Work 2.0: Game On!

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologists have always been interested in studying how we make sense of the world. Over and over, in many fields of research, one theme has recurred: what we see, hear, and feel is not just about what's in front of us. In the 1800s, early researchers began working in a branch of psychology called psychophysics. It looked at how, for example, we can easily spot a single burning candle in a dark room. But put that same candle in a brightly lit room, and the flame can be hard to spot. In other words, the context, or frame, around that burning candle matters. And that's true for many aspects of our lives. If you break your foot the night before your wedding, you might feel very sorry for yourself. But if all you experience during a war is a broken foot, you would consider yourself extremely lucky. Frames also shape how we think about our jobs. This week on Hidden Brain, the second installment of our new series, Work 2.0. Last week, we looked at how many organizations fail to notice the frictions that hold them back. Today, we explore how smart companies and governments are reinventing the world of work by changing the frame around it. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward, no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com/hiddenbrain. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. The world of work and the world of play are different worlds. At least, they seem that way. When we are at work, we are supposed to be serious. Play is the opposite of that. We play games to relax, To kick back with friends, to have fun. At the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Ethan Mollick asks if these worlds have more in common than we think and whether the world of work has a lot to learn from the psychology of games. Ethan Mollick, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you for having me.

I want to start by talking about the ubiquity of games in our lives, Ethan. Social scientists are always talking about what would happen if a hypothetical anthropologist from Mars would pay a visit to planet Earth, and surely a visitor from another planet would notice how integral games are to human life, starting right from childhood. It's actually quite remarkable.

Yeah, I mean, we are a game-playing people. That's a definition of humanity, actually. So we have evidence that we've played games through history, and obviously games are how we learn as a kid. Games are how we relax, how we compete with each other. So it really is a ubiquitous feature of being human.

And if you extend the world of gaming to include sports, we spend huge amounts of time not just playing recreational sports and watching sports, but arguing about sports, dissecting it, engaging with it.

Exactly. This is a thing we all care about. We've cared about it for a long time. There's actually graffiti in the Great Pyramids that suggests that there was actually game playing among the various groups that were building the pyramids. The pyramids appear to have been built, at least in part, by drafted labor. And they would divide into teams with names like the Friends of Khufu or the Drunkards of Menkaure and compete with each other to haul the most blocks and get beer as a reward for being the winner. So games have been with us as a motivating factor for a very long time.

Now, these days, Ethan, there's one type of game that dwarfs all the others. And those, of course, are video games. Can you give me some sense of the scale of the popularity of video games?

I think one of my favorite stats is actually from a very popular game that you've probably heard of called Fortnite. And at its peak of popularity during the pandemic last year, people played 3.2 billion hours of Fortnite in a single month. And just to put that in context, that's equivalent to building 29 Panama Canals or 457 Empire State Buildings.

Wait, you're saying the amount of time people spent playing Fortnite in one month, you could build 29 Panama Canals or 457 Empire State Buildings?

Exactly. If you could get the people to work, a lot of Some of them are middle schoolers, so it probably wouldn't be legal, but yes.

Well, that's astonishing. I mean, you've also cited a survey that once asked people in 3 Canadian cities to identify a photo of the Prime Minister of Canada and a photo of a character from a famous Nintendo video game. What did the survey find, Ethan?

Oh, far more people were able to identify Mario than Stephen Harper, who was the Prime Minister at the time.

I mean, isn't that astonishing? I mean, people are recognizing a fictional Italian plumber in a game versus the prime minister of their own country.

I don't think it's that surprising because of our level of engagement. Just like if you ask people to remember the circle of people they knew in high school, they might have more trouble than remembering who was on their local sports team during that same period. We really connect to games as people.

Now, this may be hard for people who don't play video games to understand, but the business of video games dwarfs many other industries. Can you give me a sense of the The scale, the business of the video gaming industry?

It's bigger than movies. It's bigger than music. It is the biggest entertainment industry by far. And its influence is everywhere, right? It drives the adoption of new technologies, whether it's virtual reality or the Apple App Store. It's an amazingly ubiquitous part of what we do. And the money flowing into it is huge.

All right, so I want to contrast what we've just heard about the world of games with the world of work. I want to play you a clip from the TV show Friends, where the character Rachel expresses many people feel about the world of work. Oh God, I hate my job.

I hate it.

I hate my job.

I hate it.

I know, honey. I'm sorry. Oh, I want to quit, but then I think I should stick it out. Then I think, why would such a person stay in such a demeaning job just because it's remotely related to the field they're interested in? Now, many, many people feel like Rachel, don't they, Ethan?

Yeah, I mean, work is full of frustrations and things that make it feel meaningless or a treadmill. And even if you're enjoying your job, I think everyone has times where they wonder, is this what I'm really doing with my life?

I remember talking with the late anthropologist David Graeber some time ago, Ethan. He told me that vast numbers of people believe their jobs were not just boring, but pointless, that if their jobs disappeared tomorrow, no one would notice. And it sounded like a terribly sad commentary on what work feels like for many people.

Yeah, I think that many people don't feel meaning in their work. They don't feel a connection to a bigger picture. And that can be incredibly demotivating.

