Last week, I started my quest to explore the brave, new world of gamification (this YouTube session from John Broadbent can get you up to speed). Could it really be possible to use game theory and mechanics to solve real world problems for good? I was skeptical but hopeful that I would discover how gamification could inspire innovation inside.
Most of the blog posts and articles that surfaced early on talked about the potential benefits for businesses – attracting customers, motivating and engaging staff – largely untested and light on ROI data, but definitely intriguing.
The Game of Life
And then my quest led me to a deceptively familiar door – my beloved TED Talks. When I opened that door and stepped over the threshold, I found myself in a truly unexpected place. There was Jane McGonigal again – the woman who had invited me into this world with her first TED Talk. But this time, she was telling a different story. She was telling her own personal story – the story of how a game literally saved her life!
Watch this!
Jane suffered a concussion that did not heal properly and left her to cope with devastating headaches, mind fog, and severe depression. She became suicidal and terrified for her own life. At her lowest moment, she turned to what she knew best – gamification. She created a game called “SuperBetter” and invited her closest real world allies – her twin sister and husband – to play the game with her. Jane and her team of super heroes were on a quest to defeat her greatest enemy – her injury.
High Score: Failing Forward and Feeling Better
SuperBetter effectively directed all of her energy, not to her injury, but to her comeback. Jane was using two of the most basic lessons every gamer knows to her advantage:
- Fail fast to move forward – For the gamer, failing fast is a good thing. The only way for the gamer to “level up” is to keep moving away from where she is and closer to where she wants to be. And she must do it as fast as possible. The gamer expects to open a lot of wrong doors before she finds the right one.
- Never play alone – Gamers don’t go it alone. They play the game with allies and win together. Focusing on her injury made Jane feel isolated and alone. Playing her “comeback” game allowed others to play alongside her.
By gamifying her recovery, Jane built the personal resilience she needed to stay strong, focused, optimistic and eventually “SuperBetter.”
No One Wins Alone
Jane says that she “took a trip to the underworld” and came back a stronger version of herself. This struck a very personal chord with me.
Over 18 years ago, I lost my young husband to cancer. We were just starting out in life. We had just had our first baby – a bright, beautiful daughter that we hoped would be the oldest of many. We bought our dream home overlooking the lake with plenty of room for our growing family and a great backyard to hold the many birthday parties and celebrations to come. We were starting to feel established and successful in our new careers. We even paid off our many student loans together on the same day – one of our proudest moments.
We had so much ahead of us. He was way too young to die. I was devastated and traumatized, and of course, I was not grieving alone. Our wonderful family and amazing friends were grieving too and were there to help my daughter and me. The difficult part to explain is that, while I was surrounded by lots of loving and compassionate people, I still felt very alone. As a young widow with a 13 month old baby and a high profile, high pressure job, I didn’t know how to fail fast to move forward. I didn’t know how to let others be a part of my quest to leave a life I loved for a new, uncertain future. I didn’t know how to leave the trauma behind but take the rest of it with me. I didn’t know how to heal.
Reality-Based Games: A Community Tool for Real World Problems
SuperBetter makes sense to me. When you feel bewildered and floundering, anything that provides a structure and a path to keep you feeling powerful and not alone, motivated, optimistic and focused on your comeback is a gift with value beyond measure.
Like Jane, I “took my trip to the underworld” and eventually came back a stronger version of myself. Still I wonder what it would have been like to have played my own “comeback” game along the way. And many others feel the same way. SuperBetter now has more than 250,000 users, and a clinical trial of 40 patients with traumatic brain injuries is underway at The Ohio State University.
Could games “make another big leap, from the world of recreation to the world of deadly serious”? As the New York Times reported last year in a story on Jane McGonigal: “A rash of new games seeks to help you lose weight, save energy, cope with your chemo or cut back your drinking. The game cabinet is invading the kitchen cabinet, the medicine cabinet and the liquor cabinet.”
Who knows where this will go, but something good has to come from helping people build the personal resilience to stay strong, motivated and optimistic when tackling tough challenges.
I keep a post-it with this question on my desk at work to motivate me: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” Ms. McGonigal has provided me with a new version. When asked by The New York Times what happens if her product does not catch on as she hopes, she responded this way: “Oh, I’m not worried. I’m a gamer. I’m used to failing.”
