Readalong: Reality is Broken, Ch 6 – Becoming a Part of Something Bigger Than Ourselves
This continues the Readalong by Erik van Mechelen of Jane McGonigal’s ‘Reality is Broken’ with insights from Yu-kai Chou’s Octalysis Framework. For in-depth discussions of this book and others, join Octalysis Prime.
tl;dr The key to happiness is reducing a focus on oneself and investing effort and attention into something larger than oneself, something of epic proportions, something that gives you awe.
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Summary
McGonigal’s narrative of Halo’s rise and incorporation of epic meaning from its player base and community-driven goals of 10 billion kills against the Covenant (a fictional enemy to Earth) provides the backdrop for her suggestion that the key to happiness is an investment in something with epic meaning.
Something that gives one awe in its pursuit.
Analysis
Most of McGonigal’s narrative and explanation is convincing in this chapter.
I like her tale of Halo 3’s community-driven pursuit and the seemingly endless stream of games and movies which now stake the survival of planet Earth at the center of their stories. There is something in epic scale and proportions that attracts our attention.
Halo 3’s community used narrative with collective context for shared experience by players and then placed this context in a service lens: anything a player does in service of that context which will benefit the group and the larger collective. This dynamic maps directly to Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, where belonging to a community and contributing to shared goals amplifies motivation far beyond what individual achievement alone can produce.
An online museum was even built to commemorate achievements.
Later, McGonigal builds the motivational and psychological viewpoint further.
As Martin Seligman puts it: “The self is a very poor site for meaning.”
Furthermore, archeological findings like the Gobekli Tepe (predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years) demonstrate our ancestors’ desire for epic environments. This resonates with what Yu-kai Chou calls Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling — the intrinsic motivation that comes from believing you are part of something far greater than yourself.
These Neolithic (New Stone Age) giant stone circles may have been a spiritual construction which brought people together, and may have been a place where early villages and cities grew up around.
If you haven’t read Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’, I highly recommend it.
Finally, McGonigal urges us to notice that there is something about reducing the self and thrusting efforts towards higher meaning that brings us happiness, and that we should look to not only do this in games, but in the real world.
What do you think?
What epic environments or stories or missions have pulled you into their keeping?
Is the key to happiness pulling away from oneself and into a larger meaning?
Let me know in the comments or on Octalysis Prime‘s community.
Related Reading
- Readalong: Reality is Broken, Ch 7 — The Benefits of Alternate Realities
- Readalong: Reality is Broken, Ch 5 — Stronger Social Connectivity
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling
- What is Gamification?
- Books by Yu-kai Chou