It kind of reawakens our sense of extroversion. The other thing is, there have been myriad studies of the long-term effects of socializing in game environments and how they make people feel more connected to other people.

They trigger the brain to a state in which it’s possible to do good work. Games take us immediately out of a state of paralysis or alienation or depression and they switch on the positive ways of thinking.

Neurochemically we’re kind of fired up … to take on challenges…. So games give us that sense of blissful productivity…. That’s because when you’re trying to do real-world work it’s frustrating we don’t see the results of our actions right away. There have actually been interesting studies that 62 percent of executives at work play games online and they do it to feel more productive. Studies have shown that playing a short game - having something concrete that you can accomplish - actually gives you the motivation, energy and optimism to go back and tackle real work. McGonigal: Games support happiness … by giving us more satisfying work or concrete tasks that we can accomplish…. : You’ve said that game designers are in the happiness business. The idea is to make games that take those sophisticated ways of collaborating and apply those to real-world problems. In game worlds and in game environments we have these really sophisticated ways of working with other people and figuring out what each others’ strengths are, putting together a team where everybody has something important to contribute, coordinating globally in a virtual environment. We have all the problems surrounding hunger, poverty, climate change, energy and those are all such extreme-scale problems that require so many different actors to work together, so much concerted effort and so much creative thinking that they seem to be the kinds of problems that gamers have been trained to solve. Jane McGonigal: The game industry has spent the last 30 years optimizing two things: how to make people happy and how to inspire collaboration on really complex challenges…. What makes game designers the perfect choice to fix the world? : You say that reality is broken and that it’s the responsibility of game designers to fix it. spoke with McGonigal about the role games play in inducing happiness and what lawyers can teach game developers.

Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal