>There is nothing that would make it impossible for a job or a school system to be as engaging as a video game

Of course there is: real life has real consequences like failing school or poverty or death if you mess up too badly. Part of the fun of video games is that you can do exciting things without actual risk.

To tag on to this: I'd argue that work and school are more engaging than video games. When was the last time you just stopped going to work because it wasn't fun? Having to do these things in order to survive is extremely exciting, it just that the excitement doesn't feel good.

> Having to do these things in order to survive is extremely exciting, it just that the excitement doesn't feel good.

That's just called stress and I'm not sure I would equate stress to excitement. What makes the video game more engaging, relatively speaking, is that the stress factor is virtually eliminated. If we want to make real life more engaging, so to speak, perhaps we all need to focus more on how to reduce/eliminate stress.

I think stress is like excitement with risk. Something exciting and not stressful probably doesn't have much risk involved. However, if the individual perceives risk, then stress is introduced. Think skydiving. Skydiving can be pretty exciting, but if you perceive a high risk of death or injury then skydiving would be pretty stressful.

If we want to make real life more engaging, perhaps we need to focus on how to reduce risk. Or at least, reduce the risk of a superbad negative outcome.

I'm not disagreeing entirely, but I'd like to add and ask, have you ever heard the saying "stress is the body's natural response to task managment"?

I have been in many situations that others would find stressful (and always including the people around me during them) but because I was organized and experienced these experiences were in fact very exciting and even fun. The risk and very real consequences of failure are what made those situations what they were. Not saying it's for everyone, but for those that thrive during real challenges and having the good fortune to be tasked so heavily and with such responsibilities, these situations can be absolutely exhilarating. As an added bonus, the rewards are also real!

I greatly disagree. Please provide an example of your school or work situation for comparison with a video game. Most real-world schools and jobs do not require quick thinking and actions like video games. I do think that there is an opportunity to make school and work more engaging, its just that most are still stuck in the old framework/system.

First off, you’re clearly ignoring a disagreement about what engagement is.

Secondly, it’s not clear why engagement in terms of “quick thinking and actions” is desirable. It’s a dopamine rush, not a paycheck. You persuade me to work by paying me money; the second I see achievements at work, I’m headed for the hills.

Sometimes I got to work because I have no real choice. This isn't a new thing, I've been that way my whole life. I do sometimes enjoy my work. But sometimes I don't.

Games, however... I only play them when I'm enjoying it. Nothing is forcing me to do that.

Games are absolutely more engaging than work.

This would mean that rich people have more fun, because their risks are lower.

That seems likely to be true, coupled with the fact that wealth means greater selection in their entertainment.

However, they are not more likely to be happy (down to a certain point - earning less that 70K affects your happiness; above that though, it doesn't seem to have an influence).

Happiness != Fun. Sadly, we often seem to try to maximize Fun (/pleasure/ease/etc.), and not Happiness.

> However, they are not more likely to be happy (down to a certain point - earning less that 70K affects your happiness; above that though, it doesn't seem to have an influence).

I thought that was a misinterpretation of the data, which showed essentially logarithmic growth of happiness with respect to money? When plotted on a linear graph, the curve seems to go flat after a certain income level, but it actually keeps on increasing. Which would mean that more money results in more happiness, but with diminishing returns.

True, but OP mentioned fun.

It's also true that more wealth doesn't seem to make me happier, in and of itself. It does mean I have much less stress. That makes me more content, which some might call happiness.

But it's not like rich people live their lives as if everything is without risk like a videogame.

Not everything is without risk, even if you're rich. Most of things that make a rich person's life more fun are the things that their wealth allows them to do without risk: talk to anyone, lend people their stuff...

If there were games where you could get physically hurt, they would easily have a bigger fanbase than regular games.

Football?

> There is nothing that would make it impossible for a job or a school system to be as engaging as a video game

You mention "public school" in the previous sentence, which is important, because many private school do successfully address the engagement issue by having a much more rich and unstructured environment with better teacher to student ratios and passionate teachers that more freedom to innovate. That doesn't mean that there aren't great teachers at public schools, but that the standardization and lack of resources really hobbles them.

Standardization is often talked about, but it would totally be possible to standardize on a "good curriculum".

It's extremely hard to find teachers that are willing and able to produce entire curriculums on their own for the group of 30 children. However, there are many teachers that would be excited to try out better curriculums if they were offered them. That curriculum can, of course, be less structured as well.

Hundred percent agree on lack of resources, of course.

> Hundred percent agree on lack of resources, of course.

My state provides about $7,000 per public school student (I don't know if this is per student actually enrolled or student in the district, even if the student goes to a private school). That means that a classroom of 30 students is worth $210,000. There is absolutely no way that $210,000 is an insufficient amount of resources to educate 30 K-12 students. That's 3½ times U.S. median income — easily enough to teach a year's worth of material.

The problem with public schooling is structural, not resources.

