds of millions of people sit across the same challenge from each other over centuries and they each bring their own ideas to it and they each bring

their own experience and point of view and strategy and they talk to each other and people watch each other play, which is why we have so many people watching online streaming now. It's like instead of having to wait hundreds of years for the secrets of chess to kind of rise up and bubble up to the masses, we can just go watch Fortnite streamers and be like, oh my God, I never thought to try that wave escape. I didn't realize you could build that kind of structure. Or, oh, that's how you use that weapon to the most effect in this environment. So you learn from each other so much faster.

And we collectively become geniuses at this completely arbitrary challenge that we chose for ourselves that allows us to have those experiences of curiosity and creativity and growth and collective intelligence. People ask me, how do I turn something into a game? My first rule is people are like, how do I make it more fun? They think they have to make it easier or something. But no, you have to make it harder. If we wanted to turn leaving the house into a game, I might tell you, okay, you have to get

out of the house, but your feet can't touch the floor. Go. That's a totally unnecessary obstacle, but it immediately makes you, it sets that fire in your brain and you just start picturing it, right? What I do? I'm looking at the door. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You would go out the window.

Wait, we're on the fifth floor. So start putting, you have to do it back. You have to do it faster. When we try to translate game psychology to things like recovering from trauma or traumatic brain injury, which is one of my particular areas of research, we take this to its smallest possible micro intervention where we have you do things with a non-dominant hand, like brush your teeth with your left hand instead of your right hand because at a very basic neurological level, just doing something in a different way that is more challenging for you, it still activates

all of those emotional benefits and can help you experience growth and improvement in flow. So there are really simple ways that you can kind of open that backdoor of game design and bring it into your life. So a lot of that is just sounds like creating conditions for feeling more alive, which obviously everyone wants to do. I think everyone can agree on that. I'm curious, we talked before we started here to record about James Karses' work and his famous book, which is called Finite and Infinite Games. And the role, if any, that his thinking or his philosophy has played on you as a game designer, largely because most games end. There's a clear goal and you know when you've achieved it and the round is done or the session is done or somebody wins or something.

But maybe there's even more interesting kinds of games that go beyond that. So I'm just curious your take on Karses philosophy. Yeah. I mean, most of the games that we can call to mine easily do have that finite structure. It's the NBA finals and somebody's going to win the game and win the series and the season's over. And it allows us to kind of stop and take a breath and say, That's who was best at the game today or this week or this year. So you kind of play to find out who wins. With an infinite game, you play to keep the game going as long as possible to keep as many of the players in the game and to engage as many new players as possible.

And in reality, when James Carson wrote this book in the 70s and he was a professor of religious studies, he was really thinking of religion as being the only true infinite game because through religion, you're trying to engage as many people as possible. You're always trying to help people. If you're a religious practitioner, you want to help people find that path and join you on that path and the idea of kind of this everlasting life that through love and through peace and through worship, that you wouldn't be bound by the limitations of life on Earth. That's sort of where he was going, which is way bigger than game design.

But when you kind of boil it down to a sort of more practical. earthbound things. Certainly from the game development industry, it's incredible how much the business and design of games has embraced the idea of a more infinite game. So you look at something like Fortnite, even just the ease of getting back into the game, you're playing battle real mode, you die. It takes 10 seconds to be right back in the game. They have really tried to close that gap of feeling like I lost. You don't even have to feel that for more than a few seconds because you are reborn back into the game, have full health, full opportunity again. And so you kind of create this infinite loop of there's always hope that I can try again,

achieve more, do better, try something different. And then in terms of the relationships that game companies want to build, for a while, it was kind of this like, play a game, get to the end, you played it, congrats. And then you would like move on with your life. Now game companies are trying to build relationships over years or decades. Look at Candy Crush Saga. launched a decade ago. They're still one of the top three grossing apps in the world. People have been playing Handy Crushaga for a decade of their lives and still checking in daily and still playing how many Pokemon Go has been around for three years now. And you still have almost half a billion people playing this game. How long can that relationship last? How can we create new challenges so that

people feel a part of this? When you're playing a game with a hundred million or half a billion or a billion other people in the case of all these giant Fortnite Pokemon Go, these are big massive communities. You don't want that game to end once you've found your community. I think there's a lot of merit to this. I think it kind of, even though these games can be kind of competitive, it creates a sense of abundance. There's always another chance to play. There's always another season to start. There's always a new battle to be won. And you're never kind of eliminated or alienated from this game. It's really interesting for me to think about a generation of people that may become a part of a game and play it for the rest of their lives. In the same way that people may be played poker or ridge or golf their whole lives,

reentering the first era of digital games that people will fall in love with a game and play it forever and find their tribe. It's really interesting. I also think it points to kind of inclusivity. Like in e-sports, there's like an aging cliff to be competitive in really popular. popular e-sports, you have to have a certain physical stamina. Your fingers... Dexterity and everything. Yeah, your fingers have to have a really fast reflex, like kind of twitch reaction.

And we're seeing once you hit your late 20s, you go off this cliff. It's like... Professional sports. Yeah, it is. So already e-sports companies are thinking about when people age out of competition, what's the master's level look like? I'm a runner. I'm a competitive runner.

