Life the Game

And did these ideas begin to form in the womb the time when we were surrounded by light and dark shadows, mysterious sounds, and strange taste. After all, it was the first virtual sensory playground we ever knew, a reality external to us, filled with possibilities. We just needed a storyline, a narrative, to gather up the sensations put into ideas and then find a purpose a quest. Even in this way, you could say that life is just a game, one that we're born into. My name is Sadie and I

like to play Minecraft. I'm seven years old. I just like how the the natural terrain makes it feel like real life, except there's not like the other shapes except there's squares and circles, but um, I like it because the natural terrain is just it's just outstanding. In this episode, we look at how we create games within the game of life. We talked to an app developer about using data to level up and meet new challenges. We visit a game design company and find out how the wild

world of the multiplayer online battle arena works. And we check in with my house to works coworkers, two of them World of Warcraft veterans, about the allure of stepping into another universe. But first we look into the idea of running our lives like a game. Do you ever feel like in real life you sometimes are playing a game. Yeah, sometimes, except it's kind of more easier to control yourself in

real life or the game in real life. Some would say we're predisposed to engage in gaming to better control life. Think of all the ways we're participating in a kind of game of data, albeit unintentionally. There's the scoring system of social media, where the more followers and the more likes to the thoughts that you distribute to your followers,

the greater the reward to your ego. And then there's the more mundane stuff like building up your reward points on airline carrier for some future adventure you imagine you might have. The thing is that some of us will gain our lives no matter what. For instance, Ben Franklin might have been the first life logger, the first person to try to evaluate every aspect of his existence. And for the Ben Franklin's among us, they're living in the

golden age of information. Does this movement called quantified self that is made up of people who already tracking lots of these things about their life and trying to define insights and correlations kind of like we're doing. That's Josh Sharp, the co founder of the app exists. This is a personal analytics platform that collects all of the data that you're already tracking about your life and tries to find

trends and insights in that data. So we track things like your steps and your sleep, events that you have on during the day, your productivity, social media stats, even the weather, and then we can find relationships between these things and how they affect your habits and what happens

during your day. The app also has a mood component that asks you to rate your day from one to five, along with a few notes that you can jot down about the specifics, and this is where some pretty interesting insights arise when the app analyzes the data and finds

correlations and then allows you to be a detective. So in terms of mood, I have insights that I have a better day when I have more events on and when I get more steps, it's likely to be something like going to the theater or going through to a concert or having coffee with friends rather than something work related.

So I know that when I'm out doing things and seeing people, combining that with the steps correlation, I also mentioned that's what makes me have a better day, and that's interesting to me because as an introvert that works from home, I'm not seeing people a lot of the time, and I'm often not motivated to make the effort to go out and do that. So it's quite powerful to have that reminder you should go out and do stuff more,

you should see people. It will make you happier. There's even the ability to see what sort of correlations emerge from the music you listen to. If I want to be more productive, I have a correlation that I listened to more Radiohead and more Ryan Adams when I'm more productive. I don't know how Ryan Adams would feel about that. More generalized findings are that people tend to reap themselves happier on Fridays and Saturdays, but Sunday and that's more

of a so so day. By the time people are rating their moods on Sunday night, they're dreading and going back to work on Monday. And we actually can see from from our data across all of our users that people have the worst day of the week on Mondays and Tuesdays. That's not to say that we're all going to have crappy Mondays and Tuesdays, only that statistically the odds are fire for it. And while all this information is intriguing, Josh Sharp found that it's the mood aspect

to the app that's most popular with users. This ability to build out a story about their day. And we weren't really sure how how well this would work because it's the one thing that you have to do manually. We can't grab this style from anywhere else. You have to tell us how your day was. And it turns out that it's a really powerful habit. People really like reflecting on their day at the end of the day and picking this writing for whether the day was okay

or good or great. Um, And so we found that this is kind of built up a habit for many users, but they'll enjoy reflecting on the day at the end of the day. Well, some of us use data to build reality and feel empowered. Some of us use data to unlock skills and achievements in a parallel world. I just think about like, um, if oh, let's say, um, I'm hiking through a jungle and I discover a jungle tempole, I feel really accomplished because those things are kind of rare.

