27: How Video Games Can Make Us SuperBetter

designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. Jane is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality Is Broken, Why Games make Us Better and How they can Change the world, and more recently, she's the author of Super Better, a revolutionary approach to getting stronger, happier, braver, and more resilient. Jane is also the inventor and co founder of the game super Better. More than four hundred thousand people tackle real life health challenges. Her TED talks are also immensely

popular and I've got millions and millions of views. Jane, it is so awesome having you on this podcast. Thank you guys. That is that number four one thousand, right, because in an old bio you had tutor thousand, but then in the reading your book, I see you were up to four hundred. You did a study with found one thousands, So yeah, let me update your numbers. Cool when you we'orth half a million now for the Virginia And uh, that's really exciting. That is super exciting. There's

so much we could potentially talk about. And you know, with this sort of with this sort of topic, it was, it's so innately interesting in me I had I have hundreds of pages of notes here, but I want to start off with something because I feel like in this society gaming doesn't always get such a good reputation, and it must drive you crazy because of all the science you've seen and you talk about in this book, as well as your own personal scientific studies, which we'll get

to you later. Why aren't games a mere distraction? Well there are many reasons, whise, but enough to fill for an inferty page book. But you know, the topic that I've been most interested in probably stems from the idea that you know, we have it all wrong about games, which is that we normally think about games as being the opposite of work, right play and work or diametrically opposed,

like hot and cold or day and night. But if you look at the research, and even if you look at brain scans of people playing video games, it turns out that the opposite of play is at work. The opposite of play is depression. And to me, that is the single most important idea that we need to cultivate and integrate into how we try to lead happier, healthier lives. Right so, reading your book to me felt like I

was playing a game. I know that it was in part large part design that way, but I really felt like I was getting immersed in it. I was looking out that window over there, I was jumping up, I was walking, I was doing all these things. It was just really cool. I've never ever read a book in my life where I felt like I was actually like leveling up as each chapter went on. That's awesome. You know.

It's interesting. There have been a lot of books in recent years about the idea of using game design to try to inspire people to change their lives. And I once read a book review that I thought was so insightful and incisive, which said, you know, if this author believes all these ideas, why is the book not a game.

Shouldn't they be really embodying this in their book, And so I thought that was really important for me as a game designer and an author to really try to integrate the ideas if I think, if I think that that game design does inspire us to learn better and improve faster, that should be a part of the book. So I'm really glad that it actually delivered that experiential

quality it did. And I really like how you are really vulnerable and bring in your personal story and how this really motivated you to want to get into Now are you sick of telling the story? But first of all, because I personally, you know, I have like my own story blah blah blah, and I'm told it so many times the past couple of years. It almost feels like not even me anymore in a way. How do I

feel for you? I don't want to be yet the interviewer saying, tell me your story, you know, But yeah, I know, I'll tell you why, you know, I always I always try to tell it a little bit differently. But what else can I share about this experience? So it's a good challenge for me and I then we should we should talk about it so it's really important.

It is important. So, I mean, the basics of the story are that six years ago, while I was in the middle of writing my first book, Reality's Broken, which was about the psychology of games, I got a traumatic brain injury. And it started out a simple concussion, and I learned that many concussions do not feel in a few days or a few weeks. Mine actually took a year to really fully recover. And during that time period, I was fully concussed, couldn't think or I think clearly.

I couldn't write, couldn't remember things. I was nauseous all the time, migraines every day, I barely out of bed, and like many people with concussions that stretch out for a while, I got severely anxious and depressed. And I learned later that it's not just a consequence of I'm really anxious because I can't work, or I'm depressed tin

get out of bed. Actually, the brain chemistry changes during the healing process, and depression anxiety are as much symptoms of the injury as as just a emotional reaction to it. And you know, after a month, when my doctor told me that it was looking like it might be three months or longer to where I would be feeling better. I was. I sort of hit the wall, and that was when I decided to try to use all my

research to help. Up until that point, I'm just kind of waiting to get better and trying to just grip my teeth and get through it. But when you know you're not telling you might be three months. If it's not three months, it might be a year. And if it's not a year to get better, you might be like this forever. Then I knew I needed a new strategy because I mean, I basically seriously just wanted to kill myself if I was going to be in that much pain and that disabled for the rest of my life.