Now, the life of a Wharton School professor sounds very exciting, but surely you must have some points in your life when you feel like your own life is marked by drudgery and boredom and repetition.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I, just like anyone else, I had a series of jobs before becoming a professor that were quite tedious, ranging from sorting broken computer equipment to cleaning up parking lots at shopping centers. So this was before we had podcasts, right? So it was just the radio you were listening to. And it was both gross and boring. So you'd start to turn work into a game. So I was, how many cigarette butts can I get in my scoop before I have to empty it out? Can I get one of each kind of garbage before this song is over? So making up games and challenges to turn this boring work into something at least somewhat more interesting.

And what about in your current day job? I mean, do you experience drudgery at all, or is it unending excitement?

Well, as much as I'd like to say being a professor is unending excitement, there are aspects of the job, whether that's cleaning giant data sets or sitting through some of the particularly long meetings that we sometimes have in some committees, though I probably shouldn't admit that on a podcast. But they can feel a bit tedious, yes.

So Ethan, we've looked at how many people love games and fun. And many people think of work as being drudgery or repetition. But again, looking from the perspective of that anthropologist from Mars, there's a paradox here, which is many dimensions of games look a lot like work. Talk to me about The Sims.

So The Sims is an incredibly popular sort of life simulator. So you build families, you build houses, you have people live in these houses and kind of go through their daily jobs. And people use this for all sorts of reasons, sort of a living dollhouse. But what always amazes me about The Sims is how much time people are willing to spend just setting things up kind of correctly. So, for example, people have recreated the entire IKEA catalog, including historical IKEA chairs, so you can decorate your house exactly the way you would your dorm or your other home. And it's amazing. People spend hours just getting haircuts right. So, you know, the kinds of things that we do on a regular basis in our daily lives, people are happy to recreate in these virtual worlds as well.

But isn't it interesting that in our daily lives, these often feel like chores? So, you know, if you're telling your teenager to clean up her room or get her room in order, that feels like a chore. But to design a room on a virtual game sounds like fun.

Exactly. And that is the sort of paradox at the heart of trying to connect games and work, right, is that work is often tedious and the same thing in a game can be made to be terrific.

I want to look at a few other dimensions of this paradox, Ethan. Games like Chutes and Ladders, and I don't know how many people play those anymore, but there are many games where we routinely play the game for a while, and then suddenly find ourselves back at square one. And now we have to march all the way back again to get back to where we were. So we constantly, in many aspects of games, have to deal with the kind of setbacks that, in the real world, strike us as really tedious.

Well, there's even a word for this in the game world, which is grind. So the idea of grinding is putting in tremendous amounts of work to advance your character or your game state to some degree. And there's all kinds of games that include grind. You might spend 30 or 40 hours 40 hours sometimes to just be able to get access to a particularly good-looking piece of equipment or to upgrade your skill in fishing in an online game. So this sort of approach is really common. We see people being willing to go back to square one and start over again, over and over. In fact, some of my favorite games are these type of games called roguelikes, where the whole idea is you keep failing. You might fail hundreds of times before you succeed once or twice. And it's one of my favorite categories. I find that there's something Failure in the real world is really difficult and painful. And failure in games can kind of be a sort of release where you get to try again and try and be more perfect the next time around.

Now, I mentioned David Graeber's research a second ago into how many people find their work to be pointless. So this is another dimension of the paradox because almost by definition, games are pointless. Whether you end up with more green cones than red cones or kill the pink dragon or manage to land the ball inside the line, if you apply the same logic that people bring to their work, you can say, who cares? It's pointless. Yet somehow when it comes to games, this pointlessness is somehow appealing instead of demoralizing. No one ever says, okay, I captured the flag. Who cares? It's pointless.

Yeah, we have a category in our heads of sort of feelings of accomplishment we get from games are real, even if the experience isn't. So I think you're highlighting really nicely this kind of contrast between the fact that our real-life experiences Even though they actually matter in the world, often don't feel like there's a point. While the things where we know they don't matter in the world, we get satisfaction out of them. And I think that that is one of the most interesting aspects of games.

So we've looked at how games often involve similar kinds of repetition and setbacks and drudgery that lots of people experience at work. There is another aspect of games that also looks a lot like work, Games often demand intense effort. Now, some of the earliest games we learn to play as children involve physical activity, running, and many of us continue to pursue these activities into adulthood. I want to play you a clip from the 2019 Boston Marathon where the commentators are talking about an athlete approaching the finish line after running more than 26 miles. What a finish. To see that, I mean, you could just see going to everything. Arms, legs, and everything is shot. So painful.

I kind of feared for DeSisa that he might rip his hamstring muscles.

He was straining so hard at the finish. And he knew it was gonna come to that. You could see. I mean, surely, Ethan, you know, the anthropologists from Mars would say, you know, these kinds of activities don't look like fun. And yet tens of thousands of people voluntarily sign up to do them over and over again and think of these activities as being some of the most meaningful achievements in their life?

I think it goes back to what you discussed earlier, which is that meaning in our work is about how we feel about this, right? And when we play games, there's some degree of— we get to pick the competition that we're in. And we pick competitions that are meaningful for us. And there is this sense of accomplishment and joy that comes with achieving goals that you set for yourself, even if those goals might seem meaningless to the outside world.