And yeah, so actually trying to really were Is there anything else that we haven't covered here that you would like to talk about Minecraft that you want people to know, Um, well, how to make an iron golem? The Minecraft golem is an imposing figure, an attribute it shares with another gaming archetype, the tank. Some players are going to choose a character who's more defensive and tanky, and their job is to

suck up damage from the other team. That's Todd Harris, co founder and CEO of High Res Studios, a game to elopment company that specializes in games like Smite, which uses a third person multiplayer online battle arena. He's describing one of the archetypes that a player can take on

when joining a team. Someone else on the team is going to be more aggressive and maybe be able to do a lot of damage, but they're going to be pretty fragile, more of a glass cannon it's called in gaming, where they need protection of their teammates, but they're going

to be able to output a lot of damage. And so just like a game like basketball, where you have specializations between the center and the guard and you probably can't switch those players, people over time developed these specializations and at the very beginning of the match, they will within the match lobby call out their role. They're saying, I'm going to play support, or I'm gonna play jungle, or I'm going to take the mid lane, and the community knows that the other roles have to be filled

if they want the best chance to win. For a little context here, Smite is based on ancient myths. Players can take on the visage of seventy five different mythical beings, gods, and goddesses from around the globe. You could be a tank like Athena or Hermes, or a hunter like Egyptian goddess Nief. Once they have their roles, and let's say I'm going to be more of a tank. I'm going to be kind of a more supportive character with a lot of health but not be able to do a

lot of damage. Well, now within the game, there's going to be you know, ten to twenty different characters. I might choose to fulfill that role. I'm really good at

the character Sylvanas. He's a tree god who was a small character inside of a giant tree, and he has four abilities that have been designed to be consistent with his lore, with his mythology, but makes sense within our universe and our game rules, And so I will have had to have mastered those four abilities and work in conjunction with my teammates who also have four distinct abilities,

and then go up against another team. If you're already seeing a matrix of characters, players and skill levels beginning to form, then it's easy to understand why this kind of game requires something called a matchmaker. Behind the scenes, we have software that's called the matchmaker, and its job is to make sure that your group of five is evenly matched as evenly as possible with another group of five it knows every game that you played, how many you won, how many you lost, and even whether you

want or lost, what your contribution level was. And matchmaking is very simple if it's a one versus one game, but when it comes to a team game, it's much more complicated because you have to parse out the individual skill level combined with the team and what if out of the five people on the team, two people play together all the time and they were matched with another three people that play together all the time versus three

people who are randoms. So there's a lot of both math and really machine learning algorithm around what makes a good match. Most players are aware that the matchmaker is running behind the scenes, but not I'll realize the amount of world building that goes into every one of the characters that they play. Take the Egyptian goddess Nith. Fifteen different people will contribute to her character, beginning with a

researcher who constructs her mythology explore the whole universe. Then once that's isolated down, a three D modeler is actually going to construct the geometry. It's basically like digital sculpting, and most of those people have sculpting backgrounds. Then in an artist is going to do the texture work and actually think of it as painting on the colors and the materials of the character. Where's their skin, where's their cloth and fabric, where's their metal? What colors are going

to be presented? How is that consistent with the mythological pantheon and feels like it fits within the family. Then a rigger is going to get involved. Who's going to put virtual bones and take that static sculpture and make it so that it can be manipulated by the next phase, which is an animator who's going to be breathing life into the character and doing key frame animation for every attack.

Then it goes on and on and on and just like, this is not the sort of game that's put together casually. It's not the kind of game that's played casually. It's very strategic, but very fast paced. I say, it's like speed chess played in a team format. And that's the level of thinking and teamwork required to play these games, which is why for people that are playing them within tournaments,

I mean, they're spending tremendous time mastering the game. I mean there are people out there whose full time job is playing Smite and they're earning a living doing that, being watched by other people and um and earning a full time living through a combination of prizing, companies sponsoring them, people watching their own content on YouTube and Twitch and monetizing that, and it really has become a whole new

career path of being a professional gamer. To give you an idea of Smite's reach, consider that hundreds of thousands of people play it on a daily basis, and according to Todd Harris, there are fourteen million registered accounts, meaning fourteen million people have played it at least east once. It's a lifestyle for a lot of folks, so they're not just playing the game, they're spectating, watching other people on YouTube, they're doing cosplay, dressing up like their favorite character,

