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Jane McGonigal
Jane McGonigal
Jane McGonigal
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Jane McGonigal (born October 21, 1977) is an American author, game designer, and researcher. McGonigal is known for her game Jane the Concussion Slayer and her role as Director of Game Research and Development at Institute for the Future.

Key Information

McGonigal received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006, where she was the first in the department to study computer and video games. She has worked on several notable alternate reality games, including I Love Bees (2004) and World Without Oil (2007), as well as designing SuperBetter (2012). After suffering a severe concussion in 2009, she created Jane the Concussion Slayer as a therapeutic game, which evolved into SuperBetter, a platform designed to help people build resilience and achieve personal goals.

She is the author of three books: Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (2011), which argues that games contribute to human happiness and can address social problems; SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver, and More Resilient (2015); and Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything (2022). McGonigal has been called "the current public face of gamification," though she has expressed reservations about the term. She has been recognized by MIT's Technology Review as one of the world's top innovators under 35 and named to O: The Oprah Magazine's 2010 Power List.

Early years and education

[edit]

McGonigal was brought up in New Jersey.[1] Her parents are teachers who emphasized intellectual attainment. Her identical twin sister, Kelly McGonigal, is a psychologist.[2]

McGonigal received her Bachelor of Arts in English from Fordham University in 1999,[3] and her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006.[4] She was the first in the department to study computer and video games.[5]

Personal life

[edit]

In 2009, she suffered a debilitating concussion that helped her develop a game, Jane the Concussion Slayer, for treating her concussion and other similar conditions; the game was later renamed SuperBetter.[6]

Philosophy

[edit]
A woman with curly blonde hair wears oversized red crochet sunglasses and a patterned purple top while playfully holding her hands up toward the camera
McGonigal at Foo Camp in 2009

McGonigal writes and speaks about alternate reality games and massively multiplayer online gaming. She also writes about the way that collective intelligence can be generated and used as a means for improving the quality of human life or working towards the solution of social ills. She has stated that gaming should be moving "towards Nobel Prizes."[7]

McGonigal has been called "the current public face of gamification."[8] Despite this, McGonigal has objected to the word, stating, "I don't do 'gamification,' and I'm not prepared to stand up and say I think it works. I don't think anybody should make games to try to motivate somebody to do something they don't want to do. If the game is not about a goal you're intrinsically motivated by, it won't work."[9]

Career

[edit]

After earning her Bachelor of Arts in English, McGonigal started developing her first commercial games. As a designer, McGonigal became known for location-based and alternate reality games.[10] She has taught game design and game studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Berkeley.[11]

In 2008, she became the Director of Game Research and Development at Institute for the Future,[12] and in 2012, the Chief Creative Officer at SuperBetter Labs.[13]

Games

[edit]

McGonigal has been developing commercial games since 2006, some of which are listed in the following chart:

Year Title Organization Credit
2012 SuperBetter SuperBetter Labs Chief Creative Officer
2011 Find the Future: The Game New York Public Library Director[14]
2010 Evoke World Bank Institute Creator
2009 Cryptozoo American Heart Association Director
2008 Top Secret Dance-Off Creator (under pseudonym Punky McMonsef)
2008 Superstruct Institute for the Future Director
2008 The Lost Ring McDonald's and The Lost Sport Director
2007 World Without Oil ITVS Interactive Participation architect w/ Ken Eklund[15]
2006 Cruel 2 B Kind Concept and design w/ Ian Bogost
2005 Last Call Poker 42 Entertainment Live Events Lead [citation needed]
2005 PlaceStorming [16]
2004 I Love Bees 42 Entertainment Community Lead/PuppetMaster [17]
2004 Demonstrate [citation needed]
2004 TeleTwister [citation needed]

SuperBetter

[edit]

In July 2009, Jane suffered a concussion after hitting her head in her office. The symptoms were severe and lasted for several weeks. They made her feel suicidal. She requested her friends to give her tasks to do each day.[9]

Wanting to recover from her condition, she created a game to treat it. The game was initially called Jane the Concussion-Slayer (after Buffy the Vampire Slayer), then renamed SuperBetter.[18] McGonigal raised $1 million to fund an expanded version of the game.[9] Additionally, she has collaborated on commissioned games for the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.[19]

Books

[edit]

On January 20, 2011, McGonigal's first book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, discusses gaming, massively multiplayer online gaming and alternate reality games. Using current research from the positive psychology movement, McGonigal argues that games contribute to human happiness and motivation, a sense of meaning, and community development.

