SuperBetter

SuperBetter, according to its own wiki, “is a game that can help you improve your health, motivation, wellbeing, and ultimately your life!”

 

“SuperBetter is a tool created by game designers and backed by science to help build personal resilience: the ability to stay strong, motivated and optimistic even in the face of difficulty challenges.”

As readers of yesterday’s post will already know, SuperBetter was designed by Jane McGonigal. Jane is a game designer, who specialises in pervasive gaming and alternate reality games. When she was faced with serious health problems as the result of a concussion, Jane decided to take action by turning her own existence into a game, where the objective was to recover her health. To do this she recruited allies (the support of her close friends and family), engaged power-ups (actions she could take to boost her resilience) and battled villains (took steps to overcome the things that triggered her symptoms).

Why did she do this? In her words, “I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game… we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination and more optimism and we’re more likely to reach out to others for help. And I wanted to bring these traits to my real-life challenge.” 

The results were very positive and Jane began to recover successfully. But what happened next surprised her. In blog posts online, she put some instructions on how to play the game she had designed and named it “SuperBetter”. Very soon, she began to hear from people from all over the world who had begun using the game to overcome their own real-life problems and were experiencing similarly remarkable results.

These results were, Jane discovered, due to something called post-traumatic growth. The opposite of post-traumatic stress, post-traumatic growth occurs when one uses a traumatic experience as a metaphorical springboard to create better things in your life. And Jane’s game had triggered this  response in everybody who played it.

SuperBetter now exists as an online site, where you can register, state your objective and begin working to achieve it by transforming your life into a game. Objectives can vary from overcoming serious health problems to simply losing weight or getting fitter. You get to choose your own quests, battle the villains and activate the power-ups. SuperBetter is backed by scientific research and provides a highly social environment. Read it’s About page by clicking the link.

Awesome!

 

A TED Talk on Games

Today’s awesome and inspiring TED talk is by Jane McGonigal. Jane is a game designer, who passionately believes that games can make the world a better place. In her video, she uses remarkable insights to show how games contribute to the world we live in. She also explains how she applied the concepts of gaming to a remarkable real-life situation… the results are truly remarkable. Watch the video below, or click this link to watch it at ted.com (LINK)

For the benefit of readers, I will also briefly explain what is said in the video, although I must emphasise that you also watch the video to get her message and all the detail that goes with it.

Jane begins the talk in an intriguing way. I recently did a post on the 5 Most Common Regrets of the Dying. Referring to the same article by Bronnie Ware, Jane lists the top 5 regrets. She then mentions the fact that people traditionally tend to view games as a waste of time.

“On your Deathbed, are you really going to wish you spent more time playing Angry Birds?”

However, she then draws an interesting and perhaps surprising link between games and the Top 5 Regrets. Games provide a solution to most of the 5 regrets. 1) I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. Games provide a means to relax from work and a way to spend time with your family, particularly kids while they grow up. 2) I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.  Games – across social networks etc – now provide an effective way to do this. Fantasy Football is my own personal example. 3) I wish I’d let myself be happier. Games are a lot of fun. Also remarkable recent research shows that games outperformed pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression. Very cool. 4) I wish I’d had the courage to express my true self. Interestingly, avatars can provide a way for people to project their best ideas about themselves; and Stanford University has researched the link between using avatars and our real-life behaviour. 5) I wish I’d led a life true to my dreams. Jane leaves this one open for now.

Jane then draws a connection from these ideas to her own personal experience. Her story is truly inspiring. Two years ago, Jane sustained a serious concussion, which did not heal properly. It left her with awful symptoms, like memory loss and severe headaches. She was advised by doctors not to do anything that might trigger these symptoms (not to read, play games, exercise…) and she noticed that her life was being stripped from her. She was contemplating suicide, when an awesome solution hit her. She decided to turn her life into a game.

The way she did this was to treat her scenario like a game. Anything that might trigger her symptoms became the villains to be overcome; her close friends and family became her allies; she created power-ups, small activities like taking a short walk or cuddling her dog that could be used to give her a small boost on a regular basis. And incredibly, within days of adopting so simple a method, she began to notice results. She was completely cured within a year.

From this experience she developed SuperBetter, which will be the subject of tomorrow’s post. SuperBetter is a program that uses this concept to transform real-life situations into a kind of gameplay, with objectives, villains, power-ups; people have used SuperBetter to overcome their own traumas, or to achieve things like weight-loss.

Most people will have heard of Post-Traumatic Stress; but there exists an opposite, called Post-Traumatic Growth, where a traumatic experience becomes a metaphorical springboard for better things. Jane concludes the video by looking at ways to experience the benefits of Post-Traumatic Growth without having a trauma. These ways are anything that enhances your resilience, physically, mentally, emotionally or socially. Finally, she adds that by enhancing your resilience in these ways, you can add years onto your lifespan, which is pretty awesome.