I mean, do you do this yourself, Ethan? I mean, do you do this when you're working out, for example? I don't know if you're a runner or a swimmer. Do you sort of set artificial targets for yourself and derive inordinate pleasure when you meet those targets?

Well, I have those targets. I'm a big Apple Watch workout user. But there's another dimension that I think you've hinted at throughout our conversation so far, which is a lot of this involves other people, right? Whether that's sports or marathon running, you want to beat someone else. So for me, it's one of my sisters and I, since the pandemic, have been competing weekly for exercise on the Apple Watch, and I will keep an eye on it. And when she inevitably starts beating me, I have gone downstairs to work out at 11:30 at night to get those last 20 minutes in to try and overcome her point total, even though I think the score is currently like 44 weeks to 5 weeks or something like that where she's won. But every time I pull it off, I feel great.

Yeah, it's astonishing that people will exercise in order to have a metric on their watch or to beat somebody else instead of exercising to save their own lives. I mean, you would think that the latter would have more appeal.

Except that, you know, saving our lives is a slow process, and beating my sister is happening now. And, you know, there's a big difference between those. And that's a big problem with the work issue too, right? Your accomplishments are all for the future, but, you know, when you blow up an alien, you're blowing it up right now.

The world of play and the world of work have a lot in common. They can both involve painstaking effort and repetitive tasks. Yet many people pay money to do one set of activities and resent doing the other, even though they get paid to do it. When we come back, we uncover the psychology behind this paradox and what it tells us about how to make work more rewarding And perhaps even fun. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive Save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, The perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Think back to when you were a kid. Ask yourself, did anyone have to force you to play games? If you were like most kids, the answer is, of course not. Whether it was a game of tag or soccer or Minecraft, you often had to be torn away from games by your parents or teachers. Think for a moment about how different that is from the world of what we call work. Managers hovering over you, teachers yelling at you, people showering you with threats and inducements to stay on task. At the Wharton School, Ethan Mollick teaches innovation and entrepreneurship. He studies why games have a radically different effect on our minds than work. Ethan, we talked about how many games aren't all that different from jobs in that they can also involve repetitive, boring, Or difficult activities. But there are many psychological differences between work and play. And one of them has to do with the way games often incorporate stories. Can you tell me how games use storytelling to hold our interest?

Definitely. So our lives at work often don't fit a neat narrative, right? We're not hero. We're not villain. There's not a story of progression. We have to do that for ourselves. But humans are kind of narrative creatures. We've always told stories. And games are great because they give you a context or a meaning for your work in that storyline. You're not just clicking a button, you're saving a planet. You're not just moving a mouse and completing some task, you are helping your team win. So there's both the sort of small-scale story that we feel like we're part of that narrative, and also the larger-scale stories. Many games are built around storyline, right, that you are accomplishing some goal. You're often the hero of the tale, saving the world or improving something in some way. And that's a really powerful way powerful tool because we can imagine ourselves in those positions, and that makes our choices feel meaningful.

The connection that you're drawing here might explain why movies lend themselves to games and vice versa. Like, the Harry Potter movie franchise has spawned dozens of games, right?

Oh, exactly. I mean, you know, one step beyond the movie is being in the movie, right? So even though movie games have a reputation for being pretty mediocre games, they're also continuously popular, not because the gameplay is amazing, but because you want to be Harry Potter or Rey or Luke Skywalker or whoever you want to inhabit.

Something you said a moment ago really struck me, which is it's not just that games have stories, but sometimes the reward for playing a game is that you unlock new elements of the story. So playing the game becomes a way to move forward in the narrative. Can you give me an example of a game that works like this?

Oh, definitely. I mean, a lot of games depend on sort of a cliffhanger or next event. The feeling of you're gaining power, gaining control is really important. So there's classic role-playing games where there's the Final Fantasy games or The Witcher where the story is compelling. You want to find out what happens next and you— your choices affect the world around you.

Got a minute?

Why not?

I'm looking for a woman, long hair, dressed in black and white.

Seen anyone like that?

Of course!

I actually still have some games that I played, one called Mass Effect. That I still, you know, about 6 years later, think about how I made a bad choice that doomed one of my companions in the game and still regret it at this point. I should have loaded that saved game. I'm sorry, Jack. Damage was contained, but Jack did not survive.

I am sorry, Jack. So games allow us to follow narratives and become entranced by stories, but they also do something else that you hinted at a moment ago. They offer us a chance to try things out and to take So in other words, when you let down the character Jack in the game, that was painful, but presumably not as painful as letting Jack down in real life. Can you talk about how games allow us to simulate life, but with lower stakes?

Yeah, so we are drawn to systems, and we like to be able to kind of play with systems, right? Failure is interesting, and it's why flight simulators are interesting, right? The chance to fail, to learn from mistakes, and to try again is an exciting thing to do, right? Building sandcastles is fun. Knocking them over is actually more fun, right? The sort of destruction, the playing with reality is really interesting. So games lend themselves very naturally to thinking about systems and how they break and how they fail. And then you get the real sense of improvement from that failure in games that you don't in real life, right?

Right.