I recently entered the master's world of running. And I'm like, amazing, because now I'm like the youngest fittest instead of the oldest, not, you know, but it's a whole new opportunity to be good and to achieve and be esteemed. So there's a sense of how do we include as many people as possible to keep playing the games they love, even as their abilities change or the time they can put into gaming changes. One of the big areas for investment is also mobile e-sports. So people who are more casual or maybe they don't have access to high-end computing from a global technology perspective. how can we bring those people into these communities and opportunities? So there is a kind of sense of more accessibility, more inclusivity that comes out of wanting us all to play the same game.

I'm not saying it's all noble in spirit. I mean, there's money to be made and there's markets to be grown. But I like the idea that if we want to play and we find games we fall in love with, that we may be able to grow with them and grow our community through them. For anyone listening that's, let's say skeptical or it's not not a gamer of any kind. Like they haven't played video games. They haven't played.

They can solve that right now on any laptop, install Fortnite, play it once. That was going to be my question. If you want to understand, yeah, gaming culture, play Fortnite, get on your phone, make sure you have tried Pokemon Go. They've really innovated the features since it launched. So even if you tried it in 2016, which I called the Summer of Love, do you remember how it was crazy when it came out? Oh, my God.

The streets are full. And you could talk to anybody. any age. Anyway, you should play Fortnite, play Pokemon Go. And then, I mean, if you've at least tried those two games, you will be conversant. I would say you could also try Minecraft because there's a new augmented reality version of Minecraft coming out that I think is going to basically, I think it's going to blow people's minds and we're all going to be running around. Have you seen any of the demos? I haven't seen. No. I mean, it's like Pokemon Go for Minecraft. So if you could just pick your favorite building and redesign it to be anything you wanted, but you had to

mine the resources and you had to work with a hundred other people and someone else is trying to build a dragon on it and you want to build a castle and anyway so try Minecraft too is a good one but then you'll have a literacy in gaming which is important because I get worried about the sort of artificial barriers that go up between people who game and don't game there can be shaming of gamers or a sense of I don't know just looking down at people for something that generates a sincere passion and creates real friendships. And for many people, real financial opportunities, whether it's through streaming or through competing or becoming a game developer themselves and entering the industry. So I always think you owe it to yourself to have a basic literacy in what's

going on so that you're not, I guess, blindsided by the ways that gaming influences workplaces. I mean, can we talk for a minute about what Amazon is doing with video games? Have you seen this? My familiar with Amazon video games is mostly Twitch. Right, of course. Now, this is from the kind of gamification side. Okay, so obviously a big part of Amazon's business are their warehouses and finding whatever you bought and boxing it up and getting it sent to you, right? This was used to be driven by human labor.

Now they've automated a lot of this. Robots go out. See those videos. Yeah, right? Bring it back. And then basically the job of the human worker is to just look. Did the robot pick the right thing and put it in the right? box. Beep. Okay. Green light. Red. Whatever. I mean, the robots always get it right. There's like

nothing for humans to do anymore except it's very basic, almost mindless level of checking, verification. And so people who work these jobs are kind of demoralized. They are calling in sick. They're not checked in. This is not a fulfilling, meaningful, exciting, stimulating job. So Amazon's like, hmm, what should we do about this? Their solution, partly inspired by some National Bureau for Economic Like research that came out in the past year, it shows young men without college degrees, the type who would work in these types of factory environments or warehouse environments. They've been choosing to work fewer hours, specifically in order to play video games more. Because what they can get paid at minimum wage, that amount of money is less valuable to them than the benefits they get from gaming,

whether it's the psychological and emotional benefits or the social relationship building or the esteem they get from their community. They basically feel like keep your $15 an hour if I'm lucky because I get more benefit from games. I'll work 20 hours this week instead of 30 hours. So Amazon's like, okay, if they're more motivated by games and our jobs are kind of boring and automated and soulless, let's pretend they're playing a video game. So they've created a game to project on big screen. So now the worker stands by a big screen. And when they approve a package, blow something up on screen.

They're trying to make them feel like this job is a video game. It's so interesting to me because on one hand, I feel like this is dystopian, apocalyptic, black mirror. We've made work so meaningless that we have to try to convince workers that they're playing a video game. In my mind, people would just work less and actually play more because the goal of automation and gains and productivity should be to free people up to do whatever, caretaking, art making, playing, whatever is meaningful to them. I mean, it's just such an intriguing signal.

It's like they see what's happening. Is this the right solution? I don't know. But as a futurist, you're looking at this and you're thinking something is going in a new direction and whether we're all going to be playing games more and working less or automation is going to require workplaces to become much more gameful in order to keep people engaged instead of checked out mentally or checked out emotionally. And we'll see which way it goes.

It seems like a lot of what's under the undercurrent of all this is just making things fun. Like when we want to accomplish something, making it fun through a game improves our odds, like fitness challenges at work and whatever it might be. Fun is a really loaded word, though. Okay, why? So because to me, when you ask somebody what's fun, it's not actually the same for everyone. So like, for example, the type of person who really enjoys knitting versus somebody who wants to do parkour, they would both tell you that it's a really fun. activity for them. If you were to try to replicate knitting, oh, okay, knitting's fun. Great. How can we make the world more like knitting versus, oh, parkour is fun? How can we make work more like parkour?