Food is subsidized, so let's say about $100/month/kid is going to help pay for their school lunch. There's $36,000 a year gone.

Arts classes requires materials. Instruments for band. Mopping the classrooms. Maintenance for desks.

Some of those kids go to detention, so now some teachers get paid overtime to sit with them.

The football team takes the bus to go somewhere.

The library buys some new books. Updates the computers.

There's a lot of stuff going on, it's not just the teacher.

The delay between the sacrifice and the gratification (and the corresponding neurochemical responses) in real life is often on the order of years or even decades.

In video games the delay is often on the order of minutes or hours.

The real world cannot compete with video games in the same way that milkshakes cannot compete with broccoli.

Something that I've been thinking a lot about lately is the idea that due to the way humans evolved, we've spent most of the ~100k years of our species existence in an environment we evolved to be adapted to. Humans have spent most of our history as hunter-gatherers, and only in the last 6k years or so have we had civilization and only in the last 100 years have we invented abnormally pleasurable experiences (crack cocaine, Doritos, World of Warcraft, etc).

Milkshakes cannot compete with broccoli because milkshakes are far beyond the tastiness of anything we would have found in the savannas of Africa. But so my wonderance is - would life 70k years ago be as fulfilling and enjoyable as World of Warcraft, since that was the environment we were adapted to do well in?

Modern schools ask children to sit still for hours and do mental work. The savannas had us outside all the time, living with close family and friends, exercising a lot, etc.

I'm not trying to romanticize living in the jungle, just makes me wonder how our ancestors felt day to day.

> The delay between the sacrifice and the gratification ... in real life is often on the order of years or even decades.

> In video games the delay is often on the order of minutes or hours.

Regarding the education component of the original comment, there can be just as much immediate gratification in education as there can be in games (note that the topic here is gratification, not how long it takes to really learn some topic). E.g. solving a problem that takes a minute to solve - whether there's the intrinsic gratification, or some sort of gamified element like getting points that will work towards you leveling up in some sort of scheme.

the world is way more random than video games. in general most games reward effort with a small set of known outcomes, and for online RPGs and the like, the more effort (time) spent, the more rewards one can get.

in real life you could spend your entire life dedicated to a single craft and fall short for reasons outside of your control.

> The real world cannot compete with video games in the same way that milkshakes cannot compete with broccoli.

It's ironic that you bring this up because I actually quite like boiled broccoli.

More than a milk shake?

I average maybe a milk shake a month, but broccoli multiple times a week. And I'm on the "eat whatever the hell I want at all times" diet. Broccoli out-competes milkshakes for me. If I had to give up one or the other, I'd give up milkshakes.

Don't get me wrong, the sugar in a milkshake is delicious, but it's just not hearty and fulfilling like a good meal can be. Of course, this is well after I started cutting back on sugary drinks during meal times. Not for health reasons mind you - I realized it was messing with my appetite, which in turn was limiting my ability to fully enjoy the rest of my meal. That it's healthier for me is a nice bonus.

As I've gotten older, my sweet tooth has diminished considerably. Many milkshakes are cloying to me now. I would much prefer broccoli stir fried with some meat in a savory, spicy sauce.

>In the book "Reality is Broken" by Jane McGonigal, she argues that instead of video games being something that are a corrupting influence, real life is not nearly as engaging as it could be compared to video games.

The same could be said for porn. But unless we think it's ok to turn everyday life in endless group-sex (often involving tentacled animals) I don't think it's relevant, either there or here.

Heck, the same holds for drug use -- drugged states can be more engaging as compared to "real life".

Games can be totally "exciting" by taking shortcuts and providing cheap dopamine thrills, in a way regular life can't easily replicate.

But the proper question is not what is more engaging, but what is more meaningful/useful.

I agree with you - the threshold for what is engaging and what is over-engaging is not really very defined. That's where my thoughts from evolutionary psychology come, since it gives a way to define that threshold. Basically anything that is way beyond what we would have experienced 70k years ago might be best viewed with caution.

I'm not sure the author is doing an either/or. Instead she is examining the uses of the word "pharmakon" in Plato's work, and suggests that how it describes the innovation of written speech as a spell or drug or scapegoat could be inferred of technology, too. The author concludes, "Demonizing the substance, rather than the impulse, behind addiction is what leads us away from true healing and towards damaging narratives. Technophobia isn’t a soothing ointment, it’s pushing some guy you don’t like off a cliff and hoping your pustules magically disappear."

As we're entering a risky new era in technology, it might be that same technology that would provide us with a cure.

I am optimistic that that will turn out to be true. Some are pessimistic about, say, how there are so many different prescription drugs out there that now no doctor can realistically know how all of the interactions work. But, in the case of something like the IBM Watson computer, it (at least theoretically as it is pitched) can examine literally all the combinations and make it work.

My current running theory is that the world will become really great if we can just get to that point before everything explodes.