The book was met with a favorable reception from The Los Angeles Times[20] and Wired[21] and mixed reviews from The Independent.[22] The book received criticism from some quarters, notably the Wall Street Journal, which felt that her thesis—which claimed to use games to "fix" everyday life by giving it a sense of achievement and making it seem more fulfilling and optimistic—made "overblown" claims from minor examples, and did not address conflicting individual goals and desires, or the influence of "evil."[23] The New York Times Book Review[24] also criticized some points in her book, citing the lack of evidence demonstrating that in-game behavior and values could translate into solutions to real-world problems such as poverty, disease, and hunger.

On September 15, 2015,[25] McGonigal's second book, SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver, and More Resilient, was published by Penguin Press. It was #7 on the New York Times Best Seller: Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous List its debut week.[26]

McGonigal's third book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, was released on March 22, 2022.[27]

Recognition

[edit]
Date Award Description
2010 O: The Oprah Magazine "2010 O Power List" Named in O: The Oprah Magazine as one of 20 important women of 2010 on the "2010 O Power List"[28]
2008 Women in Games: Gamasutra 20 Named in the first Gamasutra 20, honoring 20 notable women working in video games.[29]
2008 South by Southwest Interactive Award for Activism Awarded for World Without Oil [30]
2006 MIT Technology Review's TR100 Named one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35 by MIT's Technology Review.[31]
2005 2005 Innovation Award from the International Game Developers Association and a 2005 Games-related Webby Award. For I Love Bees, the Halo 2 promotion.[32][33]

Publications

[edit]
External videos
A woman with long curly blonde hair and blue eyes wears a headset microphone and a floral-patterned top while looking slightly upward
video icon Jane McGonigal: Massively multi-player... thumb-wrestling?, TED Talks, published November 15, 2013
  • McGonigal, Jane (2011). Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Penguin Press. ISBN 978-1-59420-285-8.
  • McGonigal, Jane (2015). SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient. Penguin Press. ISBN 978-1-59420-636-8.
  • McGonigal, Jane (2022). Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today. Spiegel & Grau. ISBN 978-1-954118-09-6.

References

[edit]
[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Jane McGonigal

View on Grokipedia
from Grokipedia
Jane McGonigal (born October 21, 1977) is an American game designer, researcher, and author focused on leveraging game mechanics to foster resilience, happiness, and problem-solving in everyday life. She earned a bachelor's degree from and a PhD in from the in 2006, and currently directs game research and development at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit . McGonigal's work emphasizes "urgent optimism," a combining evidence-based hope with proactive action, applied through alternate reality games and digital platforms designed to tackle real-world challenges like health recovery and future forecasting. Her seminal book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (2011), posits that games outperform reality in providing intrinsic rewards, clear goals, and voluntary effort, proposing as a remedy for societal ; it became a New York Times bestseller. She followed with SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully (2015), inspired by her own recovery, which outlines gameful strategies for building , supported by user data from over a million participants. McGonigal has delivered TED talks, including "Gaming can make a better world" (2010), advocating for collective gaming to address global issues, and "The game that can give you 10 extra years of life" (2012), drawing from personal adversity to promote life-extending habits via gameplay. While McGonigal's advocacy has influenced fields like and behavioral design, her claims about games' transformative potential have faced scrutiny from game scholars and critics who argue they oversimplify , undervalue non-gamified motivations, and lack rigorous causal evidence for broad societal fixes, as seen in analyses questioning the empirical foundations of gamification's efficacy.