You're going to design two very different experiences that you could kind of miss what the heart. And maybe this gets back to... Is it a feedback loop thing maybe? Well, it's because if the first necessary feature for games, these unnecessary obstacles, so you can be bad at something and get better and have that growth and go. into flow, at the sort of back end of what it's required for a game, it's that you choose to play it. It's voluntary. You are saying, this is the right challenge at the right time for me, given my interest, given my skills, given what turns me on.

And so fun is just a way of saying you have designed the right challenge for the right person at the right time. So one of the things that I often do in my work is I help people find the right games for anxiety attacks or for depression if you're trying to kickstart the parts of the brain that remember how to anticipate something good could happen so that you can feel more motivated by just everyday things. There's different games that will do that. A game like Pokemon Go is really good to kind of trick your brain into going into a very rapid cycle of something good could happen anywhere because literally Pokemon can pop up anywhere and it would be really powerful.

and I might get a gift today from my friend. Like, oh, my gosh, something good could happen anytime. That's good for depression. But if your anxiety, you might want a really small game, a really tiny game, a single player game. It could be mini golf on your phone or a really gentle, meditated puzzle game. Because what you're trying to do is stop your brain from thinking thoughts, imagining things other than just this very tiny, tiny piece of work that you can focus your brain on.

So it's like Pokemon Go is big and diffuse and dynamic. For anxiety, you want something like Tetris. It's kind of small and focused. And anyway, so it's like you don't want to make things more fun. What you want to do is you want to find the right challenge for the right impact. And it's typically going to involve asking you to do something that's challenging, but it's going to be the kind of challenge you enjoy. I don't even like virtual killing of things when I play Fortnite.

I am the best hider building. builder storm evader. I have no kills in Fortnite, but I have single digit. I can outlast them. And so if you're going to try to make something more fun for me, you would get in a lot of trouble if you looked at Fortnite and said, oh, it's this battle mode and it's powerful weapons and we feel powerful when we deploy them. The landscape of psychology is so rich. So instead of saying fun, I just like think about specific positive emotions. We need people to feel more curious. We need people to feel more control. We need people to feel more hope that something good could happen. That's the level of granularity that I think is really productive to talk about. How do game designers calibrate? I want to talk

about feedback loops and difficulty. It seems like part of the benefit of games is that you get a positive payoff, maybe faster than you're used to getting in the real world. I have a friend here that said, if I went for a jog and lost five pounds every jog, like I jog all the time, but the feedback loop is just too long. Whereas in games, it seems to be like perfectly calibrated. I'm curious, like what's behind that. How structured is that? What are some two things? Very structured. A lot of best practices.

So when I was translating, I had invented a role-playing game for my concussion recovery, which I had called Jane the Concussion Slayer. And when I started a company to turn it into an open platform for people recovering from any injury illness, I hired one of the game designers from Farmville to work on it. This is when Zingo was basically ate the whole game industry. One of the things that they were really pioneering around was A-B testing. You would give half of the players one version, pink cow, blue cow, which one gets clicked on more. You would give them 100 points for doing this.

You give them 1,000 points for doing this. Which one gets them to move to the next thing? They were kind of pioneering this really data-driven approach with the idea that don't have your own assumptions or hypotheses that are unchecked. Let's test it. And also, I mean, really trying to use that data. When do people quit? what are predictors of who will come back on day two? What kind of experience do they need to have on day one to predict that they'll come back

on day two? So one of the things that she taught me when we were setting up super better was in a Zingya game, we would say that they need to have success in the first five seconds of playing or we will lose them. So how do you give somebody challenge and success in the first five seconds? And that's actually where we came up with the initial design for the super better app. And then I wound up doing it in my TED talk on it, which turned out to be the most amazing thing. I'll just have this whole audience play the first minute of the game.

I'm going to give them four experiences of success. And we wound up the first thing you do when you come into the app is stand up and take three steps or raise your hands over your head as high as you can for five seconds. And it turns out that that's really good for your metabolic system. I mean, there's reasons to do it. You will, if you just do it, shall we do it? Can we do it now? Yeah, let's do it. All right.

So we'll take one, two, three. as you both if you want. And it's like your body has just gone. Yeah, your body's just gone from being checked out to checked in. And almost anyone can do it. And we're thinking about ability. What if somebody is physically not able to walk? What can we give them to do?