and really um. For people who get attached to a game or set of games, it is a big part of their identity and their lifestyle. What keeps people engaged, though, is the ability to inspire a state of flow in the player. N Hi Chick sent me High is one of the founding fathers of positive psychology, and he was interested in exploring flashes of intense living against the dull background of everyday life. He called this a state of flow. In his studies, he found that people who dipped into

flow were happier than their non flow counterparts. But there have to be certain conditions met in order to engage and flow, like a clear set of goals, a self contained universe, immediate feedback, a manageable challenge not too hard, not too easy, and a sense of troll over the situation. And these are the kinds of conditions that games deliver

in spades. And though would it be easy to say that games like Smite are successful just because they inspire flow, but they forced players to find their edge, the truth is is that players find themselves in the midst of a shared experience. On the one level, of players have a meta relationship with the game designers, who continue to be blown away at the players emergent behaviors that they played the characters in ways they could have never imagined.

And then there are the players charging forth together in lockstep, speaking a coded gaming language transported to another universe, informing relationships in that universe. I told Julie the other day that I'm a recovering World of Warcraft addict, uh and I have been. I've had my all, my chips and I've been clean for I think five years. That's not how long I have to hear go to the same groups, set around and drink coffee at Share War Stories. I'm

Christian Seger. I am one of the co hosts of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Right for Brain Stuff and several of our other video shows here at how Stuff Works. And I am Terra c. V Wilson. I am co host of Stuffy miss in History Class, and I'm also the editorial director of how Stuff Works dot com. Christian and Tracy have been steeped in gaming since childhood. I've been playing games like role playing games since i

was a little kid. Uh And it's so gaming has always meant to me like groups storytelling, That's what I've always connected it with. Like when you're playing with other people, you're you're like creating an experience together, but you're also sort of telling a story together. And that's what I love about it. I've been playing since I was a kid, and playing role playing games since I was a kid. But I was really playing like the single player old

Sierra games. Oh yeah, like Kids Quest, King's Quest, all like all of those. I was really really into you as a kid, but I was a deeply socially awkward kid, and I also lived, uh and where we lived was kind of rural, and so it was kind of a whole to get to anybody's house to play with them, And so I did a lot of very solitary playing with all these video games that were kind of a

way of escape. They tied to a lot of things that I really liked about reading, because I was also really really into reading books, and so it was like I was playing in the story and that was awesome. And it wasn't until I became an adult that I started playing things that were more of a multiplayer situation and it became like a group social activity to play World of Warcraft together as an adult. Gaming provided a different benefit to Christian, one he can identify now that

he's had time away from World of Warcraft. I think, like, now that I look back on it, like the relaxation

of feeling like I had control over something in my life. Right, Like, so the outside, like real world is so chaotic and difficult to understand sometimes times, and at the time, I was in grad school, so I was like overwhelmed all the time with this this information that was getting poured into me, and it was the only way I could relax and be like I have control over this, Like if I do this particular task this many times, then

I know what the result is going to be. And I it had like a sort of cause and effect correlation that I didn't feel like I had in real life. And sometimes I would just do stuff that didn't even have any like consequence to it, like for hours, like fishing, Like I would just go fishing in World of Warcraft and just sit there and just catch fish. I had the I had the fishing title, the one you got, Yeah, and I won the Stengel Thorne Vale fishing things and

I had the fishing fishing poles like all of those things. Yeah, I thought it was the best. Like I was just like, oh, this is so relaxing in the way that I'm sure that many people, especially outdoorsmen, like go and fish for relaxation in the real world, but for me, it was like on my laptop in my living room. For Tracy, gaming transcends the road aspects of day to day life.

A lot of the stories that we read as kids are about people are overcoming something, and I for a lot of folks, when you grow up into adulthood, your life is just kind of boring. Like your obstacles are things like paying your rent and buying food, and those are legitimate things to be concerned about, but you know, they don't have the kind of weight that a lot of the things that we are used to reading about

as heroic. UH. And so when you get into a video game and you get to go do something, even if it doesn't seem like something big, but it's something different and it's something that seems important, that can be an awesome thing to get to feel like you're achieving when your real life is achieving things like showing up to work on time and paying all of your bills and not letting your house fall into complete disrepair through

your own neglect. Like, none of that seems very interesting in comparison to uh going on a bunch of quests so that you can literally turn into a bird and fly around. So there's an idea that's been around since two tent Let's call it the gamification of everything, that we can take this question the state of flow we funding games and apply it to all aspects of life.

