And, sir, considered hardworking creatures. Humans are too. Many people define themselves through their jobs. Hard work is seen as honorable. It's often glorified, in fact. But should work determine who we are? What do we like to do most in our free time? Play. Play. Play.
These days, we're playing a lot more than we used to. The board games market is booming. The video games market is too. Games have been integrated into schools and companies for a while now. Are we running from reality? Will we turn into creatures that play more than work? And if so, who's going to stack the shelves and collect the trash?
Where did the idea of play actually come from? When did it start and why? Has it been of any benefit to evolution? Playing is fundamental. It's a primal phenomenon that we see in all areas of life. Animals play so it's natural that humans play too. When animals come into the world, their brains are not yet fully developed. It's the same with humans. We have to learn a lot from birth and we do that through play.
In the first seven years of life alone, our brain volume triples and it wants to be filled. Exploratory play is the term researchers use when toddlers explore their environment. They mostly like doing that with their mouths. They put everything in their mouth because it has so many sensory receptors. They're exploring and grasping things in the truest sense of the word. At some point, imagination comes into play. Objects are linked to stories.
And just like that comes a role playing. Or de Papi was, Daddy has to pretend to buy chocolate ice cream at the playground. Again and again and again. Then come the building games. They foster our desire to change the world, bring it under control and create something with intention. Exploratory play, role playing and building games are all things our ancestors did too. But back then it was more existential. Playing was vital training for survival.
Making fire, making tools, courtship behavior, everything had to be learned through play. Like practicing on trees before facing off against a real woolly mammoth. And play had an even more profound purpose. We also find the first games of chance among hunter-gatherers. People use these games to influence and shape society. Some communities would use games of chance with pieces of wood, for example, to decide how to divide up the spoils from a hunt. Even though the hunters were the ones who brought the meat home, this meant the week in the elderly also had some power. This is play as a means of participation, a way to change power structures.
These types of games help equip us with necessary life skills, or even compensate for inequalities in a group. But how do we explain the emergence of board games and card games? Lifting a game piece is hardly going to strengthen our arm muscles. And not every game of chance can be used to redistribute wealth.
Been and amyzen have a natural instinct which tells them their position in the group. But we humans are so unconfigured that we have to painstakingly learn the culture and rules of society. Like, how do we get along with other people, including strangers? How to divide up labor? We have to make rules together on how we want to get along in a city, village, settlement, and so on. That requires unifying common ideas.
And the first board games try to communicate these ideas. The oldest surviving board game is the royal game of Orr. It was played almost 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. The object of the game is to get all your pieces off the board before your opponent. At that time, unifying social ideas revolved primarily around the belief in higher powers, or life after death. Eternity is a theme of the classic Indian board game Pachisi from around 400 CE. Board games often have spiritual significance.
Pachisi is an ancient board game that's still around today. This exact game principle is echoed in the German game, Don't Get Angry Man. You go around, get kicked off, get reborn, and the aim of the game is to arrive in pain-free, blissful Nirvana. Games like this reflect society. As we players have some light-hearted fun, complex ideas are seeping into our consciousness.
Pachisi是一种古老的桌游,至今仍然存在。这种游戏原理在德国的游戏“Don't Get Angry Man”中有所体现。你要绕圈子、被踢出去、重生,游戏目标是到达没有痛苦和幸福的涅槃。这样的游戏反映了社会。当我们玩家轻松愉快的游戏时,复杂的概念正在渗入我们的意识中。
So how are games used as a kind of medium or political tool? Let's take chess, a war game. Like armies on a battlefield, the pieces advance tactically. This game also tells us something about how social classes are being valued. The pawns are on the front line. At the very back in the middle are the king and queen. They're the most valuable pieces in the game. In SCAT, it's the other way around. The jacks are more valuable than the kings.
SCAT appeared in Europe just as certain social hierarchies were crumbling. Maybe that's why it was so popular in revolutionary circles in the early 19th century. In a similar spirit of revolution, Elizabeth McGee invented the landlord's game in 1904. This board game was a critique of the monopolization of land ownership. It inspired the best-selling game Monopoly, which didn't make McGee rich, but the Parker Brothers, to whom she had sold her patent rights in 1935.
Monopoly is a depiction of early capitalism. What function do all these games have in this day and age, other than entertainment? Games are made up systems regulated by ideas. We re-enact social rules with games and train ourselves to deal with the problems and conflicts that we experience in real society. So by playing Monopoly, we're practicing social Darwinism, preparing for a revolution with SCAT and war with chess, seriously.