Early Life and Education

Childhood and Upbringing

Jane McGonigal was born on October 21, 1977, in , . She grew up in , alongside her identical twin sister, , who later became a . Her parents were public school teachers who prioritized intellectual development in their household. The family environment was marked by high competitiveness, with McGonigal composing her first play at age six.

Academic Training

Jane McGonigal earned a degree in English Literature and from in 1999. Her undergraduate coursework emphasized narrative structures and media analysis, providing an early foundation in interdisciplinary approaches to storytelling and communication technologies. She pursued graduate studies at the , where she obtained a in in 2003, followed by a in the same field with a designated emphasis in in 2006. Her doctoral dissertation, titled "This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century," examined how pervasive digital technologies and interactive projects redefine the boundaries between play, performance, and everyday life, drawing on examination fields including and network culture, twentieth-century play and performance theory, and contemporary . The work was supervised by co-chairs W.B. Worthen and Gregory Niemeyer, with additional committee members and Peter Glazer, reflecting influences from theater, , and . During her time at Berkeley, McGonigal contributed to academic projects such as "A Lost Cause: Performance and the Digital Archive" in 2003, which explored performative aspects of historical activism through digital reconstruction and earned the Dunbar Ogden Award for its innovative integration of and performative analysis. This project foreshadowed her interest in blending narrative performance with technological interfaces, though her formal training remained rooted in performance theory rather than dedicated programs.

Personal Life

Family and Relationships

Jane McGonigal is married to Kiyash Monsef, an Emmy-nominated producer, director, and writer who has contributed to television, short stories, comic books, and game design. The couple has children, with McGonigal describing a daily routine that involves coordinating childcare responsibilities with her husband alongside professional commitments. She has an identical twin sister, Kelly McGonigal.

Health Challenges and Recovery

In July 2009, Jane McGonigal sustained a severe after striking her head on a cabinet door while standing up abruptly. The injury failed to resolve within the typical timeframe, persisting beyond 30 days and manifesting in symptoms including constant headaches, , vertigo, sensitivity to light and noise, cognitive impairments such as memory loss and mental fog, as well as heightened anxiety and depression severe enough to include . These effects rendered her unable to work, read, write for extended periods, or perform basic activities like getting out of bed, aligning with recognized features of . To cope, McGonigal devised a personal game titled "Jane the Slayer," framing herself as a heroic battling the concussion personified as an . She incorporated elements such as identifying "power-ups" (e.g., drawing on from allies like family and friends), assigning "quests" for incremental challenges (e.g., brief walks or cognitive exercises), and tracking progress against bad guys representing symptoms. This self-directed approach, rooted in her expertise in , provided psychological motivation and structure amid medical limitations, with McGonigal reporting a noticeable alleviation of symptoms within days, including reduced mental fog. McGonigal's symptoms eventually subsided, enabling her return to professional activities, though she later experienced a second , underscoring potential risks of repeated as noted in broader neurological research. The "Jane the Concussion Slayer" framework directly informed the conceptualization of SuperBetter, formalizing these gamified recovery tactics into a broader resilience-building tool, based on her firsthand account of causal efficacy in her case. No verified public disclosures indicate permanent deficits from the 2009 incident, with her subsequent productivity suggesting effective resolution through combined rest, medical oversight, and her interventions.

Core Ideas and Philosophy

Key Principles on Games and Reality

McGonigal contends that outperform reality in motivating human engagement by offering voluntary participation in structured challenges that satisfy core psychological drives. Unlike real-life tasks, which often lack defined goals and reliable feedback, impose artificial obstacles that participants choose to overcome, creating a and purpose. This framework, comprising clear objectives, behavioral rules, progress indicators, and opt-in commitment, enables sustained focus and intrinsic rewards absent in routine work or chores. Central to her thesis is the concept of blissful productivity, wherein gamers experience heightened happiness during demanding play compared to idle relaxation, driven by immediate visibility of advancement and achievement. Players willingly invest effort—evidenced by billions of hours logged weekly across platforms—because align challenges with skill levels, inducing flow states of optimal immersion and efficacy. This contrasts with real-world drudgery, where ambiguous outcomes and erode motivation, leading McGonigal to argue that games empirically demonstrate superior pathways to fulfillment and output. McGonigal extends these principles to propose gamifying reality's deficits, emphasizing how games cultivate urgent —a proactive belief in solvable futures—and epic meaning through collective quests. By embedding social fabrics of and shared victories, game designs can redirect human potential toward real problems, fostering voluntary cooperation on scales unattainable in unstructured environments. This approach prioritizes causal mechanisms like feedback loops to amplify and resilience, positioning as blueprints for enhancing everyday reality.