And I know, I know that to many people, killing yourself or embedding a game do not seem like the two most you know, natural like options. Those those are my only two options. But but you know, I was in the middle of all that researched on games and how they make us happier and better problem solvers, so it seemed worth a shot. Yeah, And not only in this book you talk about how living a gameful wife not just helped with that traumatic brain injury, but lots

of other things. Trea trained for your first marathon, you successfully could quit IVF treatment right, which resulted in the birth of your twin daughters. I don't know if I'm a wowed to say that. Yeah, and that became my new super Better challenge. They were actually ten weeks to be mature. So it went EQ for two months and I wound up adopting a new secret identity, which is one of the rules of Super Better to get their unique you stay and you know, turned all the nurses

and doctors into our allies. And so, yeah, it is a method that you can come back to and play. Like any good game, you should be able to play at different times with different people with different strategies, and so I have used it for lots of different things in my life for more half a million users. The top five most common uses, though, are in disorder. Number one most common is depression to his anxiety. Three is a chronic illness of some kind, Number four is chronic pain,

and number five is PTSD. So people really are using it to tackle challenges much more serious than you might imagine could be effectively tackled with a game or a gamefule mindset. Now you mentioned PTSD and my friend and colleague, Anne Marie Ropke, who is your coibrator on a study, and it's so cool to see you mention her in your book. I think she she really deserves, you know, get a lot of attention. I write about her a lot of in my in my own upcoming book on

creativity because her research is terrific. Post a static growth, there are these different there's all these other forms of of of of so there's post of static growth, there's post traumatic growth right itself, and these things which in the field of polity psychology which I work in, and you talk a lot about that in the book, and how how gaming can can be used to for both these things. Could you just explain a little bit for the audience what post a static growth is and what

post traumatic growth is. Sure, but we'll start with post traumatic growth because that's the one that's been studied, as you know, more extensively, and it's related to post traumatic stress disorder. It's not the opposite of post traumatic stress disorder, which it sounds like, because many people who have post

traumatic growth also experience post traumatic stress disorder. First, you know, it's a as they wrestle of the trauma, but scientific literature suggests that it's actually fairly common for people to go through traumatic experience and come out on the other side feeling stronger in some way. Maybe they feel like they understand their own resilience better, they feel better understood

by their friends and family. Maybe they feel like they can change their priorities now to lead a life that's truer to what really matters to them, maybe less about what others expect of them. These sort of positive outcomes where they take a terrible and traumatizing experience and use it to kind of become a stronger, braver, and often in many ways happier version of themselves even though they

went through this terrible thing. And so some researchers, as you know, have been wondering, is there any way to get these benefits without a trauma, because obviously, you know, know all those books, Yeah, nobody would wish to go through these things that, even if they yield these amazing

life changing benefits. So Amory Rippy was one of the first people to really look for other kinds of life experiences that are usually identified as positive experiences but seem to share some of the qualities of traumatic experiences that help us grow, and she was really looking at things that force you to dig deep, sail a lot, maybe even suffer a lot as you're trying to reach your goal or or embrace the experience. The things like training for a marathon, becoming a parent for the first time,

writing a book. By the way, I did all three things last year. So I am the most post ecstatic growth person on the planet. Can you od ecstasy? I know, I'm like, I'm living it. I'm living it, but as I post a static growth is the term that she coined to describe this, and it's not I mean, I'm not talking about standing on a mountaintop and having a rave.

You know, it's not just ecstasy. It's doing things that you've chosen, that you are excited about, that you are happy to be doing, but they're going to be a significant enough challenge to your resources, to your skills and capabilities that you are going to be forced to wrestle with what you're capable of. Really reach out to friends and family for help in many of the same ways that you do with the trauma, and it turns out that you can experience a lot of the same benefits.

So with super better, which seems to be pretty effective at generating post traumatic growth. We've seen a lot of people try to, you know, do this sort of sneak in this back door to those benefits by using it for exactly those kinds of things, writing books, trying to start their own company, training for Iron Man events, and things like that. And I would say, so far, our data suggests that it's weirdly, it may be easier to get these benefits from trauma that it is from from

these things that you choose for yourself. And and that's something I'm interesting exploring further in our research to see if there's anything we can do about that, or maybe it's just a matter of when you're forced to confront something that you didn't choose for yourself that it really does bring out something different in terms of the sort of starkness as you complok at yourself and look at the world and figure out, you know, what you're made of and what you want to which when you get

back to the world. It's like the famous philosophy experiment with the experience machine. You know, you could be you know, if you give people the option to have simulate pleasurable experiences every second of their entire life. Very few people take it. They would rather have authentic, challenging experiences than a whole life of simulating pleasure. Well, you know, that's really interesting because one of my favorite philosophers gentlemen by

the name of Bernard Suits. He's a Canadian philosopher who passed has passed away just recently. Friend is a Canadian philosopher, so maybe they sed to hang out and PLoP about. He wrote my all time favorite book on games, which was called The Grasshopper on Utopia playing games, and his follows philosophical premise was that if we achieved utopian society, no hunger, no poverty, no war, that the only thing we would be able to do to avoid going crazy

and killing ourselves would be to play games. That we would have to invent these obstacles, right, it calls them unnecessary obstacles to bring a sense of meaning and purpose to our lives. If all the real problems are solved, we would need games to fulfill our desire to be challenged and to connect. And I think that's absolutely true. I agree too, it is that the challenge part is

very essential. You know, we could sit there eating bond bonds and watching reality TV, and yeah, maybe a pleasurable experience, but people that go through that don't report any personal growth at all. They don't report any increase in meaning. Yes, definitely not so clearly there's more of that. You know, you just made me think when we talk about the importance of challenge, it's so strongly tied to the flow literature.

