by Adam Alter
Experts may have believed that games were fundamentally more attractive to males than females, but that difference turns out to have been cultural. Now that smartphones have become game delivery devices, many of the most popular games, such as FarmVille, Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood, and Candy Crush, are played by more women than men. All you need is the right environment—and the removal of barriers that prevent novices from taking their first hit—and you’ll find a brand-new segment of addicts that looks nothing like the addicts who came before them.
Kimberly Young, a psychologist who practices at a small regional hospital in Bradford, Pennsylvania, coined the phrase “Internet addiction” in 1995, and in 2010 she opened the Center for Internet Addiction—the country’s first hospital-based treatment center for Internet addiction. Most Internet addicts are hooked on games. “In the mid-2000s, as the infrastructure of the Internet improved, Internet addiction became a much bigger problem,” Young said. “But the biggest changes, by far, were the introduction of the iPhone and then the iPad in 2010.” Games became mobile, available to anyone with a smartphone all the time. Instead of a string of teenage boys, Young was suddenly treating both males and females of all ages and personality types. What had saved these people from forming Internet addictions beforehand was that gaming was largely inaccessible. You had to decide to buy a console, and you had to have hours and hours of free time on your hands. Apart from teenage boys, most people were excluded on one or more fronts. “Everybody now has a tablet or an iPhone or a smart device, and it cuts across generations,” Young told me. “That’s how my career exploded.” Young says early lures designed to hook novices are just the beginning. The most compelling experiences maintain their appeal in the longer term, providing benefits not just to beginners but also to veterans.
Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros. appealed to novices, of course, but also contained buried treasure for more experienced players. The game’s first level contained a secret tunnel that gave experts a shortcut to the end of the level via an underground chamber filled with coins. The tunnel allowed them to skip Miyamoto’s in-game tutorial, and it also rewarded their persistence by playing a string of “ding” sounds as Mario grabbed the underground coins. Because Miyamoto hid some of its charms from all but the game’s most devoted fans, many early fans continue to return to Super Mario three decades after its release.
7.
Escalation
According to Google Books there are more than thirty thousand books about “making life easier.” These books focus on a wealth of issues, including romantic relationships, managing your finances, succeeding at work, selling on eBay, networking, life as a modern woman, life as a modern man, parenting, losing weight, gaining weight, maintaining your weight, gaining muscle, losing fat, writing exams, making animated films, computer coding, inventing products, getting rich quick, dancing, staying healthy, being happy, living a meaningful life, acquiring good habits, shedding bad habits, and hundreds of other topics. These books suggest that our lives are hard, and that we’d be happier and better off if we could learn to replace hardship with ease. But most of these books weren’t written for people enduring major hardships, and there’s very little evidence that people with regular lives become happier when you replace challenges with ease. We know this because people don’t seem to embrace ease when you give them a choice.
In the summer of 2014, eight psychologists published a paper in the influential journal Science about how people respond when given an opportunity to embrace ease. In one study they asked a group of undergraduate students to sit quietly for ten or twenty minutes. “Your goal,” they said, “is to entertain yourself with your thoughts as best you can. That is, your goal should be to have a pleasant experience, as opposed to spending the time focusing on everyday activities or negative things.” It’s hard to imagine a psychology experiment being less onerous. (The first experiment I ran, almost fifteen years ago, was designed to measure how people behaved when they were sad. I subjected one hundred students to the scene in The Champ where a young Ricky Schroder cries as his dad, played by Jon Voight, dies in his arms. The scene is regularly voted the “saddest scene in film,” and even the bubbliest students were upset when they left the lab. So asking people to sit quietly with their pleasant thoughts isn’t so bad.)
The experimenters added a twist to the experiment. They hooked the students up to a machine that administers electric shocks, and gave them a sample shock to show them that the experience of being shocked isn’t pleasant. It isn’t agonizing, but it sits somewhere between the pinch of a syringe needle and a bad toothache. Just before leaving the room, the experimenter told the students that the electric shock would be available while they were thinking quietly, that they could experience it again if they wanted to, but that “Whether you do so is completely up to you—it is your choice.”
One student—a male, in case you’re curious—shocked himself one hundred and ninety times. That’s once every six seconds, over and over, for twenty minutes. He was an outlier, but two thirds of all male students and about one in three female students shocked themselves at least once. Many shocked themselves more than once. They’d all experienced the sting of the shock before the experiment, so this wasn’t just curiosity. By their own admission in a questionnaire just minutes earlier they didn’t find the experience pleasant. So they preferred to endure the unpleasantness of a shock to the experience of sitting quietly with their thoughts. In the experimenters’ words, “most people prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.” As thirty thousand books tell us, we may be looking for an easier life on some level—but many of us prefer to break up a period of mild pleasantness with a dose of moderate hardship.