Empirical Foundations and Applications

McGonigal's ideas on enhancing real-world resilience through game-like elements build upon Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory, which describes a state of deep immersion arising from balanced challenges and personal skills, often more reliably achieved in games than in unstructured daily activities due to immediate feedback loops. supports that video games induce flow, correlating with increased engagement, reduced self-consciousness, and positive emotional states, though causal links to broader psychological benefits require controlled conditions to isolate from confounding entertainment factors. Games further engage neural reward systems by triggering release through predictable achievements and action-outcome predictions, which McGonigal posits occur more frequently than in real-life scenarios lacking such structured incentives. This mechanism underpins short-term motivation boosts observed in gaming, but comparisons to real-world responses remain indirect, as studies highlight games' amplified feedback without equivalent longitudinal data on transfer to non-gaming behaviors. In applications to and resilience, McGonigal's SuperBetter platform, a gamified tool, was evaluated in a 2015 with participants experiencing depressive symptoms; the intervention led to significant reductions in symptom severity compared to controls, alongside self-reported resilience gains. Broader meta-analyses of gamified interventions, encompassing 42 studies on , report small-to-medium effect sizes (Hedges' g = 0.38) for outcomes like decreased anxiety and depressive symptoms, particularly in non-clinical populations, with stronger effects tied to tailored designs. These findings indicate gamification's utility for symptom alleviation and , such as increased physical activity or habit adherence, via elements like quests and progress tracking. Distinctions emerge between immediate engagement surges—evident in player metrics like session completion rates and scores—and enduring change; while short-term data show metric improvements (e.g., 20-30% uplift in scales post-intervention), long-term follow-ups are scarce, with effects often attenuating without ongoing reinforcement. faces constraints from prevalent study designs relying on self-selection, short durations (typically 4-12 weeks), and self-report biases, limiting generalizability beyond motivated users and underscoring needs for larger, blinded trials to disentangle from placebo or novelty effects. Such limitations highlight that while aids resilience proxies, robust evidence for transformative real-world applications, like sustained through collective games, awaits more rigorous, scaled experimentation.

Professional Career

Early Roles and Alternate Reality Games

Following her academic training, McGonigal began her professional career in during the early , initially focusing on real-world, face-to-face games and behind-the-scenes theatrical experiences that blurred the lines between performance and interactivity. She contributed to early pervasive gaming projects, including elements of The Go Game, a series of urban scavenger hunts and team-building experiences developed by Wink Back, Inc., which emphasized collaborative play in physical environments. A pivotal early role came in 2004 when McGonigal joined 42 Entertainment as a game designer and community lead for , an (ARG) created to promote the video game . The ARG centered on a of a time-traveling disrupting a (ilovebees.com), unfolding through hacked blogs, voice messages, and over 1,000 real-world activations across the that rang spontaneously to deliver clues. McGonigal directed the payphone operations and , coordinating player responses that drove the story forward via crowd-sourced decoding of puzzles, viral coordination on forums, and emergent collaborative , ultimately attracting more than 600,000 unique participants. This scale demonstrated ARGs' capacity for massive, decentralized participation, with players self-organizing into hives to solve riddles and influence plot outcomes in real time. Building on , McGonigal shifted toward independent design of ARGs, leveraging their viral mechanics to explore and immersive fiction on a broader scale. By the late , her work had established ARGs as a viable medium for large-scale, player-driven experiences, paving the way for her public advocacy. This progression culminated in influential presentations, such as her 2010 TED talk, where she articulated how game structures could enhance real-world engagement and problem-solving.