And I know that you've told me, you know, in our correspondence that the gaming community is really big at admirers of MEI, chickset me I as research. Yeah, so you know, his model of flow is that there should be you know, the challenge should be not completely matched, it should be just a little bit harder than your current skill level. And so when you're designing games, do you or in general, when game designers design games, how much do they take into account, like the average ability

level of the player? I mean, it's so tricky because there's such individual variation, right of people playing these games. And when you're designing, you're designing it for Are you designing it for the average? Who are you design it for? You know? Right? Well, I mean one of the good things about games is that typically every new player of a game is bad at it because they don't know how to play. They never played it before. And so in a way, you don't actually have to worry about

people's individual skills and abilities. Games are pretty equalizing early on. You know, if you've played the game for a thousand hours, you may be amazingly better than someone else's played it for a thousand hours, because you have natural gifts and talents or previous experience that you can draw on. But but most people, when we start playing games, we're terrible. We don't know how they work. It's total trial and error.

We're learning it. So I mean most game designers, actually it's pretty easy to you have you every player who comes to your game for the first time is essentially, you know, kind of like a blank slate. So that's one way to look at it. I mean, another way to look at it in the kinds of games that I designed. A lot of the games that I've designed, which are meant to achieve real world goals, I am.

I am thinking about how do I get that challenge curve to the right spot that someone can experience flow. I think they may already have a challenge in mind. And my job as a game designer is to figure out what I need to do to get them up, get their skills and ability levels up to the point where they can meet that challenge. Just to give you an example, I had the chance to design a game for the New York Public Library a few years ago,

and they were like, what do you want. I don't know, do whatever you want with the game, but we want it to be at the library. And I decided that the goal of the game should be to write a book. Because almost ninety percent of young people in the United States say they want to write a book someday. So I thought, Okay, let's start working with a real goal that people have. Okay, that's a challenge, write a book.

As a game designer, my job is to figure out what does the average person need in the way of support, resources, allies, power ups to make it possible for anybody to write a book within a certain number of hours of engaging with a game. They need inspiration, they might need peer editors, line editors, you know, they need a structure. You know, I should create a structure that any author can come in and play with it. So I mean I'm a little bit different from a video game designer. That way.

I do think about flow a lot, but I think about I think a lot about my job as real world game designer is to improve people's skills and abilities so that they can meet the challenge that they've already decided to embrace. That's so good. You know, you talk a lot in your book about and I see analogus to the deliberate practice literature. You know, Chay anders Ericson argues that it's not so much the amount of hours of deliberate practice that are important, it's the quality of

those hours, always on the edge of your ability. Yeah, and so I see analogues to the kinds of things you're talking about in your book when you talk about why you need a good balance between game pursuits and real world goals, and you you say that people play video games, and you say about three hours a day tend to reap the benefits of play. So you would probably argue that, really, you know, it's the quality of those game full experiences that that matter more than just

share hours. You know, are you getting in flow? Are you challenging yourself? Are you pushing yourself? You also make a distinction between playing to escape versus playing with purpose yeah, I thought I wonder if you could talk a little more about that. Sure, well, I mean, the good news for people who don't want to spend a lot of time playing games is that when you look at the peer reviewed literature studies that have found benefits like decreased depression,

decrease anxiety, improved mood, improve relationships with the family. In reverview play with they have family benefits for as little as twenty minutes, three times a week, so you can make a difference. And even you know, for studies where they're looking at video games as like a cosmative vaccine against PTSD, I'm sure you've seen the Oxford University studies that playing Tetris for ten minutes within twenty four hours

of the traumatical experience Tetris. Yeah, everybody should have it on their phone because if you see a trauma, experience a trauma, you play it for ten minutes within twenty four hours, and it diverts the mind's eye basically to have flashbacks of the game instead of the trauma. It's been shown to decrease flashbacks and symptoms of BTSD and

that's just ten minutes a gameplay. So as you say, it's really about what is the what is the right game at the right time, and you're not You don't have to be playing for hours a day, although if you are playing for more than three hours a day, the research literature suggests there are opportunity costs, and we do see some of the negative effects that have been associated with video games, like being more depressed, being more anxious,

being socially isolated from people who aren't playing the same game. Uh, and even worse, you know, worse performance at work or school. That's just because there's only so many hours in a day, and if you tend to be playing more than three hours a day, it's just mathematically impossible to put the necessary effort and time into physical activity, maintaining relationships outside the game, school and work, and that sort of thing. So that seems to be a little bit of a

tipping point. I did a meta analysis of every study that's looked at addiction and negative impacts, and no study found negative impacts at under twenty hours a week, whereas many studies did at somewhere at twenty hours a week somewhort thirty hours a week. So but it does seem pretty clear that there's a safe cut off point. If you're under twenty hours a week, nobody's finding negative impacts.

