Jane McGonigal – How Games Make Life Better - [Invest Like the Best, EP.138]

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I know firsthand how complex the tech stack is for asset management firms. And seemingly every new tool and data source makes the problem even worse, adding more complexity, more headcount and more risk. RidgeLine offers a better way forward. One unified platform that automates away the complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance and more, all at scale. RidgeLine is revolutionizing investment management, helping ambitious firms scale faster, operate smarter and stay ahead of the curve. See what RidgeLine can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgeline.ai.

• 0:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Neal 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.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Patrick O'Neal is the CEO of O'Neal Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Neal Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Neal Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 1:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My guest this week is Jane McGonigal, who is a world-renowned designer of alternative 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 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.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  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 the 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, 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.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  You would sit across the 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 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.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  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

• 4:02Speaker 03

  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 you're thinking might be possible real.

• 4:17Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You mentioned you were designing games at age 10, it sounds like, so very early.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Well, computer games, my own board games are, if you go visit my parents, they still live 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.

• 4:33Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  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?

• 4:41Speaker 03

  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're 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 and 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

• 5:25Speaker 03

  for me what captured my imagination.

• 5:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  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?

• 5:42Speaker 03

  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 developers conference, the book everybody has read is Flow by Mike Chiksehmi-Hayid. That's a given. By the way, I have a great story about the first time I got to meet Chiksehmi-Hayid 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

• 6:26Speaker 03

  just to get better, one teeny tiny micro skill or 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, but he said he thought games were really perfectly designed for that. So game designers are very interested in that. For 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 like 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

• 7:07Speaker 03

  you bring to real life? And the experience of being in flow, it gives you evidence that you are 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. Imagine like the first time you play golf, everybody's 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, ah frustrated, ah, 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

• 7:50Speaker 03

  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? Or now that I have built all these skills, what can I do with them? We can thank flow for that.

• 8:23Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's almost like games as engineered flows. 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 some of 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.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I always say that you lose track of time and space. I mean, the thing about kids and 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 kid's face because they're always got this, 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 and gaming, as you said, the sort of, it's rotting their brain. It's hijacking their brain. It is the most powerful, real esteem builder,

• 9:31Speaker 03

  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, you 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

• 10:13Speaker 03

  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. 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

• 10:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 11:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  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 to 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.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  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 obsessed 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.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  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 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."

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Because then, all of those amazing skills and abilities they're 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?

• 13:42Speaker 03

  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 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 and the real world and be that best

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Fully realized inflow version of themselves in multiple contexts.

• 14:29Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  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?

• 14:47Speaker 03

  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 depersonalized.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  We could be doing a super intense shoot them 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 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.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  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 as 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 a subhuman, which will bring up all these negative emotions. So.

• 16:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Good rule of thumb, good litmus 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, in 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.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  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 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

• 18:13Speaker 03

  to do it for you and you could automate it and sit back and relax. I mean, but you would find an efficient and 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,

• 18:56Speaker 03

  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 chessboard 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 approach 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

• 19:38Speaker 03

  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 or 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.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:35Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You just start picturing it, right? What do I do? I'm looking at the door.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll go out the window, wait, we're on the fifth floor. So start putting, you have to do it backwards, 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 like 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 and flow.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  So there are really simple ways that you can kind of open that backdoor of game design and bring it into your life.

• 21:26Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  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 hitting record about James Karss's 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 Karss's philosophy.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, most of the games that we can call to mind easily do have that finite structure. It's the NBA Finals and somebody's gonna win the game and win this 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 Karss wrote this book in the seventies, and he was a professor of religious studies, he was really thinking of religion as being the only true infinite game.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  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. Right, 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,

• 23:24Speaker 03

  even just the ease of getting back into the game. You're playing Battle Royale 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.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  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 Candy Crush Saga for a decade of their lives and still checking in daily and still playing. How many Pokemon Go's 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 100 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.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  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 maybe played poker or Ridge or golf their whole lives, re-entering 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 kinds of inclusivity. Like in esports, there's like an aging cliff.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  To be competitive in really popular esports, you have to have a certain physical stamina. Your fingers-

• 25:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Dexterity and everything.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, your fingers have to have a really fast reflex, like kind of twitch reaction. And we're seeing, once you hit your late twenties, you go off this cliff. It's like, you know-

• 25:52Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Like professional sports.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is. So already esports companies are thinking about when people age out of competition, what's the masters level look like? I'm a runner, I'm a competitive runner. I recently entered the masters world of running and I'm like, amazing. Cause now I'm like the youngest, fittest instead of the oldest, not, you know, old, but- And 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 esports. So people who are more casual, or maybe they don't have access to high-end computing

• 26:35Speaker 03

  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, but 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.

