>>Jane McGonigal: I'm a game designer. And I'm also a little bit of a geek. So when I
bring up my slides, I'll show you the geeky things I do in my spare time.
One thing I like to do is keep track of the number of gamers worldwide. And this is kind
of an exciting day for me, because this is the very first time that I've shared this
data anywhere. You guys are the first to see it.
This is an exciting day for humanity, I think. We have just reached, this summer, one billion
gamers worldwide. So -- yay, I know, right? Largely thanks to this guy over here with
the Angry Birds, but he'll tell you more about that later.
And you can kind of take a look around the map and you can see where the gamers are showing
up, you know, 187 in the United States; 311 million in China now; 105 million in India;
35 million in Brazil. And the kind of games that we're playing various
from region to region. So, you know, consoles are really big here in America. But in Brazil,
they're playing mostly online, casual Web browser games. China, it's really an explosion
of social network games. So you see mobile games in India, of course.
So that does vary from region to region. What's really interesting about this number is that
over the past 18 months, it has doubled. So in February 2010, we were at 500 million
global gamers. So 18 months, we've doubled. I don't know if there's a rule in there, like
Moore's Law or Zuckerberg's Law, double gamers every 18 months.
I'm sure you're wondering why I like to keep track of the number of gamers worldwide.
Well, it's because according to my calculations, we need to get to 1.5 billion global gamers
before we can achieve my personal number one goal in life, which is to see a game designer,
any game designer, doesn't have to be me, win a Nobel Peace Prize. So 1.5 billion global
gamers Nobel Peace Prize. The very good news, this is very recent, just
in the last week or two, is that it turns out one billion gamers might be enough to
get one of the other Nobel Prizes, medicine or chemistry. And I'll tell you a little bit
about that in a minute. Maybe you're wondering, what is she talking
about? How could gamers ever deserve a Nobel Prize?
Well, in addition to making games, I also do research. I did a Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley
studying the impact of games on our real lives. And my -- really, my area of interest is the
skill and abilities that we develop by playing games and how we can use them to collaborate
in real life, to solve real problems. So today, I'm going to talk to you about just
one of the skills that these one billion gamers are developing.
And that skill is resilience. Okay? Turns out that games are an outstanding platform
for building resilience, which is the ability to stay motivated, determined, and optimistic,
even in the face of extreme challenge. It's the ability to get stronger when we confront
difficulty, rather than becoming weaker. Now, scientists have been studying resilience
for decades, mental resilience, physical resilience. It turns out that there are three things that
we need in order to build our resilience. The first is positive emotion.
They've figured out that there's a ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions that
we need to hit in order to become more resilient. It's three-to-one. Okay? So we need emotions
like curiosity and surprise and awe and wonder, three for every one negative emotion, in order
to be resilient. We also need strong social ties. We need at
least two to three people that we see in person at least once a week who we feel like we can
ask for help. That's incredibly important for resilience.
And the third thing is that we have to put ourselves through a process that the researchers
call stress-related growth. So this means that we wholeheartedly engage
with something that is extremely difficult for us, and we stay engaged, and we don't
give up. And if we do stay engaged, then that's how we become resilient.
So if you think about games and you look at the research around gaming, it turns out that
all three of these components are happening all the time when we play.
So the industry studies video gamers and how they feel when they play. There's research
all over the Internet. You can look it up. But every game produces a signature positive
emotion, whether it's delight or surprise or pride or curiosity. So we get that when
we play. You can just look at the faces of gamers and you see that happening.
Research also shows that games build really strong social ties. Just one of my favorite
studies came out earlier this year from Brigham Young University school of family life. And
it reported that kids who play games with their parents have, among other things, much
stronger relationship, much stronger communication, that they're significantly more likely to
come to their parents to talk about a problem they're having or to ask for help.
So we see exactly the kind of social relationships coming from playing games together that can
build resilience. And then, of course, stress-related growth.
I mean, that's the very definition of a game; right? As we play games and we get good at
them, the games get harder. They're constantly keeping us on the edge of our abilities. We
fail all the time. In fact, gamers, when they're playing their favorite games, fail 80% of
the time, eight zero. So compared to real life, that's quite a lot of stamina in the
face of failure. And they do have that opportunity to be resilient in the face of failure.
One of the more interesting areas of research that we've also seen looks at children who
have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. And it turns out that for many of
them, the symptoms go away completely when they're playing a game. And they're able to
do things like set long-term goals and persevere in the face of obstacles, to stay focused
and achieve those goals over hours, days, or even weeks, which they're not supposed
to be able to do, because they have ADD. So we see resilience in gamers while they're
playing, and then the crazy thing is, we're starting to see that resilience trickle over
into everyday life. To share with you a few of the more provocative findings. The United
States Mental Health Advisory Team did a year-long study of soldiers serving in Afghanistan.
