Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

applied to Tetris more than to any single-player game ever designed. What makes Tetris so addictive, despite the impossibility of winning, is the intensity of the feedback it provides.
    As you successfully lock in Tetris puzzle pieces, you get three kinds of feedback: visual— you can see row after row of pieces disappearing with a satisfying poof; quantitative —a prominently displayed score constantly ticks upward; and qualitative —you experience a steady increase in how challenging the game feels.
    This variety and intensity of feedback is the most important difference between digital and nondigital games. In computer and video games, the interactive loop is satisfyingly tight. There seems to be no gap between your actions and the game’s responses. You can literally see in the animations and count on the scoreboard your impact on the game world. You can also feel how extraordinarily attentive the game system is to your performance. It only gets harder when you’re playing well, creating a perfect balance between hard challenge and achievability.
    In other words, in a good computer or video game you’re always playing on the very edge of your skill level, always on the brink of falling off. When you do fall off, you feel the urge to climb back on. That’s because there is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability—or what both game designers and psychologists call “flow.” 4 When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes.
    The popularity of an unwinnable game like Tetris completely upends the stereotype that gamers are highly competitive people who care more about winning than anything else. Competition and winning are not defining traits of games—nor are they defining interests of the people who love to play them. Many gamers would rather keep playing than win—thereby ending the game. In high-feedback games, the state of being intensely engaged may ultimately be more pleasurable than even the satisfaction of winning.
    The philosopher James P. Carse once wrote that there are two kinds of games: finite games , which we play to win, and infinite games , which we play in order to keep playing as long as possible. 5 In the world of computer and video games, Tetris is an excellent example of an infinite game. We play Tetris for the simple purpose of continuing to play a good game.
     
     
    LET’S TEST OUR proposed definition for a game with one final example, a significantly more complex video game: the single-player action/puzzle game Portal .
    When Portal begins, you find yourself in a small, clinical-looking room with no obvious way out. There is very little in this 3D environment to interact with: a radio, a desk, and what appears to be a sleeping pod. You can shuffle around the tiny room and peer out the glass windows, but that’s about it. There’s nothing obvious to do: no enemies to fight, no treasure to pick up, no falling objects to avoid.

    Screenshot from the first room of Portal .
    (Valve Corporation, 2007)
    With so few clues for how to proceed, your goal at the start of the game is simply to figure out what your goals are. You might reasonably guess that your first goal is to get out of the sealed room, but you can’t really be sure. It would seem that the main obstacle you face is that you have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing. You’re going to have to learn how to advance in this world on your own.
    Well, not completely on your own. If you poke around the room enough, you might think to pick up a clipboard lying on the desk. This movement triggers an artificial intelligence system to wake up and start speaking to you. The AI informs you that you are about to undertake a series of laboratory tests. The AI does not tell you what you are being tested on. Again, it’s up to you, the player, to figure it out.
    What you eventually discover as you continue to play is that