• 27:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  For anyone listening that's, let's say skeptical or just not a gamer of any kind, like they haven't played video games, they haven't played-

• 27:10Speaker 03

  They can solve that right now-

• 27:12Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yep.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  On any laptop, install Fortnite, play it once-

• 27:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  That was gonna be my question.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  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 call the summer of love. Do you remember how?

• 27:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It was crazy when it came out.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  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 gonna basically, I think it's gonna blow people's minds and we're all gonna be running around. Have you seen any of the demos for Minecraft?

• 27:59Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I haven't seen them, no.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  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, it's 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

• 28:45Speaker 03

  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?

• 29:03Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Please, please.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Have you seen this?

• 29:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My familiarity with Amazon video games is mostly Twitch.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 29:26Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Seen those videos.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  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 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

• 30:10Speaker 03

  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 screens. So now the worker stands by a big screen. And when they approve a package, blow something up on screen.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  They're trying to make them feel like this job is a video game. And 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.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  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, but.

• 31:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  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 or whatever it might be.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Fun is a really loaded word, though.

• 32:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Okay, why?

• 32:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 32:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Is it a feedback loop thing, maybe?

• 32:50Speaker 03

  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 is 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 interests, 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

• 33:32Speaker 03

  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 might be really powerful. And I might get a gift today from my friend, like, oh, my gosh. It's something good could happen anytime. That's good for depression. But if you're 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 meditative puzzle game. Because what you're trying to do is stop your brain from thinking thoughts,

• 34:15Speaker 03

  imagining things, other than just this very tiny, tiny piece of work that you can focus your brain on. So it's like Pokemon goes 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. Even just, I don't even like virtual killing of things when I play Fortnite. I am the best hider, builder, storm evader. I have no kills in Fortnite, but I have single digit, I can outlast them.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How do game designers calibrate? I want to talk about like 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's 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 key things?

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Very structured, a lot of best practices. So when I was translating, I had invented this 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 Zynga 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

• 36:38Speaker 03

  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 SuperBetter was in a Zynga 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 SuperBetter app. And then I wound up doing it in my TED Talk on it, which turned out to be the most amazing thing.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  I'm like, let's 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. And I mean, there's reasons to do it. You will, if you just do it, shall we do it? Can we do it now? Okay, all right. So we'll take one, two, three. You can kind of do 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

• 38:04Speaker 03

  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

• 38:32Speaker 03

  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?

• 39:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Maybe it was Zynga 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 cure all to gamify everything?

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, one thing I always point out to people is I never use the term gamification in either of my books or any of 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 the game, could be your partner, could be a kid. Ask them what their favorite game is right now and what they love about it.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  And a hundred 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, you know, 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,

• 41:29Speaker 03

  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 are, 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.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  The authentic experience. We need experienced designers, not gamification software designers.

• 42:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It seems like you need to start with the challenge, maybe like start with the thing that you're trying to get better at and then build backwards from that and not come up with some point system.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, I have 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 opportunities for collaboration, sort

• 43:09Speaker 03

  of meet people and intersect with people. So how can we get people, 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

• 43:52Speaker 03

  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 as 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 it 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 pointsification, right?

• 44:35Speaker 03

  And then the other thing was, at the New York 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 gonna let them down there. We're gonna lock them in the library overnight, sunset to sunrise. Nobody's allowed out till they write a book and they're gonna 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 has 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.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  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 gonna really bring the best out in people and really, when they achieve it, they feel like it was a meaningful and epic achievement.

• 45:37Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  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 or some huge-

• 45:45Speaker 03

  It's a million people now.