If your startup company fails, that feels pretty bad. But if it fails in a game, maybe that was interesting. And now you're going to do something different next time.

Right. So if you get killed in a game, you start over. If you lose a match, you come back and play again tomorrow. You mess up at work, you could get fired.

Exactly. And that makes us less willing to take the risks that are both important for learning at work. Like, we learn from failure, but we're very afraid to fail. And even if we fail, we're afraid to publicly discuss our failure, right? Because then people might think we're not competent. So all of that holds back our advancement in the world of work. But in games, failure is interesting. Talking about failure is interesting. People make YouTube videos of the biggest disasters they had in games. So it's a very different attitude towards the world.

You know, I spoke some time ago with your fellow University of Pennsylvania researcher, Paul Rozin, and he explained this concept to me called benign masochism. When you go bungee jumping or ride a roller coaster, you have an illusion of danger or pain without actual danger or pain. And in some ways, Games allow us to taste what it feels like to be attacked or under siege or even killed without the real risks attendant to those things.

Exactly. And it's normal to sort of be curious about these things. I actually once went to a military game training convention, and I was kind of just curious about the failure states for all the games. So I would play every simulator, and these were multimillion-dollar simulators, and see what happened when you drove the tank off a cliff. Or crash the plane. It was always boring, although I did, I think, break one of the tank simulators by driving into a wall. And then apparently no one had ever done that before, and it broke the game. But I think we are interested in what happens when things go wrong in these kind of cases.

Yeah. And even though, of course, some of that might seem destructive, this is how learning actually happens. When you break something, you actually understand something deep about how it actually works.

I mean, in the most basic sense, Learning is about failure and about doing things better the next time. It's why testing helps us learn better. It's why a lot of my work now is about designing games to teach, because you can fail in a game and advance to the future, but if you fail in real life, it's costly, right? So this idea that we learn through failure, that we should experience more failure in our lives, is actually a really good one. And there's this taunt in games that says, get good, right? And that's something you could actually do in a game. You could practice and get good from failure.

I want to talk about another dimension of the psychology of games. If you like chess, maybe you've tried the game Play Magnus. It's named after the Norwegian chess star Magnus Carlsen. And the conceit of the game is that you can play against Magnus Carlsen at 29 different skill levels, starting with playing with Magnus when he was age 5, and then age 6, and age 7. And you can see at what point Magnus Carlsen starts to beat you. Ethan, tell me how well-constructed games carefully find this balance How do we strike a balance between not running too far ahead of our abilities and not running too far behind our abilities?

Well, you may have heard of the state of flow, right? This famous psychological construct that, that's when time vanishes at work, right? We get into a task and everything around us disappears. Maybe we're working on a spreadsheet and everything's sort of focused down and you looked up and hours had passed. It's very commonly found in sports and activities. And one of the keys to achieving that flow state is to neither be bored because the task is too easy, nor to be frustrated because the task is so hard. And one of the things that a well-designed game does is it adjusts its difficulty level, right? You beat a level and then you get the next hardest level. You, uh, if you don't succeed, you play again until it becomes easy. And the sense of accomplishment is something that you can get in a game where everything is always calibrated to keep you in that flow state, and it's not something we get to do in reality nearly as often.

So this reminds me of a concept sometimes called the Yerkes-Dodson Law, named after the psychologist Robert Yerkes and John Dodson. They found that people's performance increases with mental arousal and with stress, but only up to a certain point, beyond which stress becomes really detrimental. Performance starts to decline. I feel that good game designers are keenly aware of the Yerkes-Dodson Law.

Exactly. I mean, this is what the secret of games is. If you look back to the earliest sort of video games and you think about Pac-Man or Mario Brothers or whatever it is, the levels start easy, right? And they get harder and harder till you lose. And then you play again, right? They're adjusting up to your difficulty level. You get a sense of mastery and accomplishment as you go forward. So games can adjust to difficulty. Work does not adjust to difficulty, right? And work, we just keep— if our tasks are boring, it's likely to be boring for a while. If it's too stressful, we're stressed all the time. Wouldn't it be great if work adjusted its difficulty level to keep us in the perfect level of engagement without either being too stressed or getting bored?

I want to talk about another dimension of games, which is that games often come with a clear set of rules. They give us clear feedback on where we are in the game, what happens when we reach certain levels, how we can improve. I mean, this is especially true in video games, but it's also true in sports. We all agree that when a goal is scored, you get a point. I'm wondering whether the clarity of the rules of games, even if they're artificial, artificial, allow us to engage in games without the ambiguity that often comes into play in work settings where you don't always know what the rules are or how to get ahead.

Definitely. So there is clarity. We know what we're supposed to do. Even with the uncertainties, or in a puzzle game, you may not know the exact answer, but you know there's an answer for you. The second interesting thing about games is this concept that people who study games call the magic circle, which is when people play games, enter the magic circle. They agree to be bound by the rules of the game. That's why no matter how frustrating that Monopoly game is, you don't break the rules and start to cheat, right? We feel like there's stakes there and we feel bound to work with each other. So that's another aspect of games is we're all sort of on the same playing field, right, in a way that we aren't at work where you may not understand the social rules or the politics.

