Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Jane McGonigal - Page 2

If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion … you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing.

Over time, the games we play can change how we think and what we're capable of. And it's easy to maximize the benefits so the changes are positive.

Research shows that when we're under stress or facing a major obstacle, we tend to focus on our weaknesses and what we're afraid of.

Games are providing rewards that reality is not.

There is so much more knowledge than most people realize about how to maximize the benefits of play and minimize the potential harms.

You can't play the same game every day for years. New games are key.

Games are such a powerful intervention in health and wellness.

Game design isn’t just a technological craft. It’s a twenty-first-century way of thinking and leading.

It may have once been true that computer games encouraged us to interact more with machines than with each other. But if you still think of gamers as loners, then you’re not playing games.

When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.

Any time I consider a new project, I ask myself, is this pushing the state of gaming toward Nobel Prizes? If it's not, then it's not doing anything important enough to spend my time.

The more we consume, acquire, and elevate our status, the harder it is to stay happy.

We have to accept as a society that games are not escapist. They really do change us.

Games are unnecessary obstacles we volunteer to tackle.

A traumatic event doesn't doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives.

When we know our strengths, we're more likely to use them.

If you are a gamer, it’s time to get over any regret you might feel about spending so much time playing games. You have not been wasting your time. You have been building up a wealth of virtual experience that, as the first half of this book will show you, can teach you about your true self: what your core strengths are, what really motivates you, and what make you happiest.

It's a bit counter-intuitive to think about the future in terms of the past. But...I've learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. Technologies, cultures, and climates may change, but our basic human needs and desires - to survive, to care for our families, and to lead happy, purposeful lives - remain the same.' p 5

I don't want to be a saint; I just want to help people.

You need to develop mental habits that allow you to activate the same brain patterns we activate during gameplay.

Avatars are a way to express our true selves, our most heroic, idealized version of who we might become.

The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.

Cory Doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the details of alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling, new vision of how these games might play out in the high-stakes context of a terrorist attack. Little Brother is a brilliant novel with a bold argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country's best hope for the future.