Work at the Institute for the Future

Jane McGonigal serves as Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a role focused on leveraging games for foresight and predictive simulations, which she has held since around 2007. In this capacity, she designs alternate reality games that immerse participants in plausible future scenarios to generate on emerging challenges, extending her philosophy of games as tools for real-world problem-solving into institutional efforts. A key early project under her involvement was World Without Oil, launched by IFTF on April 30, 2007, which simulated a sudden global oil crisis and prompted players to document adaptive behaviors over eight weeks. The game engaged approximately 1,900 participants across 95 countries, yielding crowdsourced strategies on energy transitions that informed IFTF's broader analyses of resource disruptions. In 2008, McGonigal directed Superstruct, a massively multiplayer game addressing ten existential threats like pandemics and resource wars, where players formed virtual organizations to devise solutions from October to December. Over 5,500 participants generated more than 442 collaborative "superstructures," contributing data to IFTF's predictive models and reports on global resilience. These initiatives exemplify her integration of gaming with , as seen in EVOKE, a 2010 collaboration with the World Bank that trained players in crisis innovation through scenarios of food and , reaching thousands and producing playtested frameworks for applicable to policy contexts. McGonigal's simulations have shaped IFTF outputs, including foresight tools that equip organizations and governments to anticipate hard-to-predict events like failures or technological shifts, by distilling player actions into verifiable signals for strategic decision-making. She further leads IFTF's Urgent Optimists program, a membership initiative that applies these game-derived methods to public engagement in optimistic .

Development of SuperBetter

In January 2009, Jane McGonigal sustained a severe after accidentally striking her head on a cabinet door, leading to prolonged symptoms of anxiety, depression, and that confined her to bed and impaired her cognitive functions. To counteract these effects, she developed a self-directed game called "Jane the Slayer," framing her recovery as an epic quest with narrative elements drawn from games, which enabled her to regain functionality within weeks. This personal experiment evolved into SuperBetter, a structured platform publicly launched in 2012 as a free web-based tool and subsequent , aimed at applying to enhance real-world resilience against adversity. Core mechanics include assigning users quests (actionable tasks to build skills), power-ups (positive activities like physical exercises or ), allies ( networks for encouragement), and bad guys (obstacles such as stress triggers or negative habits to confront strategically). These elements are designed to leverage psychological principles, with users logging completions to track progress toward resilience goals. Initial empirical validation came from controlled studies, including a 2015 randomized trial where participants using SuperBetter for 10 minutes daily over 30 days reported significantly greater reductions in depressive symptoms compared to waitlist controls, as measured by standardized scales like the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. By the mid-2010s, the platform had engaged hundreds of thousands of users, with McGonigal detailing its methodology and expansion in her September 2015 book SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient—Powered by the Science of Games. Over time, adoption grew to exceed one million users applying its framework to challenges including anxiety and trauma recovery.

Major Works

Books

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World was published on , 2011, by Penguin Press. McGonigal posits that everyday reality often lacks the intrinsic rewards, clear goals, and voluntary obstacles found in games, leading to widespread dissatisfaction, and advocates applying —such as immediate feedback loops and collaborative challenges—to enhance productivity, happiness, and problem-solving in non-game contexts. SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient—Powered by the Science of Games appeared on September 15, 2015, from . Drawing from her own experience recovering from a through self-imposed game elements like quests and power-ups, McGonigal outlines a framework for building resilience by leveraging neuroscientific insights into how alter responses to stress, , and adversity, encouraging readers to adopt "gameful" strategies for personal challenges. Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today was released on March 22, 2022, by Spiegel & Grau. McGonigal introduces techniques for prospective cognition, distinguishing "cold" for distant futures from "hot" simulations of imminent shocks, and integrates foresight methods from her background with to equip individuals for by mentally rehearsing adaptive responses to plausible scenarios.

