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7 ways games reward the brain

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    I love video games.
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    I'm also slightly in awe of them.
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    I'm in awe of their power
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    in terms of imagination, in terms of technology,
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    in terms of concept.
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    But I think, above all,
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    I'm in awe at their power
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    to motivate, to compel us,
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    to transfix us,
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    like really nothing else we've ever invented
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    has quite done before.
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    And I think that we can learn some pretty amazing things
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    by looking at how we do this.
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    And in particular, I think we can learn things
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    about learning.
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    Now the video games industry
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    is far and away the fastest growing
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    of all modern media.
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    From about 10 billion in 1990,
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    it's worth 50 billion dollars globally today,
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    and it shows no sign of slowing down.
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    In four years' time,
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    it's estimated it'll be worth over 80 billion dollars.
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    That's about three times the recorded music industry.
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    This is pretty stunning,
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    but I don't think it's the most telling statistic of all.
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    The thing that really amazes me
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    is that, today,
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    people spend about
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    eight billion real dollars a year
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    buying virtual items
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    that only exist
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    inside video games.
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    This is a screenshot from the virtual game world, Entropia Universe.
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    Earlier this year,
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    a virtual asteroid in it
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    sold for 330,000 real dollars.
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    And this
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    is a Titan class ship
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    in the space game, EVE Online.
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    And this virtual object
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    takes 200 real people
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    about 56 days of real time to build,
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    plus countless thousands of hours
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    of effort before that.
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    And yet, many of these get built.
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    At the other end of the scale,
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    the game Farmville that you may well have heard of,
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    has 70 million players
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    around the world
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    and most of these players
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    are playing it almost every day.
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    This may all sound
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    really quite alarming to some people,
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    an index of something worrying
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    or wrong in society.
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    But we're here for the good news,
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    and the good news is
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    that I think we can explore
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    why this very real human effort,
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    this very intense generation of value, is occurring.
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    And by answering that question,
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    I think we can take something
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    extremely powerful away.
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    And I think the most interesting way
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    to think about how all this is going on
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    is in terms of rewards.
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    And specifically, it's in terms
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    of the very intense emotional rewards
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    that playing games offers to people
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    both individually
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    and collectively.
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    Now if we look at what's going on in someone's head
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    when they are being engaged,
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    two quite different processes are occurring.
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    On the one hand, there's the wanting processes.
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    This is a bit like ambition and drive -- I'm going to do that. I'm going to work hard.
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    On the other hand, there's the liking processes,
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    fun and affection
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    and delight
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    and an enormous flying beast with an orc on the back.
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    It's a really great image. It's pretty cool.
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    It's from the game World of Warcraft with more than 10 million players globally,
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    one of whom is me, another of whom is my wife.
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    And this kind of a world,
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    this vast flying beast you can ride around,
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    shows why games are so very good
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    at doing both the wanting and the liking.
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    Because it's very powerful. It's pretty awesome.
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    It gives you great powers.
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    Your ambition is satisfied, but it's very beautiful.
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    It's a very great pleasure to fly around.
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    And so these combine to form
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    a very intense emotional engagement.
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    But this isn't the really interesting stuff.
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    The really interesting stuff about virtuality
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    is what you can measure with it.
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    Because what you can measure in virtuality
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    is everything.
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    Every single thing that every single person
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    who's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured.
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    The biggest games in the world today
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    are measuring more than one billion points of data
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    about their players, about what everybody does --
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    far more detail than you'd ever get from any website.
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    And this allows something very special
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    to happen in games.
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    It's something called the reward schedule.
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    And by this, I mean looking
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    at what millions upon millions of people have done
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    and carefully calibrating the rate,
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    the nature, the type, the intensity of rewards in games
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    to keep them engaged
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    over staggering amounts of time and effort.
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    Now, to try and explain this
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    in sort of real terms,
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    I want to talk about a kind of task
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    that might fall to you in so many games.
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    Go and get a certain amount of a certain little game-y item.
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    Let's say, for the sake of argument,
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    my mission is to get 15 pies
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    and I can get 15 pies
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    by killing these cute, little monsters.