David Goldhill explained why some degree of hardship is essential. “People don’t understand why movie stars are often miserable,” Goldhill said. “Imagine getting the girl every night, and never paying for a meal. A game in which you always win, for most people, is boring.” The game Goldhill described sounds appealing on its surface, but it gets old fast. To some extent we all need losses and difficulties and challenges, because without them the thrill of success weakens gradually with each new victory. That’s why people spend precious chunks of free time doing difficult crosswords and climbing dangerous mountains—because the hardship of the challenge is far more compelling than knowing you’re going to succeed. This sense of hardship is an ingredient in many addictive experiences, including one of the most addictive simple games of all time: Tetris.
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In 1984, Alexey Pajitnov was working at a computer lab at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow. Many of the lab’s scientists worked on side projects, and Pajitnov began working on a video game. The game borrowed from tennis and a version of four-piece dominoes called tetrominoes, so Pajitnov combined those words to form the name Tetris. Pajitnov worked on Tetris for much longer than he planned because he couldn’t stop playing the game. His friends remember him chain-smoking and pacing back and forth along the lab’s polished concrete floors.
In an interview ten years after the game was released, Pajitnov remembered, “You can’t imagine. I couldn’t finish the prototype! I started to play and never had time to finish the code.” Eventually Pajitnov allowed his friends at the Academy of Science to play the game. “I let other people play, and I realized, it’s not me who’s cuckoo! Everyone who touched the game couldn’t stop playing either. People kept playing, playing, playing. My best friend said, ‘I can’t live with your Tetris anymore.’” His best friend, Vladimir Pokhilko, a former psychologist, remembered taking the game to his lab at the Moscow Medical Institute. “Everybody stopped working. So I deleted it from every computer. Everyone went back to work, until a new version appeared in the lab.” Pajitnov’s boss, Yuri Yevtushenko, who directed the Computer Center at the Russian Academy of Science, remembered that productivity at the Center plummeted. “The game was compelling and many of our emp
loyees got carried away to the detriment of their work.”
Tetris spread from the Academy of Science to the rest of Moscow, and then on to the rest of Russia and Eastern Europe. Two years later, in 1986, the game reached the West, but its big break came in 1991, when Nintendo signed a deal with Pajitnov. Every Game Boy would come with a free game cartridge that contained a redesigned version of Tetris.
That year I saved up and ultimately bought a Game Boy, which is how I came to play Tetris for the first time. It wasn’t as glitzy as some of my other favorites, but like Pajitnov I played for hours at a time. Sometimes, as I drifted off to sleep, I’d imagine the blocks tumbling down to form completed rows—a remarkably common experience known as The Tetris Effect, which affects people who have played any animated game for long periods of time. Nintendo was smart to include the game with their new portable console, because it was easy to learn and very difficult to abandon. I assumed I’d grow tired of Tetris, but sometimes I still play the game today, more than twenty-five years later. It has longevity because it grows with you. It’s easy at first, but as you improve the game gets more difficult. The pieces fall from the top of the screen more quickly, and you have less time to react than you did when you were a novice. This escalation of difficulty is a critical hook that keeps the game engaging long after you’ve mastered its basic moves. Part of what makes this progression pleasurable is that your brain becomes more efficient as you improve. In fact, in 1991 the Guinness Book of Records recognized Tetris as “the first videogame to improve brain functioning and efficiency.” That claim was based on research by a psychiatrist named Richard Haier, who worked at the University of California.
In 1991, Haier wondered whether our brains get better at difficult mental tasks with some practice. He decided to watch as people mastered a video game, but he didn’t know much about the cutting-edge world of gaming. “In 1991 no one had heard of Tetris,” he said in an interview a few years later. “I went to the computer store to see what they had and the guy said, ‘Here try this. It’s just come in.’ Tetris was the perfect game, it was simple to learn, you had to practice to get good and there was a good learning curve.”
So Haier bought some copies of Tetris for his lab and watched as his experimental subjects played the game. He did find neurological changes with experience—parts of the brain thickened and brain activity declined, suggesting experts’ brains worked more efficiently—but more relevant here, he found that his subjects relished playing the game. They signed up to play for forty-five minutes a day, five days a week, for up to eight weeks. They came for the experiment (and the cash payment that came with participating), but stayed for the game.
