Jane McGonigal on Happiness, Gaming and ARGs

Dan Hon (founder of UK ARG company SixToStart) has written up some fantastic notes on Jane McGonigal’s SXSW keynote, for those of us not lucky enough to attend the geek-fest in Austin, Texas.

Its a fantastic keynote, looking at the kind of feedback and emotions players get from virtual games, and how we might design more real-world interactions that share those qualities. In particular, Jane has been researching recent academic thinking about how we define happiness in our society, and what motivates people in their everyday lives. Here’s an excerpt from Dan’s write-up:

“Happiness is the new capital. If you want someone to value your service, eperience, you need to explicitly generate a positive experience for them. Happiness doesn’t mean what it used to – some people do define it as a warm fuzzy thing still, but I’m hear to say that it’s not a warm puppy, although I have a picture of my puppy coming up in 20 slides, so we will extract some, but this warm fuzziness is not what I want to talk about. I’ve been researching this for a while, so the 4 key principles that have come out of all of this peer reviewed research:

1. satisfying work to do
2. the experience of being good at something
3. time spent with people we like
4. the chance to be a part of something bigger

Not money. Not even necessarily fun. What blew my mind was the realisation that nothing gives you these four things in higher or better quality than games. Games given you satisfying work to do, designed for you to be successful, multiplayer games spent with people you like, and games give you a chance to be a part of something bigger.”

Really inspiring stuff, and light years away from most thinking on ARGs and games in general. Although if this whets your appetite, its worth checking out Amy Jo Kim’s presentation from the 2006 Etech conference – Putting The Fun Into Functional.