Can Video Games Be a Healthy Outlet for Stress Relief?
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Can Video Games Be a Healthy Outlet for Stress Relief?
The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of games is that you can get sucked into this experience of just craving and wanting to be in a clear, crisp and gentle universe where you know exactly what to do and exactly how well it’s measured.
New York Times • A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life
It turns out that there are seven ways of thinking and acting that contribute to post-traumatic and post-ecstatic growth. And they are all ways that we commonly think and act when we play games. 1. Adopt a challenge mindset. You need to be willing to engage with obstacles and look at stressful life events as a challenge, not a threat. In games, we
... See moreJane McGonigal • SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully
The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.
Jane McGonigal • Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Games can therefore be understood as imagination infrastructures—engines for imaginative engagement. There are so many games out there these days, endless virtual worlds, that the utopian potential of this medium to break far beyond the limited possibilities for collective imagination in “normal” society also seems endless.
What does it look like wh... See more
What does it look like wh... See more
Rahel Aima • Imagination Infrastructuring for Real and Virtual Worlds
C. THI NGUYEN: I n games, for once in your life, you know exactly what you’re doing and you know exactly that you can do it. And then you have just the right amount of ability to do it. It’s a feeling of concentrated, crystallized action. For me, solving puzzles, or balancing over in a rock climb, or seeing a trap ahead in chess, this is ecstasy. A... See more
New York Times • Are We Measuring Our Lives in All the Wrong Ways?
Games remain necessities of life today. For one thing, they’re fun. They activate and satisfy psychological desires. Pleasure derives from immersing oneself in games’ worlds, or in improving one’s skills, or in benefiting from their systems of chance. The real world may from time to time offer us a chance to solve an elegant problem, and the satisf
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