So well, there's one exception to that, which I do talk about in the book, which is, you know, you can play twenty hours a week trying to kill strangers online and that does seem to create a kind of testosterone poisoning effect. That's so good. Yeah, yeah, no, I like that's what I like about your book because you have this, you have this nuance about these specific features of gaming that are important. I mean it, you know, saying a blanket statement like games will improve your social life,

you know, increase your social connection. I mean just a blanket statement like that is not as meaningful as actually being able to say, what are your exact features that you know will increase social affiliation and things like that. Yeah, And I mean that's one of my goals in writing

this book. Is there are more than I mean, there're more than a thousand studies that have done a really good job of trying to figure out what are the features of different games that produce different benefits, but they're all behind academic firewalls. And and either way, if you ever need anything that's kind an academic. You know, I have a friend, I have a friend academy. That's good. I mean, you're you can be my friend in the academy.

That's great a friend. I mean, I do have friends that I'm constantly emailing people for PDFs of scientific artic I have another friend that does all the time. She says to me a long list of articles. Yeah, yeah, I don't know I should be admitting that on public is that No? No, that's like, I mean, that's we Basically, it's like almost like an academic civil rights movement. We need people to do that. We need civil disobedience, or we just freely spread our research so that people can

access it. But yeah, so anyway, you know, we have one point two three billion people on this planet who spend on average hourday playing video games. What percentage of them can access the scientific papers. I don't know, less than one percent. So I'm really trying to help make sure people have access to the really practical findings that can help them lead happier, healthier lives. Absolutely, you know, I study the psychology of creativity and I study the

psychology of play. But when I say that, it's funny because the whole research of scientific literature and the science of not my time, my gaming, the science of play. Yeah, there's like not one study about video video games. It's all about like pretend play. Don't get me started. Oh my god. I mean people are always I want to be fair because my mentor, my mentor and grad schal Jerome Singer is a pioneer in the field of pretend play. So he's done a lot of really good, important work.

But it kind of stops there. Right, It's a good start. But yeah, so it must say it must drive you crazy. People are always sending me books and articles by people is that he play, saying oh you must love this person, must love this research. Be like, oh maybe I do. They say play is good, great, let me look at it, and inevitably they say something negative about video games that it doesn't qualify as the right kind of play. It's too structured, it's too goal oriented, it's too much screen time.

You know, one of the great books on play to come out un last I don't know, decade play, like not video gameplay. But there has to be a certain special kind of make believe you play Gray, Peter Gray, I would say, by Stuart Brown, I think it's just

called play right. Oh my god. People are always saying you must love that book, but there's a whole chapter on how sad empathetic video gamers are, and you know, I mean, besides how incredibly damaging it is to shame an entire generation of young people and has all kinds of consequences for their self esteem and their ability to

actually benefit from these games. It's I actually think there's something very special about goal oriented play that builds a different kind of resilience, because in order to be resilient, you have to have a goal that you're focused on, you know, and maqu leave play you're constantly shifting and changing. Because everything's free, you can always accommodate whatever new idea

or direction it goes in. There's no need for resilience, and we know, I mean, I believe if you look at literature, the number one benefit people get from playing games is resilience in the face of setbacks. The ability to stay focus on a goal and say optimistic and recruit allies and try different strategies have that psychological flexibility. And so I think the goal orientation nature of gameplay, to me, it is personally, you know, as a special relevance.

If we're trying to improve people's real life, it's different from creativity. But I wanted to ask you a question. If I can turn the tables, I'll interview. Of course, So people are trying to study the impact of games on creativity, which if really in kids, and it would be helpful to me when I talk to the public about some of the studies to get an expert opinion on some of the measures they're using. So what is your expert opinion on the Torrents Test of creativity? Well, unfortunately,

that's the best we have right now. And you know, the big thing we're doing the imaginations too, is were We just gave out three million dollars to create a new imagination scale that actually uses We just recently announced our winners of sixteen innovative approaches to studying imagination from virtual reality worlds. Oh that's yeah. So to you know, looking at narrative creativity to we really need the field

needs to get new measures. The Torrents test was a good start, you know, just like just like pretend play with a good start an understanding play, we really do need to evolve, evolve. The field needs to evolve, So it has. You know that these charges of how many uses for a brick are there? How many coming up with all these things on this spot are It's only the very small part of I'm terrible metaphors. I'm trying to say a small part of the iceberg even make

any sense. That doesn't make sense though, right the tip of the Yeah, that's good. So it's not it's not useless. It's not useless. It correlates with real world creative achievement thirty forty years later. But the thing it's interesting, and this you might find this interesting, is that Paul Tarns, by the way, is one of my intellectual heroes, and he initiated this, this monumental longitudinal study of over and

they're still following up these these adults. Now you know, they start off as elementary school kids with tarrents in the fifties and sixties, and they fought and they're still following them up. And they found that the best predictor of lifelong creativity personally meaningful as well as publicly recognized was was not his Tarns tests. It was not any test. It wasn't the IQ tests or the standardized test. It was something much simpler and yet complex at the same time.