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    Simple game quest.
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    Now you can think about this, if you like,
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    as a problem about boxes.
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    I've got to keep opening boxes.
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    I don't know what's inside them until I open them.
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    And I go around opening box after box until I've got 15 pies.
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    Now, if you take a game like Warcraft,
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    you can think about it, if you like,
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    as a great box-opening effort.
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    The game's just trying to get people to open about a million boxes,
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    getting better and better stuff in them.
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    This sounds immensely boring
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    but games are able
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    to make this process
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    incredibly compelling.
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    And the way they do this
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    is through a combination of probability and data.
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    Let's think about probability.
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    If we want to engage someone
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    in the process of opening boxes to try and find pies,
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    we want to make sure it's neither too easy,
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    nor too difficult, to find a pie.
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    So what do you do? Well, you look at a million people --
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    no, 100 million people, 100 million box openers --
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    and you work out, if you make the pie rate
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    about 25 percent --
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    that's neither too frustrating, nor too easy.
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    It keeps people engaged.
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    But of course, that's not all you do -- there's 15 pies.
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    Now, I could make a game called Piecraft,
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    where all you had to do was get a million pies
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    or a thousand pies.
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    That would be very boring.
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    Fifteen is a pretty optimal number.
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    You find that -- you know, between five and 20
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    is about the right number for keeping people going.
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    But we don't just have pies in the boxes.
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    There's 100 percent up here.
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    And what we do is make sure that every time a box is opened,
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    there's something in it, some little reward
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    that keeps people progressing and engaged.
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    In most adventure games,
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    it's a little bit in-game currency, a little bit experience.
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    But we don't just do that either.
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    We also say there's going to be loads of other items
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    of varying qualities and levels of excitement.
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    There's going to be a 10 percent chance you get a pretty good item.
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    There's going to be a 0.1 percent chance
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    you get an absolutely awesome item.
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    And each of these rewards is carefully calibrated to the item.
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    And also, we say,
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    "Well, how many monsters? Should I have the entire world full of a billion monsters?"
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    No, we want one or two monsters on the screen at any one time.
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    So I'm drawn on. It's not too easy, not too difficult.
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    So all this is very powerful.
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    But we're in virtuality. These aren't real boxes.
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    So we can do
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    some rather amazing things.
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    We notice, looking at all these people opening boxes,
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    that when people get to about 13 out of 15 pies,
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    their perception shifts, they start to get a bit bored, a bit testy.
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    They're not rational about probability.
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    They think this game is unfair.
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    It's not giving me my last two pies. I'm going to give up.
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    If they're real boxes, there's not much we can do,
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    but in a game we can just say, "Right, well.
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    When you get to 13 pies, you've got 75 percent chance of getting a pie now."
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    Keep you engaged. Look at what people do --
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    adjust the world to match their expectation.
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    Our games don't always do this.
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    And one thing they certainly do at the moment
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    is if you got a 0.1 percent awesome item,
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    they make very sure another one doesn't appear for a certain length of time
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    to keep the value, to keep it special.
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    And the point is really
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    that we evolved to be satisfied by the world
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    in particular ways.
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    Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years,
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    we evolved to find certain things stimulating,
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    and as very intelligent, civilized beings,
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    we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning.
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    But now, we can reverse engineer that
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    and build worlds
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    that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes.
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    So what does all this mean in practice?
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    Well, I've come up
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    with seven things
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    that, I think, show
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    how you can take these lessons from games
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    and use them outside of games.
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    The first one is very simple:
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    experience bars measuring progress --
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    something that's been talked about brilliantly
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    by people like Jesse Schell earlier this year.
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    It's already been done at the University of Indiana in the States, among other places.
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    It's the simple idea that instead of grading people incrementally
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    in little bits and pieces,
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    you give them one profile character avatar
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    which is constantly progressing
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    in tiny, tiny, tiny little increments which they feel are their own.
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    And everything comes towards that,
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    and they watch it creeping up, and they own that as it goes along.
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    Second, multiple long and short-term aims --
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    5,000 pies, boring,
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    15 pies, interesting.
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    So, you give people
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    lots and lots of different tasks.
