Reality Is Broken
- Kind
- Book
- Date
- 2011-01-20
- Publisher
- Penguin
- Retrieved
- Jun 21, 2014
- ISBN
- yiOtN_kDJZ
10 memes from this reference
A good game keeps you at the edge of your ability
As you successfully lock in Tetris puzzle pieces, you get three kinds of feedback: visual—you can see row after row of pieces disappearing with a satisfying poof; quantitative—a prominently displayed score constantly ticks upward; and qualitative—you experience a steady increase in how challenging the game feels. This…
A good game teaches you how to play it
What you eventually discover as you continue to play is that Portal is a game about escaping from rooms that operate according to rules you are unaware of. You learn that each room is a puzzle, increasingly booby-trapped, and the game requires you to understand more and more complex physics in order to get out. If you…
Characteristics of a Game
When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses their attention and continually orients their participation…
Entertaining Work is a Moral Issue
I’m not the first person to notice that reality is broken compared with games, especially when it comes to giving us good, hard work. In fact, the science of happiness was first born thirty-five years ago, when an American psychologist by the name of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi observed the very same thing. In 1975…
External VS Internal Hapiness
Many different competing theories of happiness have emerged from the field of positive psychology, but if there’s one thing virtually all positive psychologists agree on, it’s this: there are many ways to be happy, but we cannot find happiness. No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real…
Four kinds of intrinsic rewards
First and foremost, we crave satisfying work, every single day. The exact nature of this “satisfying work” is different from person to person, but for everyone it means being immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impact of our efforts. Second, we crave the experience, or at…
Satisfying Work Requires Clear, Actionable Goals
Satisfying work always starts with two things: a clear goal and actionable next steps toward achieving that goal. Having a clear goal motivates us to act: we know what we’re supposed to do. And actionable next steps ensure that we can make progress toward the goal immediately. What if we have a clear goal, but we…
There is a mass exodus into the virtual world
The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make…
Unnecessary Obstacles Make Games
As a golfer, you have a clear goal: to get a ball in a series of very small holes, with fewer tries than anyone else. If you weren’t playing a game, you’d achieve this goal the most efficient way possible: you’d walk right up to each hole and drop the ball in with your hand. What makes golf a game is that you…
Why hard work others ask us to do doesn't inspire us
In our real lives, hard work is too often something we do because we have to do it—to make a living, to get ahead, to meet someone else’s expectations, or simply because someone else gave us a job to do. We resent that kind of work. It stresses us out. It takes time away from our friends and family. It comes with too…