Playing games as survival training used to be necessary, but these days we don't fight mammoths or chase feudal lords with pitchforks. Do people these days play to fill the time that's been freed up through increased prosperity? Perhaps games offer us the experience of tackling challenges that no longer exist within the relatively comfortable lives we lead today. Or are we simply bored in looking to escape into fantasy worlds? It's not like we're stepping out of reality. The game is just another reality that we are in.
While playing, I can take on a different role. I can harm someone else, as long as it's within the rules. I'm allowed to play mercilessly for my own benefit. I'm allowed to have a plan and not reveal it. I'm allowed to bluff. There are even games that I can only win by cheating. That's one advantage of playing games over watching movies in series. It's easier to slip into a different role when you're active in completing tasks yourself. That's why games became so popular during the pandemic. The game's industry has seen 20 to 25% increase in sales worldwide.
Why? Because it enables us to do something different to be successful even in times of uncertainty. Games give us this feeling that maybe we do have a handle on things after all. That's why sometimes we'd much rather play than go to work. That's when things can get problematic. When we start to feel so comfortable in the role of the game player that we start avoiding real life, is the thing that used to drive humanity's development forward now slowing it down?
And if board games are the tip of the iceberg, we haven't even looked at what lies beneath the surface. Video games. They generate 12 times more revenue worldwide than board games. The trend is going up. We're seeing more and more gamers. So we haven't reached the peak yet. Within the video game industry, the market is shifting from offline to online games. So why is there a peel so much greater? There are so many more features to engage with. You can better connect with other people and play in groups. You also have more open worlds, where there's just so much more space to explore.
There's a large branch of research that deals with motos for gaming. And that's showed us that people play computer games for competitive reasons or to train their skills, as in they want to get better. Some people enter a spiral where they're spending more and more time online. They have the impression that they're improving at something and being successful, but they're no longer mastering tasks in the real world. So there can be too much of a good thing. Gaming can become a problem. Especially when a game becomes so captivating that we can't just walk away from it. Addictive behavior.
Not to be confused with gambling disorder. In 2022, there were at least 80 million people affected worldwide, and the trend is rising. In a game of chance, money is often at stake, and winning depends entirely or predominantly on chance. Gambling disorder has been recognized as a disease by the World Health Organization since 2001. And since 2022, so has gaming disorder and addiction to computer games. The numbers are disputed, but researchers estimate 1 to 3% of the global population is affected. That's many millions of people. In contrast, no one has ever been diagnosed with board game addiction.
Let's use board games as a comparison, as another form of stylized play. The difference is there's no industry behind it that's making money off of me playing, don't get angry man, or some other board game 30 times in a row. But why don't people play board games 30 times in a row when they'll play 30 hours of World of Warcraft or Candy Crush?
One of the mechanisms that kicks in here is the endowment effect, which we know from behavioral economics. Say I'm building a digital form, and I develop a habit. I come back every day to harvest a few coins and continue shaping this world. This online world becomes increasingly important to me because I've already invested a lot of time. This endowment effect becomes stronger over time, and users find it more and more difficult to detach from this world or to delete the app.
We also know this from platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The more time you spend on them, the more followers you get, the more you post, and the harder it is to stop. The psychological endowment effect has you trapped. I believe smartphone games are mainly designed to operate triggers that extend time you play online. They want you to keep coming back, and they might even nudge you. That's the term we use in behavioral economics, to make an in-app purchase that you didn't really want.
The trick behind nudging is called the Zygarnik effect, named after a Russian psychologist. It's the idea that an unfinished task sticks in the mind more than a finished one. Game designers take advantage of this and build in levels that are almost impossible to complete, where players lose all their lives and are forced to pause. This binds the user to the game more emotionally than if they blasted through it in one go. And it drives them to buy additional lives instead of waiting.
Game companies exploit our play instinct. They know that games can activate a particular quality in us, namely engagement. The game engages the player and provides an enjoyable experience. It makes the player overcome the various obstacles in the game with pleasure. But if games have such power over us, why can't that be harnessed elsewhere? What if you could get schoolchildren or employees to tap into their play instincts to help them succeed at school or work?
By using the tactics of the gaming industry, learning could become much more fun. Gameification is the attempt to incorporate game elements into a non-game environment, so maybe turning something boring into something nice and exciting, to motivate people to become more engaged. One example is the App Habitica, which has had millions of downloads.