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    You say, it's about
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    doing 10 of these questions,
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    but another task
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    is turning up to 20 classes on time,
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    but another task is collaborating with other people,
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    another task is showing you're working five times,
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    another task is hitting this particular target.
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    You break things down into these calibrated slices
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    that people can choose and do in parallel
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    to keep them engaged
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    and that you can use to point them
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    towards individually beneficial activities.
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    Third, you reward effort.
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    It's your 100 percent factor. Games are brilliant at this.
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    Every time you do something, you get credit; you get a credit for trying.
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    You don't punish failure. You reward every little bit of effort --
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    a little bit of gold, a little bit of credit. You've done 20 questions -- tick.
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    It all feeds in as minute reinforcement.
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    Fourth, feedback.
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    This is absolutely crucial,
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    and virtuality is dazzling at delivering this.
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    If you look at some of the most intractable problems in the world today
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    that we've been hearing amazing things about,
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    it's very, very hard for people to learn
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    if they cannot link consequences to actions.
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    Pollution, global warming, these things --
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    the consequences are distant in time and space.
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    It's very hard to learn, to feel a lesson.
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    But if you can model things for people,
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    if you can give things to people that they can manipulate
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    and play with and where the feedback comes,
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    then they can learn a lesson, they can see,
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    they can move on, they can understand.
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    And fifth,
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    the element of uncertainty.
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    Now this is the neurological goldmine,
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    if you like,
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    because a known reward
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    excites people,
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    but what really gets them going
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    is the uncertain reward,
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    the reward pitched at the right level of uncertainty,
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    that they didn't quite know whether they were going to get it or not.
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    The 25 percent. This lights the brain up.
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    And if you think about
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    using this in testing,
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    in just introducing control elements of randomness
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    in all forms of testing and training,
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    you can transform the levels of people's engagement
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    by tapping into this very powerful
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    evolutionary mechanism.
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    When we don't quite predict something perfectly,
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    we get really excited about it.
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    We just want to go back and find out more.
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    As you probably know, the neurotransmitter
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    associated with learning is called dopamine.
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    It's associated with reward-seeking behavior.
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    And something very exciting is just beginning to happen
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    in places like the University of Bristol in the U.K.,
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    where we are beginning to be able to model mathematically
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    dopamine levels in the brain.
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    And what this means is we can predict learning,
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    we can predict enhanced engagement,
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    these windows, these windows of time,
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    in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level.
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    And two things really flow from this.
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    The first has to do with memory,
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    that we can find these moments.
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    When someone is more likely to remember,
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    we can give them a nugget in a window.
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    And the second thing is confidence,
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    that we can see how game-playing and reward structures
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    make people braver, make them more willing to take risks,
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    more willing to take on difficulty,
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    harder to discourage.
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    This can all seem very sinister.
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    But you know, sort of "our brains have been manipulated; we're all addicts."
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    The word "addiction" is thrown around.
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    There are real concerns there.
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    But the biggest neurological turn-on for people
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    is other people.
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    This is what really excites us.
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    In reward terms, it's not money;
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    it's not being given cash -- that's nice --
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    it's doing stuff with our peers,
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    watching us, collaborating with us.
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    And I want to tell you a quick story about 1999 --
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    a video game called EverQuest.
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    And in this video game,
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    there were two really big dragons, and you had to team up to kill them --
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    42 people, up to 42 to kill these big dragons.
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    That's a problem
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    because they dropped two or three decent items.
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    So players addressed this problem
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    by spontaneously coming up with a system
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    to motivate each other,
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    fairly and transparently.
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    What happened was, they paid each other a virtual currency
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    they called "dragon kill points."
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    And every time you turned up to go on a mission,
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    you got paid in dragon kill points.
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    They tracked these on a separate website.
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    So they tracked their own private currency,
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    and then players could bid afterwards
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    for cool items they wanted --
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    all organized by the players themselves.
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    Now the staggering system, not just that this worked in EverQuest,
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    but that today, a decade on,
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    every single video game in the world with this kind of task
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    uses a version of this system --
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    tens of millions of people.
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    And the success rate
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    is at close to 100 percent.