And they found that the single best thing that soldiers could do to avoid posttraumatic
stress disorder was to play video games three to four hours a day, right, games like Call
of Duty and Halo. They were so confused by this finding, which they were not expecting,
that they called me up and asked me to help them figure out what was going on. And we
started to talk about resilience and gaming and how gaming confers resilience.
There's research out of Grant McEwan University in Canada showing that gamers can control
their dreams at night so that when they have a nightmare, they take charge of the nightmare
and they sort of operate themselves like an Avatar in a video game, so they can turn it
into a positive dream instead of a negative dream. So very interesting mental resilience
there. This year, the first clinical trial of casual
games to treat depression and anxiety showed that playing games for an average 20 minutes
a day is significantly more effective than pharmaceuticals for treating both depression
and anxiety. So really interesting research starting to
come out looking at games and how they build resilience.
It's a really big field. In the spirit of, you know, all of us, each of us, I mean, I
do get excited when I think about the one billion people on the planet building these
interesting forms of super resilience. But I want to narrow scope now and just talk about
one of us, me. And I want to tell you a story about myself. And this is the story of how
a game saved my life. So on July 15th, 2009, just a little bit over
two years ago, I suffered a mild traumatic brain injury. I had a concussion that didn't
heal properly. And for weeks and weeks, I had constant nausea, vertigo if I turned my
head, I had significant memory loss, I couldn't read or write for more than a minute at a
time, I couldn't be around people, because it made me sick. It was easily the scariest
and worst time of my life. Now, my doctor -- before I tell you what my
doctor told me, this is something that I wrote at the time. This was about after six weeks.
And I was trying to express what was going on.
So I wrote, everything is hard. The iron fist is pushing against my thoughts. My whole brain
feels vacuum pressurized. If I can't think, who am I?
It took me an hour, as I recall, to write that. And then I gave up and didn't really
try again for a while. So my doctor told me that what was going on
was that my brain was under stress and I had to give it a rest. So there were all these
things I couldn't do. No reading. No writing, no video games, no computer time, no running,
no alcohol, no caffeine. So, in other words, no reason to live.
[ Laughter ] >>Jane McGonigal: Yeah. Which is funny. But,
in all honesty -- and you may know this if you have had a loved one or yourself had a
traumatic brain injury -- a suicidal ideation is actually very common when you have the
traumatic brain injury. It happens as part of the changes in the chemistry in the brain.
And it actually happened to me for the first time in my life, my brain started telling
me, "Jane, you want to die." And it was -- it was alarming. It was strange.
It was unfamiliar. And it was awful. And then my doctor told me that having depression
and anxiety is common with these injuries, but you have to somehow get out of it, because
it changes the brain chemistry and will stop the brain from healing if you get deeper and
deeper into depression and anxiety. So somehow, Jane, be happy. I know you're miserable and
sick every day and can't get out of bed and can't read or write. But find a way to be
happy, and then your brain will heal. So this is pretty grim. It had been a couple
months, and I wasn't getting any better. So on August 18th, I had this moment of clarity
where I said, you know, what, I'm either going to kill myself, or I'm going to turn this
into a game. Why a game? Because I knew that games help us unlock the best version of ourselves,
the most motivated, the most determined, the most social, the most resilient.
I wanted to make my recovery feel possible by provoking my sense of optimism.
I wanted it to feel interesting, you know, by provoking that curiosity. I wanted it to
feel meaningful maybe by having a sense of awe and wonder to what was going on.
And I wanted to provoke these feelings not just for me, but for my caretakers. Because,
frankly, they were getting burned out. My husband didn't even feel comfortable leaving
our apartment, things were so bad. So I found maybe it would be easier to call
someone up and say, "I have a game that I'm playing to help my brain heal, and I want
you to play it with me," instead of saying, "I'm miserable and I want to die and you have
to help me." So that's what I did. I made a game. Mission
number one was to create your secret identity. So when you have a traumatic brain injury,
you don't feel like yourself anymore. So why not be somebody amazing and awesome? I decided
to be inspired by Buffy, the vampire slayer, one of my favorite series. She was not -- she
didn't want to be the slayer. She had it forced upon her by fate.
So I became Jane the concussion slayer. And that meant that my symptoms were the vampire's
demons and forces of darkness that I was destined by fate to battle against.
Mission number two was to recruit your allies. So the important thing here is to give everybody
something specific and concrete to do, a role to play in the game, because we know when
people are going through difficult times, we want to help. But sometimes we don't know
what to say or how to be there for them. So I gave my friends and family roles to play.
My twin sister, Kelly, became my watcher. Her role was to call me every single day and
give me a mission for the next day, some kind of quest that I could undertake and to just
ask me how I was doing. My husband became my Willow. That's the geeky best friend character.