Right. And, you know, in the game, as you pointed out just a second ago, we all start off on an equal footing, which actually is an important idea here. I mean, so Everyone who starts a game of chess starts with the same pieces and the same pawns. What happens then follows the rules of the game and then your creativity, but you're not starting out with a leg up. Someone doesn't have an extra leg up just because of who they are or which school they went to or what their background or privilege might be.

And that's, in some ways, the great democratizing aspect of games, right, is that it lets people sort of show their own ability or work in sort of a pure setting. So that's why sports is appealing in a lot of ways. Anyone can rise up, and that's a story we love is that somebody who unexpected becomes good or somebody who came from an impoverished or difficult background turns out to be a champion, right? And it's the same thing that happens in games as well. One of the things I've been experimenting with is, can we use games to identify extraordinary talent and find people who have capability to, say, be an entrepreneur that is unrecognized because of all those other social constraints that typically would hold us back, right? Who we know, where we went to school, what resources we were born with. And I think there's something, you know, about that game aspect and identification of game— of talent in games that is really appealing.

Games use a variety of psychological techniques to grab and hold our attention. They encourage exploration and learning. The best games are skillfully calibrated so we feel stimulated without feeling overwhelmed. Now, when non-gamers talk about games, it's often from a negative perspective. Parents and educators worry about kids playing addictive or violent video games. Managers worry that games can be a source of distraction in the workplace. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg once fired a government employee for playing solitaire at work. When we come back, how some companies, organizations, and policymakers are taking a different tack. Instead of seeing games as the enemy, They are deploying what we have learned about the psychology of games to engage employees, entice customers, and educate citizens. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens. the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with premium Priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Games rely on a range of psychological techniques to engage us and to keep us coming back for more. They keep score, let us role-play, and encourage curiosity and exploration. In his book, Changing the Game, and in his day job as a management researcher at the Wharton School, Ethan Mollick studies how employers and policymakers are trying to incorporate features of games into the workplace To promote creativity, to increase engagement, and to boost the bottom line. Ethan, research teams fighting disease often confront problems that involve mammoth amounts of very arduous work. You talk about a computer game called Foldit that's used to come up with cures for diseases. Can you explain the challenge that games like Foldit are designed to solve and how they work?

Yeah, Foldit represents a bunch of these really interesting games that we sometimes call citizen science. The idea that how do we take complex tasks and outsource them to regular people, regular citizens, to solve? And Foldit is one example of this. It handles a really hard problem, which is how do proteins fold? So we have a sense of the sort of atomic structure of a protein, but the shape that it takes follows all these complex rules that have never been very easy to model until quite recently on computers. And so it's relied on scientists to try and figure out what kind of shape these proteins take, and that determines all of their properties, what diseases they cause, how they can be used to increase energy efficiency of alternative fuels, and so on. And what is interesting is that people who go into, you know, cell biology or into chemistry are not necessarily really great at solving 3-dimensional puzzles, but there's lots of people in the world who are really good at 3-dimensional puzzles who may not know science. So what Foldit does is let anyone play with the structure of a protein and fold it to try and maximize a bunch of scientific characteristics. And what's cool is the citizens have come up with solutions that scientists struggled with. So it took— people have been working for 14 years, for example, on trying to figure out the structure of a protein in a monkey form of HIV, and the Foldit citizen scientists were able to come up with the answer in just weeks. So there's these kind of problems that are solvable by people through games that are not solvable in other ways.

And I understand that Foldit has a collaborative component to it as well?

Yeah, the collaborative element is really interesting, right? We talked earlier about how we like teams and competition. So actually, in Foldit, you're encouraged to join teams of people, and those teams compete against each other on a leaderboard. And the most successful teams at folding proteins are actually the teams that don't have any formal biology training. So it's really interesting because these teams would never have been drawn to the problem if it hadn't been turned into a game. But they just love solving 3-dimensional puzzles. And so these street-smart teams are actually beating the more scientific teams in the game.

I understand that part of the reason this works is not just because some people have exceptional skills, but that the elements that we've discussed earlier about gaming allow people to invest huge amounts of time in applying themselves to problems like this. Can you talk about how some of these citizen science efforts are able to enlist volunteers not just to contribute their insights, but to contribute huge amounts of time to solving problems of public interest?

Yeah, so there was another citizen science effort in a game called EVE Online, which is sort of a giant Machiavellian spaceship simulation.

You navigate the universe encased in an armored You are placed in a capsule deep within your ship, where you have complete neural control and function as one.

And you were able to solve problems by identifying images of cell structures and cell pathways. And a total of 320,000 players identified these things over a course of a year. They added tens of millions of images that have now made up the Atlas of Cell Biology. And the total amount of time they spent was the equivalent of 72 years of researcher time. to identify these characteristics. And that's because it was built into a game that people loved and cared about. And it was just integrated into their normal process.

I understand some companies are using games to help them build better products. How does Microsoft encourage employees to find bugs in critical software programs?

