Hidden Brain - The Power of Games
A recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast hosted Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, to talk about the power of games and how they intersect with life and business. Beyond teaching and research, Ethan creates games for educational purposes and has authored a number of books including: The Unicorn’s Shadow, and Changing the Game: How Video Games are Transforming the Future of Business.
The interview touches on a range of topics from gamification to simulators, citizen science, and productivity. While the whole episode is worth a listen, I want to touch on two topics that really resonated with me.
Games Allow us to Fail
I first internalized the idea that games allow us to approach difficult emotions in a safe environment from Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work Podcast. Ethan Mollick really drives home the idea that failing in life can be costly and painful. Fail at a work and you might get fired – or hurt your reputation. So, we become conditioned to fear failure, and when we fail to avoid talking about, working through what we could have done, and communally coming up with better strategies.
Compare that to games.
My friend Sean and I got our butts handed to us last week in Vindication (if you haven’t played it, it’s a great game). We’ve been texting for days about what we could have done differently to prevent our (former friend) Leon’s runaway victory.
I’ve learned something about how the game works, how to strategize, and how to complain that Leon always gets the best starting companions.
Humans learn through failure and iteration. While we can’t always lessen the painful and costly impact of failure in life – we can learn from games that failure is going to happen, and that those failures better position is for future success.
Games Adjust Difficulty
Ethan and host Shankar touched on the idea of a flow state. The feeling when you get into a task and the hours blur by everything around you disappears. To achieve flow state we need mental stimulation – but not too much difficulty that it becomes frustrating.
Alternatively, performance increases with mental arousal and stress, but only up to a point.
One of the reasons that we’re able to fall into the repetitive tasks of games, and lose track of time, is that games (particularly digital games), allow us to adjust difficulty.
I wasn’t aware of this idea around flow state, and think it could be applicable to my broader life. Even just recognizing why a task is agonizing to get done, can help mentally overcome the hurdle of it.
How do you utilize games to drive your personal or professional development?