And really trying to make sure everybody would have a chance to win in the first five seconds of this experience and that the win is not arbitrary. It's something that you will feel better. You will have made a difference in your mind or your body. you will have an experience of a positive emotion. So all of that is to say, yeah, game designers are super aware that they need to help you win faster than kind of boring everyday routine life. And yeah, they are trying to create cycles of feedback where you have more opportunities to see a challenge, rise to the occasion, meet it, and then be challenged again. It's about,

I call it multiplying pathways for success. I'm a runner. People know I've worked with Nike. on the past on their running app. And one of the things I'm really interested in is how do you multiply pathways for success on a run? Because right now you can go faster, you can go farther. Maybe you can run for a longer period of time. But on any given day, you're not going to be the fastest you've ever been or run the farthest you've ever run. So what are the other markers for success in a run? And can we measure the fun of running, the widest range of positive emotions, so that every run feels like a win, even if you're not crushing your own personal leaderboard for stats. And so that is something, and especially when people are dealing with recovery from injury

or illness, that's another situation where you kind of feel like you're losing every day. You're failing every day. You're not as productive. You're not as sociable. You're not, I mean, you just feel like the days are slipping away without you achieving what you would have normally been able to achieve. Invent challenges, invent opportunities to win. It's methodical.

Game developers know they're doing it. And when we try to recreate that feeling in everyday life, we're very methodical about it, too. Maybe it was Zinga that created this, but the term gamification became huge and popular. And I'd love to hear your take on both sides of this. So maybe areas of the world or life where you're excited about the prospects of introducing game dynamics and maybe areas that you're more skeptical that you think this isn't a curell to gamify everything. Right. I mean, one thing I always point out to people is I never use a term gamification in either of my books or anything. any my TED Talks, not on my website. And that's partly because I think some of the early adopters

of the gamification method, they were selling a vision of gaming that was really divorced from the reality of what people enjoyed about it. So if you look at classic gamification solutions, add a leaderboard, give people points for doing things. I always ask people when they come to me and they're like, well, would this make it more engaging? Would it make it more fun if we had leaderboards and points and achievement badges? I would say, okay, find someone you know who loves a game. could be your partner, could be a kid, ask them what their favorite game is right now and what they love about it. And 100 for 100, I guarantee no gamer will say, man, I just love getting points. Oh, yeah, it's that score, man. They talk about the authentic challenge. They talk about what it means

to be on a team with three people hanging on for their last bit of health. They talk about the strategy and how good it feels when something works that they didn't know if it was going to work and they had that huge rush when I can't believe we did it. Like they talk about something that is never the mechanical side. And so a lot of these gamification solutions, they really miss the heart of a gameful experience. And so what I've been kind of more interested in is just helping a wider range of people, whether they're educators or healthcare practitioners or entrepreneurs, understand how do you know when you have something that feels like a game?

And so we're starting with the idea of curiosity, can I do this, how would I do this, opportunities for creativity where I won't be punished for failure, that I can actually get better at something. Not an arbitrary digital leaderboard I'm trying to move up, but that there is a real skill involved that I'm going to have that authentic experience of getting better and improving. These are the types of things that make something really feel like a game. And we don't need, I don't know, we just, so we don't need an. industry of software, we need people to understand the psychology, the authentic experience.

We need experience designers, not gamification software designers. It seems like you need to start with a challenge maybe, like start with the thing that you're trying to get better at and then build backwards from that and I come up with some point system. Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you, I had a really crystal clear example of this. I was approached by the New York Public Library. They were celebrating their 100th birthday.

They were dealing with a problem, which was that young people in New York City, did not physically come to libraries anymore and weren't really participating in that and all the things that make physical libraries great like the serendipity of just stumbling across a book and it just calls to you and you were like, oh, I was meant to find this. Or when you're in a really inspiring architectural space, research shows you think more creatively, you think more ambitiously about your own possible futures. So can we get kids and young people into these beautiful buildings with like Gothic architecture and they've got beautiful murals in the ceiling? And also the operational. opportunities for collaboration. They sort of meet people and intersect with people. So how can we get

young people to these physical library spaces? And they had this really bad idea that they would gamify the collection somehow. Oh, with your library card, you'll get points for every book you check out and you'll get achievement badges for like visiting different branches or collections. And I said to them, this won't work because what you're doing is you are trying to get young people to do what the library wants them to do. This is a library's idea of what is a meaningful challenge. We need to figure out what feels like a real challenge and opportunity to young people and then give them that opportunity. So I did some research and I found out that in the United States, 92% of people under 30 say

they want to write a book someday. So they have this feeling like they have a story that's worth telling or their own experience and wisdom is worth being heard. So I'm like, great. So first of all, we should design a game that turns you into a published author and that if you win the game, we will print on demand your book, put it in the catalog, your name, a published author and the book is on the shelf, on the stacks, because what would make me feel comfortable going to a library and excited? We saw that people also didn't go to libraries because

they just felt like was too stuffy and they were going to get yelled at. I would feel very comfortable if I could just stroll in and be like, yes, I'm welcome here. I'm one of your authors. There's my book. So that, just thinking about what would actually mean something? What is a real challenge that young people would care about versus this stupid, arbitrary poinsification, right? And then the other thing was at the Near Public Library, their main branch, they have seven stories underground of books that there are fewer people who have access to it than have top secret clearance with the CIA. It is incredibly protected. So I'm like, and we're going to let them down there. We're going to lock them in the library overnight, sunset to sunrise. Nobody's allowed out until they write a book,

and they're going to sneak around like top secret clearance. And so we did it. We designed a game. The first 500 people got to play it overnight, but it was playable for a year. All these people wrote books. The first book that was written is in the rare books collection next to a Gutenberg Bible. It's like New York Public Library is pledged to defend and protect these books for as long as New York City is standing. That's saying to the players, you've achieved something real. You did something that mattered. It's not a score. It's not a leaderboard. So, I mean, that's how I approach these things and how I encourage people. You're looking for the challenge that's going to really bring the best out in people. And really, when they achieve it, they feel like

It was a meaningful and epic achievement. I love the real world example and it makes me think of your super better. So maybe talk a little bit about, I think it's half a million people. It's a million people now. Sorry, sorry, sorry, I don't want to short change you. So a million people that have played this game. So describe what it is and I'm going to ask kind of what you've most learned watching people come up with this stuff. Yeah.