• 45:46Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Sorry, sorry, sorry. I don't want to shortchange you. So a million people that have played this game. So describe what it is and I'm gonna ask kind of what you've most learned watching people come up with this on this stuff.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  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've 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 Super Better 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 preface by saying-

• 46:33Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This is real.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  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-

• 46:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Concussion anniversary party.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  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. 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, I 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 blackout. 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 tiny little dot, like you're almost blacking out and all. So I 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

• 47:40Speaker 03

  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 in 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. It wants 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-

• 48:24Speaker 03

  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, 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's 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.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  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 says, I'm like, give me a mission. I don't care what it is. My sister's like, um, 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.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  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 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 were 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.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  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, 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,

• 51:23Speaker 03

  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, some people were like, ugh, 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.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  I just want them to bring their most gainful 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 worse 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 fit 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.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  You know, hit me in the brain with a game until my brain re-learns how to, 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.

• 53:01Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Well, liberated into the world.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 53:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  There's two sections of the book that I'd love you to riff on just for a second. Power-ups and bad guys.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So obviously, anyone that's ever played a video game knows the importance of these two things. Tell us a little bit about why those two things are so important in any game.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  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, anytime, and reliably feel better.

• 53:48Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's like what we just did, kind of.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  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 flashback on something good that happened, so 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, and 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 power-ups 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

• 54:33Speaker 03

  assets, you have identified things that even on a terrible day, you can use. And what's interesting is, I used 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, it must've been 24, 36 hours, I'm telling my husband, "Let's start a new SuperBetter notebook. What are our power-ups? What can we do to love them, even if we can't hold them? Or what can we do to feel like we have some power, some...

• 55:17Speaker 03

  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 SuperBetter 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 SuperBetter, 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,

• 56:02Speaker 03

  what we ask you to do are 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,

• 56:47Speaker 03

  but you've got all this free time, and maybe there'll be some benefit. I mean, 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 SuperBetter, 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?

• 57:21Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Boring.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Boring, right? You don't just go into safe mode and then just-

• 57:25Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The challenge personified, right?

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. You're not trying to get rid of them. You're just, 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.

• 57:38Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You mentioned secret identity. For some reason, I don't remember that in the book. I'm curious. It sounds like fun.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  It's the most controversial. I will say, half of the people who use Superbetter do not do this part, and that's totally fine. 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 gonna 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.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  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 gonna 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 gonna be like the monster of the week. Who should I be? I'll come by. It'd be just a way of them saying, I'm gonna 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.

• 59:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  To be allies.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, to be allies. And so I feel like half of Superbetter 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. 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 gonna be Patrick and I'm still gonna friend those bad guys and collect the powers, but I can also just be me. So that depends on what seems fun to you. It gets back to that 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.

• 59:40Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  One of the things that stood out in your work reminded me of a line from James Karss, 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 yourselves, you're playing with boundaries in your life. Anyway, it's just an observation. That makes me think of that idea.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  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, 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 gonna, the bleachers are in play, or the city block is in play, doesn'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, or they think they have to work in a certain

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  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 think that wasn't for me. That's not what I wanted 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 have that cognitive flexibility. I can be adaptive. I can flow.

• 1:01:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  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 of 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.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  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

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  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 healthcare.

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  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

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:04:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I've done this and I know this is true.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  But in some places where they are projecting the faces of people with high scores on posters and billboards and telling you what they improved 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 was 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

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  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

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  and I can play and 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?

• 1:06:17Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And that positive or helpful?

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it sounds like that's being an apologist for it. And I'm not being an apologist 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 and elsewhere, a 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 less of a rupture of our social fabric? Instead of putting people in prison to restrict their access to stores and trains?

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  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 the 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 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 an even playing field, not having actual access or opportunity. Having the prison industrial complex cost us so much in society. So yeah, open mind.

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  We say, 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's actually my positive and my negative.

• 1:08:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I love it. Yeah, I was gonna 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?

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. I mean, people are so kind. The thing that leaps to mind is such a simple thing. I was in Paris, I was in my early twenties, 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, 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 welcomed by that city in a

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  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 they made, I mean, people have done much bigger things for me, but that-

• 1:09:20Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  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.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:09:38Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's the norm, right?

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  But it's-

• 1:09:39Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The unusual kindness-

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's when a stranger in a strange country makes you feel safe and cared for. And so I don't, that's something I would like to strive to do more.

• 1:09:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  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.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Thank you, Patrick.

• 1:10:02Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest Like the Best, go to investorfieldguide.com/podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com/bookclub. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away, and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter, at Patrick underscore Oshag, O S H A G.

• 1:10:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening. [Music]