So this is a really interesting aspect of games called gamification. And gamification has sort of had ups and downs. Over the last 2 decades. But the basic idea is that you're going to take elements of things that we know work in games. So those leaderboards that we talked about, competition, the idea of engagement or unlocking stories, and you're going to apply those aspects to work. And Microsoft's really been a leader in doing this on their own internal teams. So they have done things that have ranged from giving people badges and awards for participation, which increased the number of people who were reporting bugs in their software. in the internal Microsoft Teams multiple times. They've created teams that compete to find bugs or issues with software when they download it, and they unlock charity awards for their favorite charity. There are lots of really clever techniques that they've been applying that have all served to increase engagement in this important bug-finding but otherwise voluntary activity. It's made a huge difference in their work.

The actual programs are being released sooner or with fewer bugs?

With fewer bugs and faster.

So if games can be used to encourage people to solve problems, they can also be used to train people in various fields. And one of the best examples of this might be a program called Top Gun. Ethan, can you explain the genesis of this game and how it works?

So Top Gun is actually sort of the grandfather of games. It's actually the same Top Gun that you have seen, maybe the Tom Cruise movie or the soon-to-come-out remake of the Tom Cruise movie. The end is inevitable, Maverick. Maverick, your kind is headed for extinction. Maybe so, sir, but not today. And it actually is sort of one of our first indications of how important sort of games and simulations are for training. So it actually came out of the fact that the US Air Force and US Navy had been dominant pilots in air combat from World War II up through the Korean War, and when the Vietnam War started Suddenly, American pilots were underperforming. So when there was a pause in the air war over Vietnam, both the Air Force and Navy tried to figure out how to solve this problem. The Air Force had a lot more money, so they spent money upgrading planes, putting new weapons in, new turning systems, and the Navy, which had much less money, concentrated on a really interesting stat, which I think is really important overall, which is that the likelihood of you being shot down in air combat was highest in your first mission or 2. If you could survive your first couple missions, your first critical mistakes, you were likely to keep surviving. So they wanted to figure out, how do we give people the gamified simulated experience of getting a chance to try air combat against experts in your first couple missions without getting shot down in real life? And they launched Top Gun, which is this training school in Nevada where top Navy pilots fly enemy planes against trainees. And when the air war resumed, it was sort of like a natural experiment The Air Force continued to have worse and worse conditions in air combat, but the Navy went back to being incredibly successful. So there's something about that training or practice that is really important in real life, right? You don't want your pilot to be flying a plane for the first time with you in it. You don't want to be the first person for a surgeon to be experimenting on. And games can help us get to that stage where people have real experiences before they actually have to pick up a knife or fly a plane.

You mentioned the example of surgery a second ago. I mean, I'm thinking about the popular children's game called Operation, where you have to carefully remove various plastic organs with tweezers from a make-believe character. But I understand that surgeons and hospitals are actually using simulation and games to actually improve the real-life skills of people performing surgeries.

Absolutely. Real-life surgical experiments, right, playing with games and simulations that give you the experience of surgery is now a critical part of training doctors and surgeons. So for example, there is a simulator that teaches you how to interact with patients, where you are first a doctor telling a patient something in VR, and then you get to play the role of the patient seeing yourself explain things to them.

Wow.

So you kind of learn bedside manner. There are lots of simulators that use real instruments, right, that are hooked up to sort of force feedback machines. So you are using a tweezer, and you can actually replay surgeries, right, that have actually gone right or wrong and play with those as well. And in fact, we know that people who trained in these simulators have 6 times lower rate of accidents and other issues happening, that there's less complications. So those skills are very transferable, right? What you learn in these games and simulators, you can use in real life.

I mean, we talked earlier about sort of the value of making mistakes. I mean, obviously, if you're a surgeon, the value of making a mistake to you is that you learn to be a better But the cost is that the patient on the table in front of you is paying a very heavy price. The simulation essentially allows you to do the learning without having the cost. And I understand the same principle is now being rolled out in many other areas of industry, including truck driving. I understand there are simulators to help truck drivers have fewer crashes?

Yeah. What's fascinating is playing realistic truck driving simulators gets drivers to actually both get in much less crashes, but also use less fuel. So what's cool about a game, right, is you might spend 40 or 50 hours before you have a risky event happen in real life. But in games, we can force you to have that risky event happen many, many times. Drive in the rain, drive in the rain in the middle of a fog storm, drive with wind against you. And you can get through all those experiences in a compressed period of time. So you make all your mistakes upfront rather than later. And that seems to have a long-term effect on people's skills and abilities.

So some years ago, a North Carolina man named Paxton Galvanek came across an awful crash on the highway, and what he did in the next few moments made national news. Here's a clip of him talking about what happened.

I witnessed a truck flip over several times, and I was the first person to stop my vehicle, and I figured if I was the first person there, I'd be the person that could save these people. And I witnessed 2 people that needed to be pulled from the vehicle. I saw that one of the people there had severed fingers, and I actually helped him control his bleeding by grabbing a towel.

towel and controlling it.

And then a plainclothes soldier came up to the accident and said, you did a great job. You know, I see what you did. You controlled his bleeding. This may have helped him.

All from what I learned in America's Army.

Yes.

All from what he learned from America's Army. What was going on here, Ethan?

Well, America's Army was a large-scale shooter game sponsored by the US Army, and it was designed to kind of recruit soldiers, right, to give them sort of an experience of playing a game. It was sort of an advertisement. In fact, at its it was actually the number 2 reason after patriotism that people said that was why they were enlisting in the army.