One satisfying feature of the game is the sense that you’re building something—that your efforts produce a pleasing tower of colored bricks. “You have the chaos coming as random pieces, and your job is to put them in order,” Pajitnov said. “But just as you construct the perfect line, it disappears. All that remains is what you fail to complete.” Mikhail Kulagin, Pajitnov’s friend and a fellow programmer, remembers feeling a strong drive to fix his mistakes. “Tetris is a game with a very strong negative motivation. You never see what you have done very well, and your mistakes are seen on the screen. And you always want to correct them.” Pajitnov agreed. “What hits your eyes are your ugly mistakes. And that drives you to fix them all the time.” The game allows you the brief thrill of seeing your completed lines flash before they disappear, leaving only your mistakes. So you begin again, and try to complete another line as the game speeds up and your fingers are forced to dance across the controls more quickly.
Pajitnov and Kulagin were driven by this sense of mastery, which turns out to be deeply motivating. In one experiment run by business school professors Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, students came into a lab and either built a black storage box from IKEA or saw that a pre-built box was already waiting for them. The researchers asked the students how much they’d be willing to pay for the box (with the understanding that they might in fact be asked to pay that amount). Those who had built the box bid a full 63 percent more than did students who happened to be bidding on a box that was pre-built. They were bidding on exactly the same item. This difference—seventy-eight cents versus forty-eight cents—represents the value that people place on their own creations. In another experiment, students were willing to pay five cents for someone else’s amateurish origami creation, but twenty-three cents—more than four times as much—for their own (equally amateurish) origami creation. When asked to bid on the origami creations of experts, which were objectively far more impressive, they bid only twenty-seven cents—a mere four-cent premium for a vastly superior product. Other studies have shown that we’re also driven to build more Legos when the completed products—the fruits of our Lego-building labor—are stacked up in front of us, rather than removed as soon as they’re completed. The sense of creating something that requires labor and effort and expertise is a major force behind addictive acts that might otherwise lose their sheen over time. It also highlights an insidious difference between substance addiction and behavioral addiction: where substance addictions are nakedly destructive, many behavioral addictions are quietly destructive acts wrapped in cloaks of creation. The illusion of progress will sustain you as you achieve high scores or acquire more followers or spend more time at work, and so you’ll struggle ever harder to shake the need to continue.
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Six decades before Pajitnov released Tetris, a Russian psychologist named Lev Vygotsky was studying how children learn new skills. Like Pajitnov, Vygotsky spent his most productive years in Moscow, at the Moscow State University. He was Jewish, which was a significant handicap for even the brightest aspiring students. But Vygotsky was lucky, winning a spot through the university’s annual “Jewish lottery,” which decided which Jewish applicants would fill its “no more than 3 percent” Jewish quota. Sadly, Vygotsky would be struck down by a number of illnesses, and he died at age thirty-seven. But he was wildly productive during his brief life, and one of his major contributions explains why Pajitnov and his colleagues were so drawn to Tetris.
Vygotsky explained that children learn best, and are most motivated, when the material they’re learning is just beyond the reach of their current abilities. In the classroom context, this means a teacher guides them to clear the hurdle presented by the task, but not so heavy-handedly that they feel their existing skills weren’t useful in reaching the task’s solution. Vygotsky called this the “zone of proximal development,” which he represented with this simple diagram:
When adults play games, they aren’t led along by a teacher—but a well-designed game creates the illusion of being taught. (Remember the first level of Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros., which coached novice players through the game’s basics.) People who play Tetris, regardless of their abilities, spend most of their time in the zone of proximal development. Like Richard Haier’s subjects, they struggle with the game’s slowest level until they slowly develop a sense of mastery that allows them to play the second level, and then the third, and so on. The difficulty of the game escalates, but their abilities keep pace—or rather fall just short of mastering the most difficult level they’ve managed to attain.
The zone of proximal development is deeply motivating. You don’t just learn efficiently; you also enjoy the process. In 1990, a Hungarian psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published Flow, his classic book on the psychic benefits of mastering a challenge. (One of my professors told me to pronounce Csikszentmihalyi’s name as “chick-sent-me-high,” which I’ve always remembered.) Csikszentmihalyi had noticed that many artists became deeply embedded in the business of making art—so deeply that they allowed hours and hours to pass without feeling the need to eat or drink. As Csikszentmihalyi explained, when people experience flow—also known as entering the zone—they become so immersed in the task at hand that they lose track of time. Some report a sense of prof
ound joy or rapture when they enter the zone; a rare, long-lasting euphoria that only seems to arise reliably in these rare situations characterized by challenges and the ability to just barely overcome those challenges. (As Csikszentmihalyi acknowledged, flow has been a major part of many Eastern philosophies and religions for centuries. His major contribution was to refine and translate the idea for a new audience.) Csikszentmihalyi created a useful diagram that shows why escalation of difficulty is such a big part of flow:
Flow—the channel that runs from the bottom left to the top right of the diagram—describes the experience of tackling a moderate challenge with the skill to master that challenge. Both ingredients are essential. If the challenge is high but you’re less skilled, you experience anxiety; if you’re skilled but the challenge is low, boredom.