It was the extent to which the kids fell in love with the future image of themselves when they were when they were really young. He found that far and away that one variable predicted thirty It's the only thing that stood the test of time, you know, like thirty forty years later, where where Iq and his divergent thinking tests like lost their predictive power dramatically. So they would imagine themselves in their sort of dream role. What are

you doing, what are you creating? What are you contributing? Is that the sort of Yeah, so a lot of them fell in love with the future image on themselves, but then a lot of them just fell in love with something. So he has a beautiful journal article towards the end of his life he wrote called the Importance of Falling in Love with Something. It is my favorite

articles ever and he shows how this. You know, even at a very young age, people tend to show themes of what they're going to be someday in life if we just listen to them. And the thing I like about Torrance is he really took the time to listen to people. He did create the most used creativity test of all time. But what people don't realize is he also discovered lots of other variables that were equally predictive. Another really predictive variable was the extent to which you're

happy being a minority of one. So the extent to which you are happy having idea and holding on to that idea even if everyone's ridiculing you or telling you, hey, well i'm a good that that explains a lot of mind success. I think there's been a lot a long time being the only person curiotically. Well, that's so interesting. Uh well, a couple of live a couple of thoughts

to that. So I think our audience might be interested to know that there have been studies looking at using the Torrents test, the creativity to see a video gameplay has an effect on scores on that test, and it does, according to the studies that have been published, that the kids who spend more time playing games have an increase in score. There's no core, there's no causation. It's not a causation thing. I mean, they've just found that they didn't like give kids video games to play for six

months and see if their score went up. There's just kids who happened to spend a lot of time playing video games seem to score significantly higher. Oh my god, can you imagine the kids like you, they'd be like lining up the door to you know, I get to play more video games for six months. Yeah, that's my students psychology class if any. Yeah. But so that's that's interesting.

And one thing that the researchers really pointed out with that is it was any genre of game that wasn't just you know games that we associate with increasing creativity like Minecraft. It was even playing you know, shooter games, which we have all sorts of anxiety about. So that was interesting. Now, can I tell you a personal story

about myself based on what you just were sharing? This idea of that early childhood, like the things that we fall in love with, can give us glimpse into where our biggest achievements and contributions to society might be some day. When I was when I just graduated from college, I was living in a tiny little apartment with a roommate in New York City and we had, like I wish we had like forty mice that would like an habit department.

And I was just miserable, and I like, one day I went to put on my running shoes and there was a dead mouse in the shoe, and that was just sort of for me a little point. I was like, I need to change my life. I was working at a dot com company at the time, and I called my sister and she's like my twin sister, Kellen mcdonagall, who many people will know. She teaches psychology at Stanford University. She's written all the amazing books about willpower and stress,

so of course she's my own personal guru. At the time, she was doing her PhD at Stanford, and she gave me this this exercise out of a book that was supposed to help you figure out what you want to do with your life. So she gave me this exercise that was supposed to help you figure out what you

should do to make a more meaningful contribution. And the exercise was think about what you were really drawn to when you were the youngest age you can remember, and what people you know praise you for being good at better than average. And so I'm like, well, what was I doing back then? And the two things came to mind. One was that I always was making up games, like

games for the playground. I'd be like, let's am in a new playground game, or I'd make giant board games on our basement floor, you know, not DIGITALI this is before we had computers at home, So that was one thing I was like, well, okay, I was like making up games. And another thing was I was always like giving speeches. I'd like stand up on a chair in kindergarten and give a speech, or you know, i'd like write an essay and give it in front of the

school auditorium or something. So it's like, okay, well, obviously some kind of career involving making up weird games and giving speeches. But at the time, I was, you know, an editor for a dot com website. I had, was not applied to grad school or anything yet, And I just think it's really funny that at the time I was like, well, there's no career that involves making up weird games and giving speeches like fast forward, you know, fifteen, that's your life. Later that was, in fact the best

career for me to pursue. I just it took them took more than a decade to actually kind of make up a career like that. So that's that's the evidence that you know, one of your your intellectual hero mentors what he talks about perfect Yeah, yeah, you know, these themes are there if we choose to see them, we choose to get in touch with them, and we may not know what they mean right away, you know, because

because what I mean, that's the true creativity. You may have had a couple of things that you fell in love with as a kid that no else has fall in love with the same way, and you're going to have to invent a career, invent a role in society. That I mean, that's that's the true creativity. I think. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more with that. Actually, absolutely. To make sure we talk about your game super better. You know, I have it on my iPhone and uh, I'm not

that good, but I'm trying. I'm trying. How can you not be good? I mean, the only way to not be good at it is to ignore it, I would think.

