This woman thinks playing video games can heal the world

In 2009, whilst working on a study on how computer games can make us better people, Jane McGonigal suffered freak concussion that left her suicidal. Faced with a long and difficult recovery, she used her experience as a game designer to help lift her out of a dark place. Applying the principles that make gaming so rewarding (quests, allies, bad guys, power ups) into the components of a self-help game, external that could nurse her back to health. It worked so well that she's written a book about it.

We spoke to Jane about how playing more computer games could make us all better.

How have you applied your philosophy in the design of your own games?

Superbetter is a game I designed to make people's minds work in the same way they do playing games. To help them respond to stress and challenges in gameful ways, by asking: “what is it that game designers do to make you more powerful or skilful in a game?”

When you’re playing 'Super Mario' for example, getting a mushroom that makes you stronger or bigger is a 'power up'. I thought, “what would a real-life power up look like?”

For instance, I found in studies that one causal factor of depression is often dehydration. It may sound trivial, but one of the first low level power ups you get when you play my game is to drink a glass of water.

All of these benefits that you claim gaming has – is it really anything different to playing sports, for example?

You can definitely get some benefits of gaming though sport, but we don’t accept the face value benefits of gaming as much as we do with sport. Gamers may not always possess physical virtuosity, but video gamers have a mental and strategic virtuosity. We haven’t given young people enough credit for the skills they’re building.

Is there such a thing as 'bad' gaming? Will playing loads of Call of Duty make me want to go out and shoot people?

Highly competitive games, in which you’re trying to defeat people who you don’t know, have been known to increase feelings of frustration and anger and raise testosterone to a level that is equivalent to testosterone poisoning. It’s better to try to beat friends and family online, to play co-op with strangers online, or to play single-player games.

The content doesn’t matter – whether it’s Grand Theft Auto or Super Mario. It’s really more about the sort of mindset you bring to it. If you’re trying to build your resilience in the face of setbacks, you should play really hard games; if you’re looking to use games as a social relationship tool, you should play Facebook games, because there’s all sorts of research showing that the people we play those games with, we’re more likely to see in real life or ask for help with real life problems.

Are there any benefits to really competitive gameplay though?

Oh, certainly. You may become more of a jerk, but you’ll also develop a variety of cognitive skills, like the ability to process multiple streams of information faster and more effectively, to make more effective decisions quickly and so on.

Testosterone increase is not necessarily bad either if you want to be more assertive, or you need a boost of self-confidence. Hyper-competitive gameplay is really the only form of gameplay that’s been documented to have negative effects consistently. You can just be mindful of it.

It’s over-reported that most gameplay is competitive. One out of three hours of gameplay is non-competitive, even though there is money being ploughed into e-sports at the moment. There are 1.78 billion gamers on this planet and the typical person is not playing to compete against anyone else. I think it’s dangerous to over-estimate how important the competitive aspects of gaming are. It stops us from seeing the benefits.

For an alternative perspective, check out 'The Dark Side of Gaming' here, external