Other Publications and Contributions

McGonigal delivered the TED Talk "Gaming can make a better world" on March 17, 2010, arguing that gamers possess skills applicable to solving global challenges through collective play. She followed with "The game that can give you 10 extra years of life" on July 9, 2012, detailing her use of self-designed to recover from a by fostering resilience and positive habits. More recently, in "How to see the future coming — and prepare for it" presented on March 17, 2025, she outlined methods for anticipating disruptions using foresight techniques integrated with gaming principles. In periodical contributions, McGonigal authored the WIRED article "Want to save more or beat a ? Try entering a " on January 10, 2020, proposing randomized incentives modeled on lotteries to encourage behaviors like savings and health adherence, drawing on and . Her academic output includes the 2008 chapter "Why I love bees: A in gaming," published in the anthology The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, which analyzes the I Love Bees as a mechanism for harnessing distributed problem-solving among players. This work examines how such games promote emergent collaboration without centralized control, based on participant data from the 2004 project.

Reception and Impact

Achievements and Recognition

McGonigal's book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (2011) reached the New York Times bestseller list. Her follow-up, SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient Powered by the Science of Games (2015), also attained New York Times bestselling status. She has received multiple professional honors, including selection as a TR35 innovator under 35 by in recognition of her designs. In 2008, she was named one of the top 20 most important women in video gaming and received a Interactive Award for Activism for her game World Without Oil. listed her among the top 100 creative people in business in 2009, while O: The Oprah Magazine included her on its 2010 O Power List and as one of 20 important women in gaming. McGonigal has delivered keynote addresses at high-profile events, including as the first game designer to speak at the in . She holds Young Global Leader status with the . Her TED Talks, such as "Gaming can make a better world" (2010) and "The game that can give you 10 extra years of life" (2012), have amassed millions of views collectively. The resilience-building platform SuperBetter, which she developed, has been accessed by over 1 million users. Meta-analyses of its efficacy position it among validated apps for reducing anxiety and depression symptoms.

Criticisms and Skeptical Perspectives

Critics have argued that McGonigal's advocacy for gamifying reality, as in Reality Is Broken (2011), exhibits excessive optimism that overlooks the inherent constraints and hardships of non-game contexts. Nathan Heller, in a 2015 New Yorker review of SuperBetter, described the approach as portraying life challenges as akin to chess endgames where "every problem is a away from its inevitable solution," thereby perpetuating a cultural bias toward relentless goal-orientation without addressing unsolvable or structurally imposed difficulties. This perspective suggests McGonigal's framework risks idealizing play as a universal , potentially downplaying causal factors like economic disincentives or biological limits that games cannot fully mitigate. Skeptics have questioned the empirical robustness of McGonigal's claims, noting a reliance on anecdotal or short-term engagement data over longitudinal evidence of sustained behavioral change. A 2023 review in Games Criticism highlighted that while Reality Is Broken posits as superior motivators, it lacks rigorous empirical backing for assertions about transforming real-world or on a societal scale. Similarly, Jamie Madigan's analysis on of (2011) pointed out McGonigal's omission of gaming's potential negatives, such as or , which could foster avoidance of real-world confrontation rather than resilience. Broader critiques of , including McGonigal's applications, emphasize its limitations as a behavioral nudge that superficially overlays rewards without reckoning with deeper human incentives or flaws like (weakness of will). (2011) argued that such tech-utopian views, echoed in McGonigal's work, undervalue how games' structured feedback loops fail to replicate the ambiguity and discipline required in traditional pursuits, potentially eroding reliance on proven non-play mechanisms like habituated routine or accountability. Edward Champion's detailed (2011) further contended that McGonigal misinterprets psychological principles, such as intrinsic , by extrapolating from game highs to real-life lows without accounting for that extrinsic game-like rewards often decay in over time. These views align with causal realism, positing that while games may yield temporary boosts—e.g., SuperBetter's self-reported resilience gains in short trials— they do not fundamentally alter underlying realities like finite willpower or systemic barriers.

References

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  51. https://www.fastcompany.com/1778673/gamer-heal-thyself-jane-mcgonigals-superbetter
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  75. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1077722916300773
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