But I mean, let's let's let's it's really interesting because the word game is something I've been I've been struggling with to describe this, so now now I just call it a method because when we put in the app store, actually the first sentence in the app Store description was super better is not a game because I have designed a lot of games, and this is not a game in the way that other things I've designed have been gained.

And I've come toabil is that this is really I mean, it's a mindset intervention that uses some of the tropes of gaming, but really what we're doing is we're teaching you to think like a game designer. We're we're teaching you the strategies that game designers use to help their players achieve more audacious goals, to be more resilient in the face of setbacks, to be better able to learn

and improve. So I've been I've been really I'm really really careful trying to think about how do I explain these people, because I don't want you to download app and think you're going to be playing a game like Tetris or Candy Crash Saga. It's it's it's a it's more like a it's like a class. It's like a course in in mastering all of these amazing superpowers that game designers have and you just are learning to unleash them in your own life. You know, what does it

take to design a good power up? What does it what does it mean to to identify a bad guy and have all the five different strategies for tackling it. You know that what is a good quest you that you can design for yourself. So that's that's a small nuance that I'm trying trying to play around with. What is the definition of a game? Well, my definition of a game is most influenced by that wonderful philosopher I mentioned earlier, Bernard's Suits. He said, a game is an

unnecessary obstacle that we volunteer to try to overcome. So if you think about golf, this is a classic example. In golf, your goal is to get a small ball and a small hole. And if you were not playing a game, how would you do that? You would walk up to the hole and put the ball in, and you'd be like, yes, I did it. But because it's a game, you allow there to be this totally unnecessary obstacle in your way. You have to stand really far away from the hole. That is an unnecessary obstacle that

provokes curiosity, you know, can I do it? It provokes creativity, what's the best way? Let me try different strategies. It promotes learning an improvement because you're going to have never done this before, so you have to learn and improve and not to mention using a club, which is also a totally inefficient way to achieve this goal. So so for me, a game is really it's just leaning into these voluntary obstacles that provoke curiosity and creativity and give

us the experience to learn and improve. I like that definition a lot, and your game super better. You're still going to call it. I call it a method. It's a method that. Yeah, it's a method that you can learn through the book, or you can learn it through the app or the web platform, or you can you know,

learn it just by listening to a podcast. Really, I mean because it's really just a way of it's a systematic way of tackling challenges in everyday life through the eyes of as if you were a game designer and you paired up with Annie to do the study and you found that it significally reduced symptoms of depression, anxiety, increased optimism, social support, and self efficacy, which is basically

self confidence for our listeners. And by the way, this study was with people who meant the criteria for clinical depression, so not just anybody, but people with the significant amount of depression that they were experiencing. And one thing that's interesting about the study is, you know, we had people participating who were not receiving any treatment. We had people who were on prescription medication for the depression, and we had people who were in therapy or counseling, and all

three groups improved at similar rates. The sort of distance that they moved on the depression scale was similar whether they were no treatment, medication, or therapy. So that was really kind of awesome to see that this can help no matter what you're doing to try to get better, that this this creates, that this adds a layer of improvement, and it also they felt significantly happier and more satisfied with their lives. So this is really it would count

as a positive intervention. You know, you have lots of psychological interventions that are designed to get you from like negative fifteen to zero, but this is really a good example of what we put what we I would consider in the class of positive interventions, which are designed to

get from negative fifteen to positive fifteen. Yeah, and I mean I do think I mean when I as you know, from the start of the bar, when people first started using the same method after I made some videos about it, and they would write me and say that they were, you know, playing a version of the game for really significant traumas, things much worse than me. A young man in his twenties who had just gotten a terminal cancer diagnosis, untreatable,

that's it. You know, a young father with two daughters and of the age of ten who just gotten an als diagnosis. You know, people who are grieving for the loss of a beloved spouse, you know, twenty years of marriage and then suddenly to lose them. And they were talking about how this, this game or this method was helping them be happier and stronger, braver. That was when I realized that there was something weird going on here. But it's not just like about treating depression or anxiety.