Wow.

So it was actually an incredibly effective game. But one of the really interesting things in talking about making something sort of boring engaging, in order to get the power to heal people in the game, to unlock the medic class in the game, you had to sit through a really boring slideshow. You'd actually go into a barracks in your game and you'd sit down at a desk and then you'd watch a slideshow about first aid.

All right, privates, we're now going to cover combat lifesaving, or CLS.

And then your gun was turned into a number 2 pencil and you had to fill out a Scantron form. And if you got all the answers right after multiple hours of training, you got the power to heal people. It looks like everyone figured this one out. Good job, everyone.

Let's move on to the next section.

So that learning stuck around, right? So that man that you just heard from was able to actually help someone and help save their life. by the skills they learned in a game because they wanted to unlock the medic skill to be able to play a different role in the game than other people were playing.

What I love about this example, Ethan, is that in some ways, you're teaching people something that you need to teach them that involves effort. You know, you're teaching them first aid and the rules and when to apply what. And doing that in some ways requires, if you will, sort of didactic instruction. But by embedding it in a game, in some ways, you teach You take the effort out of the learning and you make people focus on the game rather than on the learning.

Exactly. And I think that is, you know, you have this kind of interesting combination where the game is kind of driving you forward, but the lessons are real. And that often makes teaching with games really hard. It's one of the things that we've struggled with in our efforts to build games for teaching is making sure the game is engaging and interesting, but also that the lessons you're learning are the real ones, right? Otherwise, you can pick up the wrong kinds of lessons from the game. So what's great about America's Army is the motivation that happened to sit down and watch these videos and take the test and do this right was inside the game itself. But the actual process of learning wasn't necessarily the point of the game, right? So you picked it up on the side.

Companies are also increasingly using games to meet their business goals. I understand that Jeep once created a game that allowed players to drive one of their vehicles over very rugged terrain. What was the thinking behind creating this game? And what was the effect on sales?

I can have you play a game that highlights the characteristics of what makes my company great, right? So if I want to emphasize rugged roads, I can put you in a rugged road in a Jeep. And I can even put you in a competitor vehicle. And you'll get a great experience. And you'll sort of get a real visceral understanding of why my product is better in some way.

And so that ends up increasing sales in the long In some ways, this is sort of akin to the car salesperson saying, why don't you keep the car for a few hours and drive it around? As you drive the car, you get to sort of have a feel of the car, but of course, there are only certain things you can do when you're driving, test driving a car. You can't drive it over a cliff or drive it over rugged terrain. I mean, you have to bring it back into the dealership in good form. The simulation in some ways allows you to test out all the possibilities of the car and in some ways also weds you to the car. It engages you. in how the car is operating.

Exactly. That idea that you are connected to this product, that you've used it already, that you have this sort of implanted good feeling and memory. Because again, I can set up a game to put you in a circumstance where you feel really good about that car, as opposed to in real life, where hopefully the test drive goes well, but maybe traffic's really bad, or maybe you end up having an annoying conversation with the salesman. In a game, I could control all of that.

Do you worry at all that in some ways, the power of games can in some ways lead bad actors to use games for bad things? bad purposes here, selling people products that might actually not be the best products, but the games are really addictive. I mean, I can see a story of how this could actually turn out badly, that the addictiveness or power or engagement of games can be used for bad ends.

Yeah, I think that we do worry, are games compelling in a way— does gamifying stock trading make people more willing to make bad investments in stocks the way they would when they're gambling? I'll say that generally— and it's always up for active debate— The most studied areas of, like, do games make people more violent, for example, or are they purely addictive in a way that other things aren't, those don't seem to be panning out. It doesn't seem like game violence causes real-life violence. It doesn't seem like games are uniquely addictive compared to other kinds of activities. But I think we should be cautious about it. And I think it's a form of media, and media is powerful. So in the end, our research shows that games are effective, but they don't replace work. So I think the games at work piece is something to be thoughtful about and concerned about. But I think that the danger is not huge, right, because people are aware of the difference between games and real life.

There are also, I think, many games being designed to actively improve the public good. And they're being created by either nonprofit organizations or by researchers at universities like yourself. I understand that European researchers, in partnership with Dutch journalists, have created a game called the Fake News Game, where players create fake news themselves. They get badges and followers for making use the strategies they learn, like impersonating someone else or inciting powerful emotions or even creating conspiracy theories, and eventually they can create an entire fake news empire. Now, some of this sounds very disturbing. What was the point of a game like this, Ethan?

One of the things that's interesting about games is they put you in other people's shoes. One of the clever things that this game is doing, this fake news game, is it's asking you to be the bad guy. exploit people. And it turns out that in actual controlled experiments, that this game actually increases the ability of people who play it to spot fake news in the real world because they understand the motivation for creating fake news. They understand the techniques people would do to use that. And then they can, when they play the game, they learn those techniques and become more immune to it in real life. So there's sometimes an advantage to role-playing as the bad guy. Ultimately, we're hoping to achieve herd immunity, you know, just as with regular biological vaccines. If enough people have at least some level of psychological immunity, the misinformation virus won't have a chance to take hold and spread as fast and as deep as it has up until now.

