Strong medical research and firsthand accounts provide evidence that playing games can make you a healthier, happier, more...
New strategies to create a great life through the power of games.
McGonigal (Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, 2011), the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, knows intimately the power of games. Not only is she recognized worldwide as a game designer, but she also used the skills she teaches readers in this book to help overcome a severe concussion. Using multiple examples from hundreds of players of “SuperBetter,” the game she invented to aid her recovery, plus other video games such as “Tetris,” “Hedgewars,” and “Minecraft,” McGonigal shows readers that concentration on intense tasks related to video games can reduce pain levels, enhance mental skills, and increase emotional and social interactions. She offers firsthand accounts of people who have suffered from anxiety, depression, cancer, and bullying, among many other ailments, and turned them around by incorporating games into their lives. “Video games create a rush in the brain as pleasurable and powerful as intravenous drugs,” she writes. The act of playing releases dopamine, the “pleasure” neurotransmitter, into the brain, which in turn empowers the player to overcome challenges. McGonigal shows how the same methods used to conquer the “bad guys” in games, such as shields and armor, can be used to ward off negative influences in real life. The author offers dozens of exercises that help readers gain strength in areas where they are weak, with each “quest” building on skills from the previous quest. Most of the quests are simple—snapping your fingers for a count of 50 or examining the food you eat and identifying those items that make you feel powerful. For those in search of a new self-help regimen, “SuperBetter” might just be the answer.
Strong medical research and firsthand accounts provide evidence that playing games can make you a healthier, happier, more confident person.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-636-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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