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

depression may be an adaptive mechanism meant to prevent us from falling victim to blind optimism—and squandering resources on the wrong goals. 11 It’s to our evolutionary advantage not to waste time and energy on goals we can’t realistically achieve. And so when we have no clear way to make productive progress, our neurological systems default to a state of low energy and motivation.
    During this period of mild depression, Nesse theorizes, we can conserve our resources and search for new, more realistic goals. But if we persist in pursuing unattainable goals? Then, Nesse proposes, the mechanism kicks into overdrive, triggering severe depression.
    Nesse thinks this mechanism, and our tendency to set unrealistic goals, may be the cause of much of the current depression epidemic in the United States. We set extreme goals: fame, fortune, glory, and supersized personal achievements. We’re encouraged, says Nesse, to believe that we can do anything we set our hearts to, and then we try to achieve dreams that are just unrealistic. We don’t pay attention to our real skills and abilities, nor do we put our efforts toward the goals we are capable of achieving. We’re distracted by extreme dreams—even when our evolutionary mechanism kicks in, signaling our ill-fated efforts.
    But games can take us out of this depressive loop. They give us a good reason to be optimistic, satisfying our evolutionary imperative to focus on attainable goals. As happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky writes, “We obtain maximum happiness when we take on flexible and appropriate goals.” 12 Good games provide a steady flow of actionable goals in environments we know are designed for our success—and they give us the chance to inject some flexible and appropriate goals into our daily lives whenever we need them most.
    The success we achieve in games is not, of course, real-world success. But for many people it is more realistic than the kinds of success we put pressure on ourselves to achieve—whether it’s money, beauty, or fame.
    It’s depressing to spend our lives pursuing unrealistic goals. For anyone who wants to opt out of this culture of extreme dreaming, games help enormously: they shift our attention away from depressing goals and train us to be more flexibly optimistic. Today’s best games help us realistically believe in our chances for success.
    Of course, this might not be a perfect solution to the problem of unattainable goal setting in contemporary society. But in the meantime, it does make us feel better and builds our capacity for flexible optimism. We can opt out of whatever “the dream” is supposed to be, and focus our efforts instead on goals that give us real practice at working hard, getting better, and mastering something new.
    Take, for example, the wildly popular video game Rock Band 2 . The musical rhythm video game series has probably given us more exciting, realistic goals than any other video game in the history of the medium. It racked up more than a billion dollars of sales in its first year. 13 And along the way to becoming the number one best-selling game of 2009, as well as one of the most successful video games of all time, it has turned millions of players into aspiring hopefuls— and spectacular failures.

The Hope of Rock Star Success
    To be a rock star is shorthand in our culture for supersized success. It’s one of our favorite symbols of status and fame—and it’s something that virtually none of us has any real hope of achieving. But when you play Rock Band 2 , you get to aspire to rock stardom, with a knowing wink.
    Rock Band is a game for up to four friends who perform the role of rock stars by singing into a microphone, banging on a plastic drum kit, and pressing out chords on plastic guitars with buttons instead of strings. You follow musical cues from the game, which tell you which combination of notes to hit—or sing—and when. All the while, your customizable rock star avatar appears