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    This is a player-developed,
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    self-enforcing, voluntary currency,
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    and it's incredibly sophisticated
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    player behavior.
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    And I just want to end by suggesting
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    a few ways in which these principles
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    could fan out into the world.
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    Let's start with business.
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    I mean, we're beginning to see some of the big problems
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    around something like business are
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    recycling and energy conservation.
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    We're beginning to see the emergence of wonderful technologies
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    like real-time energy meters.
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    And I just look at this, and I think, yes,
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    we could take that so much further
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    by allowing people to set targets
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    by setting calibrated targets,
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    by using elements of uncertainty,
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    by using these multiple targets,
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    by using a grand, underlying reward and incentive system,
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    by setting people up
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    to collaborate in terms of groups, in terms of streets
  • 14:14 - 14:16
    to collaborate and compete,
  • 14:16 - 14:18
    to use these very sophisticated
  • 14:18 - 14:20
    group and motivational mechanics we see.
  • 14:20 - 14:22
    In terms of education,
  • 14:22 - 14:24
    perhaps most obviously of all,
  • 14:24 - 14:27
    we can transform how we engage people.
  • 14:27 - 14:29
    We can offer people the grand continuity
  • 14:29 - 14:32
    of experience and personal investment.
  • 14:32 - 14:34
    We can break things down
  • 14:34 - 14:36
    into highly calibrated small tasks.
  • 14:36 - 14:38
    We can use calculated randomness.
  • 14:38 - 14:40
    We can reward effort consistently
  • 14:40 - 14:43
    as everything fields together.
  • 14:43 - 14:45
    And we can use the kind of group behaviors
  • 14:45 - 14:48
    that we see evolving when people are at play together,
  • 14:48 - 14:51
    these really quite unprecedentedly complex
  • 14:51 - 14:53
    cooperative mechanisms.
  • 14:53 - 14:55
    Government, well, one thing that comes to mind
  • 14:55 - 14:58
    is the U.S. government, among others,
  • 14:58 - 15:00
    is literally starting to pay people
  • 15:00 - 15:02
    to lose weight.
  • 15:02 - 15:04
    So we're seeing financial reward being used
  • 15:04 - 15:06
    to tackle the great issue of obesity.
  • 15:06 - 15:08
    But again, those rewards
  • 15:08 - 15:11
    could be calibrated so precisely
  • 15:11 - 15:14
    if we were able to use the vast expertise
  • 15:14 - 15:17
    of gaming systems to just jack up that appeal,
  • 15:17 - 15:19
    to take the data, to take the observations,
  • 15:19 - 15:21
    of millions of human hours
  • 15:21 - 15:23
    and plow that feedback
  • 15:23 - 15:25
    into increasing engagement.
  • 15:25 - 15:28
    And in the end, it's this word, "engagement,"
  • 15:28 - 15:30
    that I want to leave you with.
  • 15:30 - 15:32
    It's about how individual engagement
  • 15:32 - 15:34
    can be transformed
  • 15:34 - 15:37
    by the psychological and the neurological lessons
  • 15:37 - 15:40
    we can learn from watching people that are playing games.
  • 15:40 - 15:43
    But it's also about collective engagement
  • 15:43 - 15:46
    and about the unprecedented laboratory
  • 15:46 - 15:48
    for observing what makes people tick
  • 15:48 - 15:50
    and work and play and engage
  • 15:50 - 15:53
    on a grand scale in games.
  • 15:53 - 15:56
    And if we can look at these things and learn from them
  • 15:56 - 15:58
    and see how to turn them outwards,
  • 15:58 - 16:01
    then I really think we have something quite revolutionary on our hands.
  • 16:01 - 16:03
    Thank you very much.
  • 16:03 - 16:07
    (Applause)
Title:
7 ways games reward the brain
Speaker:
Tom Chatfield
Description:

We're bringing gameplay into more aspects of our lives, spending countless hours -- and real money -- exploring virtual worlds for imaginary treasures. Why? As Tom Chatfield shows, games are perfectly tuned to dole out rewards that engage the brain and keep us questing for more.

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
16:08
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