Everyday tasks like taking out the trash, doing schoolwork or tidying up become a game. Users get coins for completed tasks, which can be used to buy objects in the game. This type of gamification works by rewarding behavior with badges, levels, leaderboards, achievements and points. Companies like Microsoft have experimented with game-based reward systems, initially with success. Many employees became more motivated to work. But it quickly became clear that the effect wouldn't last.
The downside to gamification is the focus on extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is when a behavior is elicited through external stimuli, like money, praise or a treat. But why do the treats only work on humans in the short term? Because we humans are too intelligent. We see we've been employed the month for the 11th time, and that there's nowhere else to go on the level system. It's static, and they're just beating us into working harder.
The sociology of work shows that as productivity rises, productivity standards also shift. So expectations and demands are higher too. So gamification can be used to exploit us, and it doesn't work on a long-term basis. This has also been shown by research into the Habitica app. While the users got better at the game, they were completing their tasks less often in reality. With software applications that only work with extrinsic motivation, people are especially quick to look for a way to cheat.
But if we're predisposed to cheat, is the idea of playing for increased productivity doomed to fail? There's a type of gamification that we call humanistic. It's aim is to boost development and awareness, and to improve working conditions. It uses more elaborate methods. Let's take math class, a notoriously unpopular school subject. To change that, schools have been introducing educational games, such as Manga High.
While it does use extrinsic reward elements like points and difficulty levels, it also has a sophisticated story with fun characters and complex missions. Good games are just like a good menu with lots of different flavors. Sometimes you have an extrinsic motivation, then an intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic elements often have something to do with a sense of community. Maybe you're the hero in a story, and you're meant to somehow save the world.
So with the right game design, gamification may work long term after all. When educational content is disguised as a game it's known as a serious game, and they're growing in popularity. But in terms of entertainment, they can't compete with commercial video games. They have the most money behind them, which often means better design and more fun.
Many schoolchildren are already familiar with them, so can they be used for teaching? Sure, because using games like this can bring more fun into learning. Educational researchers are currently testing whether Mario Kart could be used to teach probability. Age of empires is being tested in history lessons. We tend to learn emotionally if we're gripped by emotion, then the learning process is much more intense. Perhaps unsurprisingly the initial results show that most young people are enthusiastic, but motivation and engagement are not everything.
The most important question is, what's being learned in the process, what actually sticks. That's the real question, and it's also unclear which game design elements promote learning. There are still question marks in the research. So if a company or a school introduces a game to help people reach their peak performance, the user might just get good at the game and not retain the useful material.
The truth is, if you want to learn something, especially something complicated, you have to accept that it's sometimes hard work. Gamification elements don't have to be incorporated everywhere. People also need to learn there are certain things that just have to be done. Someone has to do the dishes, and someone has to clean the toilet. It's not always fun. We may have to accept that we can't solve all problems by playing games.
And while the effects of gaming in different areas are controversial, their onward march is likely unstoppable. 70% of the world's 2,000 largest companies already use game elements to boost productivity. And more schools are introducing games into the classroom. Funding for game development is increasing every year. Game companies generate more revenue than Netflix, Disney, and all cinemas combined. We're certainly playing more. But is that good or bad?
We need to learn to think and behave in a flexible manner. Gaming skills can help us to adequately address the challenges of society in the future. So that's the good side of the coin. But is there another side that's not so good? Because if in addition to playing at home, we also play at the bus stop, at work, at school, at the doctor's office, during exercise, then aren't we all in danger of becoming addicted? What we are in Asia is that there's currently a much higher prevalence of gaming disorder in Asia. So I expect the sea and overall rise in gaming disorder and online addiction in the future. Asia tends to set technological trends so Europe could be about to follow suit.
On the other hand, not everyone who plays a lot on the computer is addicted straight away to a computer game. Take the eSports sector. Those people spend a lot of time playing video games, but they're doing it for a living. That doesn't apply to very many people, of course. But for the rest of us, as long as we hold the fabric of society together, and can manage everyday tasks and play responsibly, and school and work don't suffer, then gaming is a perfectly acceptable pastime.
Take multiplayer games or eSports. What are those games about? They're about learning how to master complex societies, and complex societies need complex games. And so we've come full circle. Just as earlier cultures prepared for life and society through games, were still doing the same today, an interesting thought.
So, are we following in the tradition of our ancestors? Although our grandparents had to work more than we do, our Stone Age ancestors had to work much less. Through archaeology, researchers estimate that only two to three hours per day were spent hunting, gathering, and making fire. And the rest of the day was spent, what else, playing?