And that was actually how I found the literature on post traumatic growth. So I do think that this is it's not just about typical resilience and getting back to normal. And that's actually where the name super Better comes from. This is it? I don't I don't know if I don't know if I talk about this, I don't often

talk about this. The name super Better was inspired by the fact that you know, when you have any kind of traumatic brain injury, you don't really know how much better you're going to get in the sense of will I get back to normal? And everybody's telling you get better soon, and what they mean is, please get back to normal and be the exact same level of cognitive ability that you were before, and you don't know if

you're going to get there. And so I thought every time some would say that, I wanted to tell them, I don't know if I'm going to get better. And I was mentally preparing for having to come up with a different life plan that had a different career and a different situation for my family. So I thought to myself a lot, I may not get better in the sense of being back to normal, but maybe I can still become a better version of myself. So I won't

be the old Jane. I'll be a new Jane that's come through this and just being more of a just a badass version of myself for having gone through this. And so that was to me, that's where they super better came from. So I can't get better, but I'll get super better. It'll be like beyond what I was before, because I may never be just the same person I was. And so that idea of going beyond getting back to normal, having that positive impact that that is that goes even

above resilience or normal coping. You know, positive coping. Sound like such a positive psychologist. Well, I mean, you know, I'm sure I am. You know, ieio I did add that to my bio. Yeah, that that I mean. Well, yeah, I had that really funny experience with Marty Seligman earlier in my career. Tell me about that one. Well, you know, I was trying to figure out why Well, I was looking at the psychology of games. Why when people play

games do they seem to not suffer? That was sort of a question I was really interested in, And why why do they feel so optimistic and engaged and they seem to derive meaning and purpose from an activity that other people see as meaningless and purposeless, But they were going to be so much meaning and purpose. So it's sort of breaking down what a games do effectively more than other things in our lives. And I came up

with thisteria of four things. And that was the same time that Marty was working on his new perma scheme. You know, what are the what are the things necessary for meaningful and purposeful life. And you know, you've got the P for positive emotions, for engagement, our relationships, and for meanings, so connecting from my bigger than themself. And then he added a controversially for like achievement and accomplishment. And so we were both sort of doing this separately.

And the first time I met him, you know, started to share my research, I was just like, by the way, it's a perfect match. You know what I've figured out that games do so well and what you've identified as a criteria for a meaningful and purposeful life. And I

was lucky definitely was like, oh, very interesting. Let me take you under my wing and help me figure this out more so that I mean, that's been really I mean, that was you know, ten years ago now, but that, uh, seeing that connection between what great researchers and psychology we're saying yielded these important emotional and mental benefits and what I could clearly see game designers were doing purposefully and elegantly, that was that was one of the big aha, light

bulb moments, you know, of my life to make me think, well, there's something going on here with game design. It's not just escapist activity. It's not just entertainment, it's not just way to pass the time. That we're really activating core needs, core psychological needs. And and you know, it would be great if we could translate that also to other aspects

of our lives. Yes, and I love how in your book you have these personal stories that shows such diversity of ways that people have showed this growth through, you know, like curing insomnia and grief, people wanting to be sexier. You know, oh and it's sexiert well, I love right. One of the women in the book, Joyce Kirwin, had just retired. She wanted to be sexier for has been which was I mean, it worked apparently so she was very happy or even just finding a new spark in

life or something. Yeah. I really like that. You know. You you have this whole section of your book on all these rules of super better to help get the most out of each day, and you know, I want people to buy the book and to go through that, so I won't I won't read all the rules and things, but I found them really personally helpful to me. A lot of these exercises really good. I like the mind reading machine, like I just liked all the ones that I really like a lot. I like coming up with

a secret identity. I think I did that a lot as a kid, just as a creative kid who wasn't too happy with my own identity as a wording disabled. But you know, it was really good to come up with the secret identity where I was this like you know, computer hacker, you know, or something. I'll tell you that's a whole other story. I know. Well, I mean, actually, it's one of the most wonderful things that you can do in super Better is to share your good identity

with someone. I mean, it turns out to be amazingly gratifying. People really enjoy coming up with secret identity. But when somebody tells you their secret identity, it's such a window into you know, who they want to be right now. You know what they're looking forward to becoming, trying trying to create in their lives. And I just love it.

I mean when even it just like book signings this month, people come up to me and have me sign it for their secret identity, and you know, I'm like, like last night in Portland, I met somebody who his secret identity was sidekick Man, and I'm like sidekickman, Like that doesn't even who wants to be a sidekick? Doesn't everyone want to be Batman? Not Robbins. I was immediately intrigued, you know what. I'm like, what what are sidekicks? You know?

Man superpowers? Because like I've never heard of that kind of superhero. He's like, Oh, you know, I'm just right now, I'm taking a like a sort of backseat to my wife's career. And I'm like really being like a primary parent, and you know, it's my job is to really be there for my wife right now and give her career, you know, sort of primary role. And I don't know

that he was. Instead of thinking about it as being a kind of i don't know, lower status functioning in the family hierarchy, he was looking at it as as a superpower. Yeah, it's really you learn a lot about people and what's in their hearts. And I love that. Yeah, but you're not going to tell me your secret identity. You'll have to you know, that should be that should be like in the notes for this episode at the very bottom, like an easter egg people, I'll listen to

the whole episode. They get a little seal totally going to do it and make a note to do secret identity. Okay, I'm just making notes of stuff. So what does an epic win? Well, uh, in super better terms and epic wing is it's a moment or outcome where you feel it truly represents that you have gotten super better but you are you have sort of transcended some old ability or limitations on yourself, and you feel like this represents