And I will preface this by saying before I explain it that we are considered the best validated app for depression and anxiety. There have been a number of meta-analyses that have come out in the past year by independent Journal of World Psychiatry, Journal of Effective Disorders, scientists looking at all the apps that have come out claiming to treat depression, anxiety, and Superbetter scored number one for having the most positive impact, measurable, best clinical research. We've done randomized controlled trials. We've done clinical trials working with doctors and hospitals and everything. So I just want to press it by saying... This is real.

It's the idea it can sound really kind of silly and strange, especially where it comes from, but we've been really lucky to be able to document its impacts through independent researchers and scientists. So, yeah, the origin of this was, I got a concussion. We're actually coming up on the 10-year anniversary. Right now I'm in the stages of planning some, I don't know, like... Cushion anniversary party. Yeah, like traumaversary, as I'm calling it. 10 years out.

But I got this concussion, and then it turned out to be a pretty serious one. And most people feel better in a few weeks. If you don't feel better in a few weeks, then you probably have it for a few months or even a year. And so I had all these, it basically felt the same from that moment of concussion, vertigo, horrible headaches, nausea. If I were walking around, I'd feel like I was going to black out, couldn't work. I'd type an email and I would start to lose. It's almost like your range of vision is going into a tiny little dot, like you're almost blacking out. So it couldn't write, couldn't work, couldn't run, couldn't game, couldn't do anything.

And what I didn't know at the time, but there's been incredible amount of research since showing one of the things that happens when you have a concussion is your brain intentionally turns off the reward and anticipation centers so that you don't go out and get hit in the head again. And it's trying to conserve the energy it needs for healing by not allowing you to basically pursue any other goal. And the side effect of that is incredible depression and for one and three people, suicidal ideation. because what happens when your brain starts telling you, there's no point in doing anything, nothing good will ever happen, which is what your brain is telling you because it doesn't want you to do anything.

I want you to use all your resources to sit in a dark corner and heal. For many people, you just start interpreting that as a reason to kill yourself. And that happened to me. And I didn't know why it was happening. I just suddenly had heard very persuasive messages that I wanted to die and that nothing good would ever happen again and just was so believable. I didn't know why that was happening. happening. But now I can look back and seeing the research. And there was literally just a new major

study published last week that's explaining even more the biological mechanisms for this. Like, they're just understanding it better and better every year that when you're injured or have inflammation of any kind, your brain just like, I want you to be depressed. So I was going through this, not knowing why I'm like kind of talking to my husband about it because I'm scared. I don't actually want to kill myself. But it's very strong in my head. And so I guess in this moment of darkness, I just was like, Jane, you've been studying games and psychology of games. And you've been saying that they produce positive emotions, even during stress or depression. You've been saying that they make people more collaborative and more

likely to help each other. And you need help right now, but you also need to be able to ask for help, which you haven't really been asking for help enough. So I'm like, just fuck it. Make it a game. Just do it. You said it works. Just prove it now. This is like your chance. Prove that your theory works, fix your brain, fix your life. And so I just started making up rules with a major concussion. So it was not the greatest game you've ever seen from the outset. But I just started being like, calling my friends and sisters, I'm like, give me a mission. I don't care what it is. My sister's like, look out your window later today. And I want you to find something, see something weird because I lived in the middle of the city. When I call you tomorrow,

I want you to tell me something cool that you saw. Yes. I have a mission. I can sit by a window and not move and look. And they just started giving you. me things to tackle that still felt arbitrary, unnecessary, creative. I was curious. What will I see? I don't know. I'm curious now. And it just what it did that I didn't know at the time is it forced the parts of my brain that we're trying to conserve energy, just powered them back up enough that I didn't want to kill myself. Re-show me something good could happen, that there is still hope for positive emotion, growth, success, social connection. Anyway, I did it.

I fixed my brain. And then I just started posting videos and blog posts about it. And suddenly everyone around the world is like, I'm using this. I'm in the hospital. I'm recovering from this surgery. I'm going through a traumatic divorce. I'm playing it. I've been unemployed for four years.

I'm using it to try to get a job. And I just heard so many stories I decided to try to formalize the method. And more importantly, I basically set off on three years of interdisciplinary research, partnering with positive psychology center at University of Pennsylvania, working with researchers in psychology at Stanford and UC Berkeley, just like, please explain to me why this game worked. Can you explain to me why this stupid part where I came up with a secret identity and my alter ego? Why did that make me feel better? And so using kind of all these research outlets to reverse engineer, why did this game save me?

