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Games and the Design of Optimal Human Experience
Games and learning
Games are optimal learning environments:
- Feedback loops are short, fast and adapted to your skill level.
- Challenges grow as you develop new skills.
- Failures are learning opportunities because every time you make a mistake, you get a hint about how you can do better next time.
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Key Ideas
Developing mastery
Fun is the experience of developing mastery. When we acquire new skills and recognize valuable patterns, our brains reward us with a shot of pleasurable sensations.
Games and learning
Games are optimal learning environments:
- Feedback loops are short, fast and adapted to your skill level.
- Challenges grow as you develop new skills.
- Failures are learning opportunities because every time you make a mistake, you get a hint about how you can do better next time.
Boredom and learning
Boredom is what we feel when our brain decides that there's nothing worth learning. It's the brain searching for new information.
And even games become boring at some point because they eventually run out of things to teach you. That's when you stop playing.
Games vs Schools
If a good game teaches you everything it has to teach you before the player quits, then a good school should be one that teaches you everything it intends before the students leave.
Schools as transmission failures
Why schools fail to teach everything they intend to:
- The patters are too easy, so students get bored (and this is especially common for gifted students).
- The patters to be learned are too hard, so students give up.
- The patterns are not perceived as meaningful.
Learning, good and bad
Schools often do a bad job teaching us things that should be good for us, while games do a good job at teaching us things that are often useless.
But school and games should learn from each other: teachers should study games to learn why they’re so compelling, and game designers can think about what schools are trying to teach and find better ways of doing so.
Rewarding human experience
There are 4 categories here:
- Satisfying work: clearly defined challenging activities, that provide clear feedback.
- The experience or promise of success: we want to feel we are getting better over time.
- Meaningfulness: being a part of something bigger.
- Social connection: sharing experiences with others, while working towards a common goal.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Rethinking Success
We liken success to sports, exams or battles that have winners and losers, and that have an end. However, success means having the stamina to keep going.
There might be many peop...
Patience and Idleness
The kind of patience that leads to success is not the same as waiting. Waiting has no benefits. Investing time doesn't do anything on its own.
The kind of patience needed for success is an active, self-doubting kind of patience. It's putting in enormous amounts of work, reviewing the work, questioning if it was the right work, then making adjustments and trying again.
Build-Up and Breakthroughs
Success tends to accrue in two different modes:
- Build up: It is the steady accumulation of improvements that you can see month after month, that will eventually help you reach your destination.
- Breakthroughs: It requires a lot of effort with no visible benefits, but every once in a while, there's an insight that unlocks your potential.
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Key Ideas
Hack the 10,000 hour rule
This rule was developed by Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and states that we need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to succeed at anything.
This may create f...
Plus, Minus, Equal
- Plus: Find mentors, real (maybe someone from your work) or virtual (from books). Learn from someone with more experience than you.
- Minus: Explain what you are learning while you are learning it. Teach someone with less experience than you.
- Equal: Find people who love what you love and spend as much time talking about this shared area as you can.
Micro-Skills
Every skill worth learning has dozens of micro-skills.
List the micro-skills. Figure out what you are good at, what you are bad at, and how you can learn to be better at each.
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Lifestyle Gamification
It is when you to turn a task into a game to motivate yourself to finish it.
It motivates the "player" to chase after rewards as he gets points and achieve new levels with new challen...
What Makes Games Addictive
- Epic meaning and calling to finish a mission.
- Development and accomplishment inspires us to finish the game.
- Empowerment of creativity to bring imagination to life.
- Ownership and possession of rewards.
- Social influence and relatedness or envy.
- Scarcity and impatience to have things we don't have.
- Undpredictability and curiosity of what the next challenges are.
- Loss coins and chances and avoidance of failure.
Be a Game Master
- Reward yourself for fulfilling one or several tasks
Use surprise rewards.
- Determine a reward by chance.
Engage in time-based challenges
Make a deal with your friend.
- Challenge and motivate each other to finish a task
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