a stronger graver, a happier version of yourself. And a lot of these epic winds are not plannable at the start of your journey. I mean, obviously for me, when I started playing this game, which I called Jane the Concussions Layer, my goal, if you'd ask, my goal was just to be able to work again. I think you know, I wanted to finish, go back to finishing my book. I wanted I wanted to be able to go back to running if I could do my first you know,

five kg and little little winds. But the real epic win, of course, was inventing something that could help people, you know, experienced post traumatic growth. And I would never have expected that when I first got a concussion. Right, So we try to help people see these new windows, right, you know that old saying door closes and a window opens, which we know is one of the psychological skills associated with the ability to experience post My growth is looking

for these positive outcomes that weren't possible before. So that's we we try. You know, those are the kinds of epic wins that I get most excited about. People kind of divert their classical orientation towards celebrating things that are you know, more meaningful to them than than they would

have been able to identify before they started. Yeah, and I love how you talk about how living you know, orienting your whole life towards get like beating your personal record, and how that can you get allows yourself to give yourself especially like you say, you encourage people to give yourself permission to do what matters most to you today, like right now, like there's nothing stopping me from looking out my window, and you know, like you know, like

I really, Oh you keep mentioning looking at your windows. I should say for for listeners, we you know, we just try to get you to do things to provoke different positive emotions. And looking at your windows a way to provoke curiosity because those for me, you don't know what you might see, but I love that. And you can also look in windows is the other technique that works, but you have to be careful which windows you look

into for a legal and for you know, variety's sake. Absolutely, you just made me activated something, so like a lot. There is a form of therapy for people who have suffered from social anxiety where they try to treat life as a game. It's actually a well known therapy and it's been applied in lots of techniques in some what argue dodgy ways. So there's a whole community called the pickup artists. Are you familiar with that? Are you familiar? Yes?

And they call it the game, which is exactly exactly. Oh you know what's wrong with that? Right? You know why it's not a game because one of the principles rules of games. Besides, there are four things. You know, it's a voluntary obstacle, you get feedback, there's a clear win condition. But the fourth condition of a game is participation is voluntary and conscious. You can't play a game if you don't know you're playing a game. You've chosen

freely play it. So the pickup artist, the person who is a pickup artist is playing a game with people who don't know there's a game, have not voluntarily or consciously entered into the game, So it's not a game. So that is, you know, something we must keep in mind when we use game as a metaphor. It is not an effective or since youre metaphor, if you're talking about people who aren't consciously choosing to play. I think

that makes a lot of sense. You love your super Better community, right, I mean you've studied them and you've noticed that there's a lot of diversity amongst them, right, it's not like it's not just like your Super Better

community is like they're just one type of person, right right? Yeah? Yeah, Well, I mean if you look at the demographics for people who done the digital version that we've been able to collect data from, it's you slightly female, I think, depending on when we measure it, as much as sixty percent female.

But you know, ages range from thirteen to i mean super old, almost almost centenarians, and people who have say they've never played a video game, although I don't believe them because usually those people play solitaire constantly on their you know, PCs or their phone. So, but people who say they've never played a video game to people who play all the time, and so it is a you know, it's a it's a different group because everyone has a

game that they love. It might be bridge, it might be poker, it might be golf, it might be basketball, you know, pandemic whatever. Even not a video gamer, there's some game that you love that you naturally adapt, adopt and practice as gameful mindset. And so it seems to be pretty easy for people to get into the super better mindset. Cool, and you say you have a goal in life to see a game developer win a Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, you know, I'm thinking it might. Medicine

might be a more effective strategy. You know, when I first said that, I think I said the year twenty twenty three as the year that I predicted it would happen. That was using my future forecasting skills. So we've still got eight years left to rally the troops to work

on games that are worthy of a Nobel Prize. And I do think, you know, talk about on the book games being used to treat severe pain, anxiety, depression more effectively than pharmaceuticals, with fewer side effects and certainly less expensively. I feel like that is a realistic proposition. You know, if we can use games, I would be ready to give a Nobel Prize to the inventor Tetris right now already just you know me too. But it seems to be the best video game we have in terms of

its potential therapeutic uses for anxiety depression and PTSD. So you know, if the Noble Committee would ask me, I'd give it to that guy. I'm going to end here because you know, we've talked so much about all these benefits of living a game full life, and I want to just repeat a quote that I love from your book. You said, the biggest benefit of getting stronger, happier, and braver is finding the courage and means to live a life truer to your dreams right now, no matter what

obstacles you face along the way. And I personally can't think of any better reason to do anything in this world. So thank you so much for all the great work you do and for chatting with me today, Jane, Thank you Bett. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as informative and thought per booking as I did.

If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot Coming BA