Why is it helping other people? So then built the game. It's free to play. I mean, there's no great business model here. It's just a free resource. We don't sell anything. There's no advertising. It's just a gift to the world to help people. And then I wrote a book explaining the research because in my experience, there was a lot of skepticism. I've been kind of high profile in my work. And at that time, if I launched a new game, it was getting written about in your times or slayed or wired, whatever. And I don't know. So people were like, if I have a real problem, I don't want to turn into a game. I'm tough. I'm like real. This sounds too silly or too childish or it feels like escaping reality, which is the opposite of what I'm all about. I want people to connect to reality. I just want them to bring their most gameful selves to reality. So I kind of wrote the book as my answer to natural skepticism. I get it. If you have a real problem, you don't want to play about it. But what I was seeing in our research and from those million people is that the worst the problem, the more severe the trauma, the more strategies they tried, the more they benefited.

So if you were like, I need to lose five pounds or I want to meditate more often, it's not a good frame for you. This works for people who literally their brains have shut down and said, life is too hard. I am traumatized. I am severely injured. I've been severely depressed for a decade. I need brute force. You know, hit me in the brain with a game until my brain re-learns how to be gameful. And so anyway, that's the story of the platform in the book.

And I'm really happy with how it helps people. Yeah. Yeah, as an option. It's not for everyone or for every problem. But if your brain is stuck, and I will say also if your brain is stuck, use Pokemon Go or use Fortnite. I mean, it doesn't have to be a gamified solution for a lot of people. Just bringing a real video game into their daily habits will also do the same thing. There's two sections of the book that I'd love you to riff on just for a second, power-ups and bad guys.

Yeah. So obviously anyone that's ever played a video game knows the importance of these two things. Tell us a little about why those two things are so important in any game. Yeah. So power-ups in the super better framework are just anything that can make you feel better right now. It could be better physically, emotionally, socially. We're just trying to give you that burst of positive emotion. And so it's something you can do anywhere, any time, and reliably feel better.

It's like what we just did kind of. Yeah, yeah. One of them is to text anybody a thank you message. Just do it. It takes 30 seconds to pick somebody. And it has this kind of first, you feel good in the moment. You flash back on something good that happens. You get to savor something that you're thanking someone for.

You've reached out. You've made a social touch that feels good. You feel more connected to people. And then probably you'll hear back and they'll be like happy. Then you get that. So you're trying to do these like little things that anytime anywhere can make you feel good. It could be aromatherapy. I mean, do 10 pushups, whatever it is.

And what Powerps do is they remind. you that you do have control, that even on a day that's frustrating or upsetting or boring or depressing, that within your just assets, you have identified things that even on a terrible day you can use. And what's interesting is I use super better for my concussion and then I used it to train for a marathon. I was using it for different things. But for me, it wasn't something, this is my habit for life.

My kids were born. They were super premature, almost 10 weeks premature, tiny. I mean, blood transfusions. It was just not good. And they were in the NICU for two months, which is a very disempowering experience. You can't hold them for more than a few minutes a day. And so in the first, I must have been 24, 36 hours, I'm telling my husband, let's start a new superviter notebook.

What are our power-ups? What can we do to love them, even if we can't hold them? What can we do to feel like we have some power or some in these situations where you lose control? Power-ups, very important. So those are power-ups. And then bad guys, it's not what you think it is. So one of the fundamental principles of Super Better is that you can't run away from your problems.

You can't run away from your triggers or you can't be afraid of feeling anxious or feeling physical pain because that's a part of getting stronger and better. And the goal of Super Better, one of the goals is to make you comfortable with the realities, whether it's physical pain or anxiety so that you're never stopped from doing what matters. to you. So if it's important to you to learn something new every day or to be the best parent you can be or to always be going on adventures and pushing the limits of your experience, what we ask you to do or identify all the things that would stand in the way and then basically just deal with it. Just invite them out and say, I see you physical pain and I'm not going to wait for my first headache-free day to go out and take a class. I'm going to go with a headache. Screw it. Come with me, bad guy. Be there. I'm going to be on my shoulder.

You're not just trying to avoid the things that are problems. You're making peace with them, making friends with them, finding creative ways to deal with them. If you have insomnia, that's a lot of people's bad guy. We're like, make a list of things you only do in the middle of the night. Maybe there's a show that you want to binge watch. You're only going to watch it if it's after midnight. Or you just write poems to your grandmother. Things that maybe you wouldn't normally make time for in the normal day, but you've got all this free time.

And maybe there'll be some benefit. how happy will your grandma be to get poems? So even though insomnia is sort of a bad guy, we can just keep going for things that matter to you. And to me, that's one of the most important things of super better is you list and confront daily the things that cause you pain or anxiety. You don't have to run for them. You don't have to pretend they don't exist. We're just helping you be more creative, be more comfortable so that they don't scare you away from taking actions that matter to you. Because in a video game, like, can you imagine a video game without bad guys? You don't just go in a safe mode and then just...

