Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal Page A

with a satisfying beep). The computer algorithms continuously adjusted the difficulty level to keep you playing at the very edge of your own abilities.
    As Sudnow put it, “Here’s all the motivation you’d ever want . . . and the prize seemed to be just holding on.” 7 The game completely sustained his attention, even when he wasn’t in front of the Atari console. “When I wasn’t at the TV, I was practicing the sequence in my imagination, walking down the street, sitting in a café twirling a salt shaker, looking up during dinner in a Japanese restaurant at a bamboo and rice paper trellis with Breakout -like rectangles on the ceiling . . . just waiting to get back to the game.” 8
    The better he got at the game, the more he wanted to play, and the more he played, the better he got. Sudnow was so taken aback by the intensity of this continuous feedback loop, he felt compelled to write an entire book to understand it. It’s an extended, poetic meditation on the emotions of game-play. He says almost everything we need to know about the emotional power of early video games in just these two famous sentences:
    This was a whole different business, nothing like I’d ever known, like night and day.... Thirty seconds of play, and I’m on a whole new plane of being, all my synapses wailing. 9
    What Sudnow describes is the extreme neurochemical activation that happens in our brains and bodies when we start to play a good computer or video game. He was intensely focused, highly motivated, creatively charged, and working at the very limits of his abilities. Immersion was almost instant. Flow was fast and virtually guaranteed.
    From zero to peak experience in thirty seconds flat—no wonder video games caught on. Never before in human history could this kind of optimal, emotional activation be accessed so cheaply, so reliably, so quickly.
    In the past, the deepest experiences of flow had required years of practice to achieve, or extraordinary settings. When Csíkszentmihályi first wrote about it, he was studying expert players of chess, or basketball, or rock climbing, or partner dancing. Flow was typically the result of years, if not decades, of learning the structure of an activity and strengthening the required skills and abilities. Otherwise, it required being immersed in a truly spectacular and unusual context, like dancing in the crowded streets during carnival or skiing down an exceptionally challenging mountainside.
    Flow wasn’t supposed to come easy. But, as Sudnow and millions of other early gamers discovered, video games made it possible to experience flow almost immediately. Video games took the traditional properties of potentially flow-inducing activities—a goal, obstacles, increasing challenge, and voluntary participation—and then used a combination of direct physical input (the joystick), flexible difficulty adjustment (the computer algorithms), and instant visual feedback (the video graphics) to tighten the feedback loop of games dramatically. And this faster, tighter feedback loop allowed for more reliable hits of the emotional reward fiero: each microlevel of difficulty you survived prompted a split-second emotional high.
    The result was a much faster cycle of learning and reward, and ultimately a sense of perfect and powerful control over a “microworld” on the screen. As Sudnow described, “The joystick-button box feels like a genuine implement of action. Bam, bam, bam, got you . . . Please don’t miss, come on, do it, get that brick, easy does it, no surprises, now stay cool, don’t panic, take it in stride, get it now. Get that closure. Video-game action. You know when you’ve got it like you know your first drunk.” 10
    It was this fast, reliable fix of flow and fiero that kept Sudnow and all the earliest gamers coming back for more. It’s no exaggeration to say that for many gamers, it probably felt like they had been waiting their whole lives for something like this: a seemingly free