Daily Tao -Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World 1
he wondered, then why did real life so infrequently resemble a game? Csíkszentmihályi argued that the failure of schools, offices, factories, and other everyday environments to provide flow was a serious moral issue, one of the most urgent problems facing humanity. Why should we needlessly spend the majority of our lives in boredom and anxiety, when games point to a clear and better alternative? “If we continue to ignore what makes us happy,” he wrote, “we shall actively help perpetuate the dehumanizing forces which are gaining momentum day by day.” The solution seemed obvious to Csíkszentmihályi: create more happiness by structuring real work like game work. Games teach us how to create opportunities for freely chosen, challenging work that keeps us at the limits of our abilities, and those lessons can be transferred to real life. Our most pressing problems—depression, helplessness, social alienation, and the sense that nothing we do truly matters—could be effectively addressed by integrating more gameful work into our everyday lives. It wouldn’t be easy, he admitted. But if we failed to at least try to create more flow, we risked losing entire generations to depression and despair
Flow is best achieved when we engages tasks with a sense of autonomy, where tasks are challenging enough but not too difficult such that it induces stress and anxiety. Nevertheless, most of the tasks that we engage in our school and work life seldom lead to any form of satisfaction in itself. That might be one of the challenges of life itself, as unlike games, life does not proportionally reward hard work with rewards. In a game, positive feedback is highly observable and you can complete milestones, tasks and achieve points unlike in real life.
In this book, Mcgoinal asserts that what we need to do is to insert more aspects of games into our real life environments. Workplace can create environments where employees have more autonomy, where feedback for their effort is apparent and where milestones and achievements can be better appreciated. The fact that some people choose to engage in gaming speaks to a “hunger” for something more. In games, people can feel their actions matter, like they have “saved the world”, like their actions mean something in the world. We should always try to drive and create that element for “meaning and value” into our work place.
As individuals, we can also insert gamification elements into our own life. We could also choose to engage in some hands-on work where results can be observed. For ourselves, we have to also learn to create situations and challenges which induces our own “flow”.