The challenge personified, right? Yeah, yeah. You're not trying to get rid of them. They are part of my environment and I'm flexible and I'm creative and I still figure out how to go after what matters to me. You mentioned secret identity. For some reason, I don't remember that in the book. I'm curious.

It sounds like fun. It's the most controversial. I will say half of the people who use super better do not do this part and that's totally fine. And secret identity is like you just come up with a heroic nickname or alter ego that expresses the strengths that you want to call upon or develop. So when I was dealing with my concussion, one of the things about it was it just happened to me and it derailed my life. I was in the middle of writing my first book.

I couldn't write it. I was going to miss my deadline. I had to cancel trips. I'm like, this sucks. Why did this happen to me? And I thought about Buffy, the vampire slayer, one of my all-time favorite heroes of fiction and she didn't ask to be the slayer that was forced upon her and she had to choose how to rise to that occasion. So I'm like, great. She didn't pick it, but she rose to the occasion and

she did great things and I didn't pick a concussion, but I'm going to do something great with it anyway. And so just starting to call myself Jane the concussion slayer, it was a way of communicating to friends and family and myself how I wanted to be seen or approach this challenge. And it gives people, just kind of a way to play with you. I had friends saying, okay, I'm going to be like the monster of the week. Who should I be? I'll come by. And be just a way of them saying, I'm going to come and visit you, which is really hard with a long concussion. People forget that you're still at home months later and not going out. This is a way of giving them a reason to check in on you. To be allies. Yeah, to be allies. And so I see like half the super better users,

they come up with an alter ego. Sometimes they just make an anagram out of the letters of their name, just to be like, I can be anyone I want to be. I don't have to be the person I am today. And so, or I can tell a different story about myself. So for some people, that's very freeing. And other people are just like, nope, I'm going to be Patrick, and I'm still going to friend those bad guys and collect the power. But I can also just be me. So that depends on what seems fun to you.

It gets back to the idea of fun. For some people, it's fun to role play. And for other people, I don't know. That's not fun. So you don't have to do it. One of the things that stood out in your work reminded me of a line from James Carson, actually, which is just a simple notion of playing with boundaries. A lot of games have artificial boundaries, but maybe the infinite games or when you're really

pushing yourself, you're playing with boundaries in your life. Anyway, it's just an observation. That makes me think of that idea. You're saying that makes me, I've always been interested in the boundaries of a soccer field. So now we've got the Women's World Cup going on and thinking about this, about what would happen if the players agreed in the middle of a soccer game just to expand the boundaries. Now we're going to, the bleachers are in play or the city block is in play. Wasn't it, you're bringing up that idea that you can put boundaries in play for any human being.

That's like wonder and awe comes in when we realize that we are not, we are not limited to the constraints that we have agreed to at this moment. Some people think they have to live in a certain country their whole lives. But if they give themselves permission to imagine, what would it mean if I didn't live in America the rest of my life? Just move the boundary a little bit where they think they have to work in a certain profession. What if I spent a year doing something else, remove that boundary? If you realize that you can play with that and maybe you'll put them back and you say, that wasn't for me. That's not what I want to do.

But I've experienced something bigger and I've been flexible enough to explore. Yeah. And we should do that more with games in general. It's why playing with kids is so good because they're always changing the roles. So it gives you that really concrete experience of flexibility, you've that cognitive flexibility. I can be adaptive. I can flow. So I want to close with what you're most excited about and what you're most worried about in the world at large when it comes to games.

We'll start with the negative one and close on a positive note. So we were talking maybe negative is the wrong word. But there's just things that have you interested. We were talking before we hit record about what might happen in terms like under authoritarian regimes, like games put into place by authoritarian regimes or something like this. So maybe you mentioned your research on that a bit. Yeah. So I'm sure a lot of people listening have heard at least a little bit about the social scoring system that's being. experimented within China. And that's something I'm watching very closely because it is kind of a

massive gamification project. Describe it briefly. The Chinese government has given a kind of mandate to different groups and organizations to create scoring systems. It's not just one scoring system. If you live in a particular city of Shanghai, you might have a Shanghai citizen score, but if you use a certain bank, you might have a score from that bank. And if your kids go to a certain school. They might have a score from the school. So there's multiple competing scoring systems, and the government's kind of watching to see how does it change behavior, how does it shape the psychology of citizens? Do they feel surveilled and watched? Do they feel optimistic? The way that your score is based is observed public and private behavior. So if you smoke a cigarette

in a non-smoking train car, your score will go down. And if your score goes below a certain level, maybe you can never take an express train again. You can only take these slower trains. Similarly, people with high scores and maybe their score has been increased because they are visiting elders in the community. That's one of the ways you can increase your score is doing these kind of positive social things so that if you have aging relatives, you're not kind of abandoning them. You visit them regularly. Okay, score goes up. Now you and your family have faster access to health care. You don't have to wait in the long line. You get the short line. Certain schools will only admit people, certain stores. You can only shop there if you have a certain score. So basically it's carving up

reality into places that you have access to or opportunities you have access to or don't based on whatever the scoring system thinks is worth measuring. And on one hand, this is absolutely terrifying because the technology they're using to do it are CCTV facial recognition. They have cameras in classrooms judging whether kids are paying attention or not. They have apps on phones to see they're measuring, are you saying things about society that are optimistic or are they cynical or challenging? I mean, the things that you can be judged on, that's in a way the most important piece of this phenomenon to look at. I don't want to live in a world where maybe my speech is monitored or my movements are monitored. But there's a flip side of this, which is as you look at the different scores, some behaviors are changing for the better.

For example, if you spend a lot of time in China, you know that crossing a crosswalk is really taking your life into your own hands. No matter what drivers are supposed to do, it is not a common practice to actually stop for people who are crossing across. I've done this tonight. I know this is true. But in some places where they are projecting the faces of people with high scores on posters and billboards and telling you what they improve their score for. And one of the things you can improve your score for is, oh, look, they stopped at a crosswalk. And you see, wow, this guy's being celebrated and all he had to do is stop at a crosswalk.

They've actually effectively changed this widespread cultural practice in certain communities where the score is being calculated on that behavior and it's being publicized or publicizing the good, not the bad. So they're not shaming people. Oh, he smoked a cigarette on a non-smoking car. Shame, shame, shame. But they're promoting the positive. So there's like this weird thing going on where, and some people are like, I feel safer now. I feel so much safer. I can walk in my community in ways that I didn't feel safe before. You talk to people. They're like, this has been great for my family. We're able to get opportunities for health or learning. We haven't had before. Some people love this. And it doesn't feel repressive or paranoia inducing. They feel like they have more

pathways towards good things in their future. We have to watch that because we can assume, especially here in America, where privacy is so important to us, but we also tend to have a certain degree of economic mobility and educational access that in other countries, people may be very willing to trade the privacy for pathways to success that feel like, wow, this is a game where I'm on an even playing field and I can play in advance. And so I say all of that, it's still worrisome, but I think it's going to spread. So I feel like we can't ignore it and we can't just pretend that the world is going to say, oh, bad idea, let's not do it. I think we need to study the psychology of it. We need to look for versions that do not lead to paranoia and repression

and see, is there any version of this that is... And that positive or helpful. Yeah, and it sounds like that's being an apologist for it. And I'm not being an apology for it. What I'll sort of put on the back end is you look at criminal justice reform in the United States. I think most people who look at what's happening with the, we have more people in prison than anywhere else on our high percentage of people in prison. It costs so much money to incarcerate people. The longer people spend in prison, the more likely they are to reoffend, it doesn't help them being in prison. So it's expensive to society. It tears apart families. In America, we're looking for if our system of punishment isn't working. Would it be fairer? Would it be fairer? Would it?

be less of a rupture of our social fabric instead of putting people in prison to restrict their access to stores and trains? I think there's a version of the future where even in a place like America, we say that our prison industrial complex is inhumane and incredibly expensive. And maybe this social scoring is a better form of justice in prison, right? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. But I think when I look at the future, I always try to see where are the pain points. And so I don't know if the pain of losing privacy, people don't even honestly seem to care about that. We think people care about it. But every generation's like, take it, take it. I really don't care. The real pain is around things like not feeling like we're on even playing field, not having actual access or opportunity,

having the prison industrial complex cost us so much in society. So yeah, open mind. We say at the Institute for the future where I do a lot of my research, We always say have really strong opinions but lightly held. Be provocative in your thinking and forecasts, but be ready to be wrong or see evidence that shows that it could go a different way. So that's how I feel about that. That's actually my positive and my negative. I love it.

Yeah, I was going to say. You nailed them both in one fell swoop. So my closing question for everybody is to ask what the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you is. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. The kind of thing anyone has ever done for me. I mean, people are so kind.

And the thing that leaps to mind is such a simple thing. I was in Paris. I was in my early 20s. And I was sobbing hysterically over something stupid, like romance stuff. And I was just on a bench in Paris. I didn't know. It was my first time I'd been there. I didn't know where anything was.

I had to get to a train station. And somebody just walked over to me and asked if I was okay. And I said, yes. And she said, are you sure? And I said, yes. And she just sat down next to me. And she didn't try to talk to me. She didn't make me explain.

anything but she just sat there and I felt so safe and like welcome by that city in a way that I mean it could have happened on any street corner anywhere but I'm so grateful to somebody seeing me in pain and wanting to know if I was okay so I've always kind of made it a practice if I see somebody in distress to try to do that it's one of the small things that I don't know why that made it I mean people have done much bigger things for me but that No, I think it's always fascinating what pops to mind. And I'm amazed by how many of the answers, which are all different, other than my parents or family, they all have some sort of undercurrent of integration kind of like that one, which is just fascinating to hear always.

And maybe it's just we have an expectation that our family will be kind to us or a teacher will be kind to us. It's the norm, right? The unusual kindness. Yeah, it's when a stranger in a strange country makes you feel safe and cared for. And so I don't know. That's something I would like to strive to do more. Well, this has been so cool. I mean, so many interesting things to think about takeaways. I'm sure everyone listening will agree. So thanks for all the research. Thanks for the great books. And thanks for this conversation. Thank you, Patrick. Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Investors like the best, go to investorfieldguide.com forward slash podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com

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