I understand you've created a game where your students have to go on a mission to the planet Saturn in the year 2087.

You will help lead humanity to the future. You are about to take part in The Saturn Parable.

Tell me what happens in the game and what students take away from it?

Yeah, so it's actually been a lot of fun as, you know, the culmination of a lot of my work. I've been building games for teaching, and this one takes place, like you said, on a sort of doomed mission to Saturn. The year is 2087, and humanity has left Earth behind, heading out into the solar system, colonizing Mars, and looking out even further. But one thing holds them back: the lack of water. And it includes elements from Escape rooms, and we brought in a science fiction writer to help us write some of the plotline. And the idea is that by putting people in a fictional setting, it puts everyone on an even playing field. So no one's been on a mission to Saturn, so there's nobody who has more knowledge than another. It's the quiet person in the room has just as much knowledge as the loud person, the older person as the younger person. And we give them a set of problems that are general problems that teams encounter. It's sort of a failure simulator for teams. So there's issues with communication in the teams, things in the mission start to go wrong and explode, can they coordinate in the right way? Can they avoid information problems that happen in real life? Can they avoid groupthink? Can everybody get their head in the game so they can coordinate and avoid kind of process failures that teams suffer from? And so in the end, part of the reveal is all the things you experience in the game are actually just the kind of problems you face in work all the time with this fictional setting.

So everything we talked about, putting a compelling story and competition and systems on top of it, but in reality, you're learning about the kinds of failure that people have all the time I understand you've also built games on how to launch a startup, and it seems to me that some of the skills in the Planet Saturn game would also apply to being an entrepreneur, of sort of juggling and thinking about the number of different things you have to plan for and anticipate and guard against.

Yeah, and most of the time how you learn to be an entrepreneur is you have to try being a founder and start a company, and that's a really expensive thing to do, so we've built a fake game where people live through running a company over the course of multiple weeks in real time, and all the events that happen in real life happen. We built fake Zoom, fake Slack, fake Dropbox, so you're actually interacting with customers and crises are occurring, and you get to learn the lessons that you would in real life, but without the risk and without knowing whether— without having to have a good idea first. And the early evidence is that it seems to make a big difference in people's entrepreneur ability. I've actually had students who played the game contact me a couple years later when they were running their own companies And referring to events that happened in the game as if they happened in real life.

Wow.

And one of the things we were trying to do is open this stuff up to the world. So we actually have a 90-minute version of the game that anyone can play at our Wharton Interactive site. So if people want to try it out, they're welcome to.

You know, some years ago, I remember the New York Times published an interactive tool on their website that let people figure out how to allocate the national budget. So, you know, the newspaper basically says, here's the amount of revenue we have. Here's what we have to spend on. Here are the different priorities. How would you divide up the budget? In other words, ordinary people, ordinary citizens got to play the role of Congress. What I found remarkable about the game was how much it engaged people in policy questions instead of simply presenting them with didactic information or ideological positions. People were saying, how would I balance this if I had to do it myself? As people got to explore the trade-offs, I had the sense it even reduced some of the partisan rancor.

Right.

we see in the news all the time. So I feel like the potential for games in terms of improving things that are in the public interest is actually quite vast.

I agree. I mean, you know, there's all the elements come together here, right? So games make something that would seem really boring, like budget balancing, engaging. You're trying to solve a puzzle now. It also— you get to see how other people are answering it. So there's social competition and comparison, and it makes a complex topic like the budget feel sensical, right? One of my favorite examples of a game that engages people in policy, even though they don't know it, is SimCity. And I think maybe you've played it. Many, many people do. People start playing in like 5th grade. And if you actually look at the number of variables people are balancing in SimCity— so they're trying to manage police coverage and economic development and firefighting and sewage— there'd be over like 450 variables that they're maximizing. And if you tried to tell me that you'd teach a 5th grader about 400 aspects of city planning, it would seem insane. But in a game, it all seems natural. And so the idea of a game to build perspective, to understand the complex systems we're in, bodes really well for educating on complex topics like climate change. So there's a lot there that's really powerful.

What is your vision for how we should think about games in the workplace and in the public square, Ethan? I mean, based on all of the work and thinking that you've done, what do you think is missing in our public conversations about games or even in our attitudes about the role of games?

Games are here to stay. People love them. So I think the question is, what can we learn from games? And I think it's not that we can You know, turn work into a game and then work becomes amazing. But we can take aspects of games that make work compelling or make learning compelling and apply those—that simulation aspect we talked about, competition, the idea that you understand what you're trying to do and have clear rules, clear rewards, adjust difficulty level to someone's difficulty level in life. I think we should be asking how can we take aspects of games beyond just sort of the simple let's have points and use those to make. make work and life and policy decisions more intelligently.

Along with David Edery, Ethan Mollick is the author of Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business. Ethan, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you for having me.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Kristin Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Next week in our Work 2.0 series, we look at how to avoid being knocked off course by distractions. Our unsung hero today is Alex Muntianu. He's a listener, and Hidden Brain is his favorite podcast. He says, I really enjoy the episodes that have a personal story combined with fascinating psychological research findings. Some time ago, Alex decided to become a supporter of our show on Patreon. Alex, we are so grateful to have your support. It means a lot to our team.

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