So he was doing email for me. He was doing research on traumatic brain injuries for me.
And he was keeping track of all my points and achievement badges that I was winning
in this game. By the way, isn't it eerie how much they look
alike? I just want to say that, eyebrows and everything.
[ Laughter. ] >>Jane McGonigal: I invited my friends Natalie,
Ramel, and their dog, Maurice, to be my Xander. That's the comic relief character. Their mission
was to come over once a week and make me laugh by any means necessary.
So mission number three is to find the bad guys. These are things that trigger your symptoms.
And the idea here was that I felt so sad and pathetic that I couldn't play games, that
couldn't have caffeine, that I couldn't go out into crowded spaces or be around bright
lights, the idea is that if you can escape the bad guys, you're actually healing your
brain, you're doing something good, you're winning, not losing, you're winning. Over
time, I can vanquish the bad guys so I can be in bright spaces again and under bright
lights. Mission 4 was to collect your power. These
are things that make you feel happy no matter what kind of day you're having. Hugging your
dog or looking out your window. This helps you get your positive ratio up.
Number 5, choose your epic win. Stop trying to get back to normal. Pick something you
really care about, that really excites you, that you want to do so you can be motivated
for something positive. Maybe it's a road trip. Maybe it's wanting to give a talk.
So did it work? Yes. So within a few days, I stopped wanting
to die. That was the best thing that happened. And within a few weeks, the cognitive symptoms
started to improve. It did take about three months before I was off bed rest. So it wasn't
an instant cure. But it made the process so much better and
gave my friends and family a way to be engaged. It worked so well that I put the rules online.
I told people how to play. And I started hearing from people all over the world. I called it
SuperBetter, because not everybody wants to be a slayer. I understand that. But people
all over the world started telling me that they were using it for diabetes or newly diagnosed
asthma, for losing weight, for finding a job, for going through chemotherapy.
And I realized that this was something that a lot of people could unlock, this resilience
that we have as gamers. For me, the big takeaway from that experience
was that pain is inevitable, but suffering is really optional. You know, we have the
opportunity to rise to the heroic occasion when we have to confront these difficulties
and to become the best version of ourselves. So the good news is, after hearing from all
these people play this game, I decided we should make a real product, a real platform
that people can play on. So I have a new startup company called SuperBetter. I'll just give
you a sneak preview of what the game looks like. So you can see, there's an actually
real secret headquarters that you build where your friends and family play with you. We
even have a secret lab where we track different things that you're building, for example,
we track your curiosity, your hope, your optimism, your perseverance, and, of course, your resilience.
And the idea here is that people can take control of their health. We've signed up lots
of people for our closed beta. And they're playing it for depression, anxiety, stress
reduction, eating better, sleeping better, quitting smoking, chronic pain. This is a
way to bring gamer traits into our real lives. Now, I have to say, I'm not the only gamer
who's had this experience of bringing games to real life. I want you to Google this term,
game transfer phenomena, or GTP. It's a new scientific term for this desire to bring our
gamer powers to the real world. It turns out that more than half of gamers
who play at least ten hours a week have this experience of being out in the real world
and wanting to do something gameful, like, for instance, for me, I have played a lot
of Farmville in my day. Whenever I walk by big plants, I want to harvest them. It's weird,
it's like this trigger. [ Laughter ]
>>Jane McGonigal: So this is happening all over the world. And if you give gamers real
things to do, they can rise to the heroic occasion.
The other thing I want you to Google if you haven't heard about it yet is a game called
Foldit. Just last week, scientists at University of Washington announced that 250,000 gamers
with no training in biochemistry had solved in a matter of ten days a scientific problem
that had confounded scientists for 15 years. It has to do with a way to treat AIDS. And
the gamers took ten days playing a video game to solve this biochemical problem. They're
very optimistic that it might be used for a really powerful drug to prevent the developing
of AIDS. So Nobel Prize, I see it coming. Really, the big idea here is that we have
to change the conversation. We have to stop thinking of games as just escapist. We need
to start thinking about them as returnists, that we play these games and we come back
to the real world with powers and skills that we can use to change it and to change our
own lives. I think we should stop telling kids that they're
wasting time when they're playing games, that they've thrown their lives away playing World
of Warcraft for 20 hours a week. What we should be telling them is, thank you for developing
these skills. You are ready to do something extraordinary in your real life. You are ready
to rise to the real heroic occasion. I'm very excited about the idea that there
are a billion people now who have this super resilience and can change the world. When
they rise to the real heroic occasion, it's no -- we have no idea how much they can accomplish.
But over the next decade, we are going to find out. And I think it will be very exciting.
Thank you. [ Applause ]