Gets down to defining who you are, right and like, gamification gives you metrics to help you to define who you are, and we like to think that based on merit, that's how we accelerate and level up. This has led to some companies offering, say virtual badges to encourage people to turn in their reimbursement receipts on time, or scoring points to employees who contribute to internal forums where their

posts are light. These are ideas that Christian witnessed a few years back at south By Southwest, a kind of tech clearinghouse of films, interactive media, concerts, workshops and ideas. You think as I was reading through this stuff that you brought in this quote by this guy, Ian Bogo

story says uh. More specifically, gamification is marketing bull invented by consultants as a mean to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to domesticate it for use in the gray, hopeless waste land of big business where bullsh already reigns. Anyway, that was exactly what I was seeing at south By Southwest. The efforts can be pretty ham fisted, and let's face it, mandated play is not play. Moreover, it comes down to what motivates the individual.

Game designer Jane McGonagall explores the impact of the individual in her world bettering games which draw on collaboration to

solve real world problems like climate change and hunger. That philosophy for her started with her being very ill and and basically she made a game for herself to help get better, where her sister would kind of contact her every day to give her request and and it was really important to her recovering from being so ill um and so then she applied that idea get to a lot of other things, but she did apply it in a way that it was a lot more about making

the world better and making your life better. In the Gonicles example, it's about life imitating games, but at the core it's about connecting and reaching out across time and space. My fiance and I played multiplayer games together all the time for a lot of our relationship when it was long distance, we played Minecraft together and we built basically

a Minecraft world that was our world. The release updates of Minecraft periodically and new stuff gets introduced into the world, and we got to this point where we had explored so far beyond where we had built our home in the game that when new stuff would come out, we would have to go farther and farther to figure for new stuff to spawn in the world. When it spawned, a new chunk of the map. Uh. And so my fiance was like, what if I carved out our home and like plopped it into a new map and then

we would have the new stuff. And I said, Okay, well, we have to make sure our world that we created together that means something to us makes it into this new thing. Otherwise we're not doing it. Um And he'd basically do a big square and cut it out of the map that got all of the things that were important to us that we had built together and put

them into a new world, which was pretty awesome. You can still see in the world that cut lines where he did that, like your walk up, and they'll be a sheer cliff old world versus a new world, Old world versus new world. What's beautiful about this is that the home they built together in Minecraft is an interactive metaphor for their relationship, the ways in which the borders change and grow. I have this question for you. It's kind of a bizarre question. You might need to ponder

it for a moment. But what if real life it was like Minecraft? Would you like that? Not? Really? I love real life a lot because there weren't coffee clubs and oranges and these recording things. Real life gives us games and games give us a better life, a way to work out our fears and desires, a way to bridge a path to someone else. We can have our coffee cups are oranges, are recording things, and we can create a parallel world to place them in, including love

a Minecraft poem for your birthday. Tedious excision, Like severing mold lines from a crusader, you raise our our home from its played out old world, lifted up like a cloud hoisted castle, oaken arc driven by many waters, up from a still plane. It drifts like a lily shorn

off from its root, and then settles downstream. Little arm far flown tracks, still intact, framed now by scarp and topple, precipice edges abutting the ocean, sunflower planes, mushrooms suited for shortcuts and shrinking, stippled allium and ox eye ringing the trees. Our matching maps, new made and blank, unveil step by step what's ahead of our marks? A half glimpse before us an inkling a hint. This episode concludes our first season, which is an online love letter to you. Thank you

for listening to us. Thank you to Christian Singer and Tracy Wilson for plumbing the depths of gaming. You can find more of Tracy's poetry at geek Tastic pentameter dot com. And thanks to t Harris of High Rest Studios for taking us into the realms of gods and goddesses. We also want to thank Josh Sharp of Exists for revealing to us the moves that we make in the game of Life. The Stuff of Life is written and co produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music and sound design

is by co producer Noel Brown. Editorial oversight is provided by head of production Jerry Rowland. If you like what we do here at The Stuff of Life, visit us on Facebook and Twitter. In the meantime, email us your season two episodes suggestions at The Stuff of Life at how Staffords dot com, and we'll be seeing you again this summer. The sixt