dismissed as a trivial pastime or even a waste of time. Thanks to the efforts of researchers, we now know that even though games are fun, we can and should take them seriously as a tool for becoming stronger, happier, and healthier.
A SuperBetter Story: The Game-Playing Monk
I met Vasily on the other side of the world, high in the mountains of Ganghwa Island, an hour outside of Seoul, South Korea. I had escaped the city for a weekend stay at the ancient Jeongdeungsa Temple, built in AD 381, where visitors are invited to learn about Buddhist cultures and traditions.
Vasily was our teacher for the weekend. Tall, handsome, and Russian, he was not quite the kind of monk I expected to meet at a temple in South Korea! I soon learned that while he had been ordained as a monk in Russia, he had chosen to make Jeongdeungsa his home, as he preferred the peace and beauty of the landscape.
After two days of practicing Buddhist methods of meditation and prayer and chanting with our group of twenty students, I had a chance to sit down for a chat with Vasily. I wanted to ask him his opinion about the role of play and games in a spiritual and happy life. I knew that the Buddha had famously rejected games, compiling a list of all the games he would not play—including those with balls or dice and even “guessing at letters traced with the finger in the air or on a friend’s back.”28 Yet given everything contemporary science has said about game play as a way to learn to control our attention—which is one of the primary aims of Buddhist practice!—I wondered (perhaps a bit impudently) if there wasn’t a place for games at a Buddhist temple after all.
Vasily first explained to me that the Buddha rejected games on the grounds that they were “a waste of time.” (Worrying about games as a waste of time? Apparently, not much has changed in the past twenty-five hundred years!) The problem, according to the Buddha, was that games distracted players from the more important work of seeking enlightenment. Vasily shared this concern and discouraged me from using games to “escape reality” rather than be present in the moment.
But then Vasily lowered his voice and said something that rather shocked me: “Of course, I play Angry Birds every night.” Looking a bit sheepish, he explained, “We meditate for hours. We pray for hours. There are still many hours in the day.” He did not see his game play as an escape: “Especially in the evening when I am tired, one hour of Angry Birds is a way to focus and calm my thoughts. It is skillful practice, not escape.”
Here was someone who had spent years training in the Buddhist practice, mastering some of the most powerful attention-control techniques ever devised. And even he, a master of highly complex forms of meditation, breathing, and prayer, had decided to integrate video games into his daily rituals!
It’s been almost three years since I met Vasily, but whenever I pull out my phone for a quick session of Angry Birds, I find myself thinking about him. I picture him in his monastery robe, seated on a meditation cushion in the oldest temple in Korea, slinging the same adorable birds through the same virtual space, both of us enjoying the peaceful experience of controlling our spotlight of attention.
From Snow World and Tetris to Super Mario and Bejeweled, healing video games teach an important lesson that extends far beyond the virtual world: you are mentally and emotionally stronger than you realize, especially in the face of stress, trauma, or pain. You can control your attention spotlight. And therefore you can control your thoughts, emotions, and even physical sensations.
MISSION COMPLETE
Skills Unlocked: Why You Are Stronger Than You Know
• Control over your attention spotlight is a hidden superpower you already have, one that can help you combat stress, anxiety, depression, and pain.
• Games help you discover and practice this power—and prepare you to wield it even under the most difficult real-world conditions.
• To prevent traumatic flashbacks or curb cravings, swing your attention spotlight toward something that is highly visually engaging, like Tetris or jigsaw puzzles.
• To block pain or anxiety, don’t try to relax. Instead, focus your attention on any flow-inducing activity—something that challenges you and requires active effort.
• If you need to quickly pull your attention away from an unwanted thought or feeling, play the two-letter word game (in which you try to list as many words that contain both letters as possible).
• Thirty minutes of a “deep focus” activity—such as casual game play or meditation—three times a week can improve your mood, decrease stress, and help reduce symptoms of depression. It will also improve your heart rate variability, one of the best measures of physical resilience.
• Playing games is not a waste of time to feel guilty about. It’s a skillful, purposeful activity that gives you direct control over your thoughts and feelings.
You Are Surrounded by Potential Allies
Your Mission
Discover just how many people are ready to help you with any problem, at any time.
What if you were surrounded by people ready and willing to help you with any problem at any time? How much more could you accomplish? How much more ambitious could you be?
You already have this power. You can turn almost anyone into an ally—even a stranger, even someone who thinks they don’t like you—just by playing a game with them.
In this chapter, we’ll examine the unique properties of games that make them the perfect platform for learning how to strengthen real-life relationships and find more common ground with others. You’ll see how the benefits of playing a game with others last long after the game is played. Plus, you’ll learn practical strategies for bringing the positive ways we interact in games into the rest of your daily life.
Hedgewars is a cute and funny video game, despite the word wars in its title. Players are invited to commandeer an army of pink hedgehogs for intergalactic space battle. (Think Angry Birds but a bit more challenging—and with flying spiny mammals instead of birds.) It’s relatively simple to learn, playable on any computer or mobile phone—and as researchers at the University of Helsinki recently discovered, it has a powerful effect on our bodies and brains.
When two people play Hedgewars together in the same room, they experience what Dr. Michiel Sovijärvi-Spapé and Dr. Niklas Ravaja describe as “neurological and physiological linkage.”1 The two players start to make the same facial expressions, smiling and frowning in unison. Their heart rates adapt to the same rhythm. Their breathing patterns sync. Most astonishingly, their brain waves sync, as their neurons start to “mirror” each other—a process that helps each of them anticipate what the other will do next. All these changes happen almost immediately, within minutes of starting to play.
Surprisingly, this synchronization occurs whether the two players are cooperating or competing with each other. It doesn’t matter whether you consider your fellow player a teammate or an opponent. When you play Hedgewars together, your minds and bodies start to operate in near-perfect harmony.
What makes these biological
