Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extra years of life

I'm a gamer, so I like to have goals. I like special missions and secret objectives. So here's my special mission for this talk: I'm going to try to increase the life span of every single person in this room by seven and a half minutes. Literally, you will live seven and half minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk.

Okay, some of you are looking a little bit skeptical. That's okay, because check it out -- I have math to prove that it is possible. And it won't make a lot of sense now. I'll explain it all later, just pay attention to the number at the bottom: plus-7.68245837 minutes that will be my gift to you if I'm successful in my mission.

Now, you have a secret mission too. Your mission is to figure out how you want to spend your extra seven and a half minutes. And I think you should do something unusual with them, because these are bonus minutes. You weren't going to have them anyway.

Now, because I'm a game designer, you might be thinking to yourself, I know what she wants us to do with those minutes, she wants us to spend them playing games. Now this is a totally reasonable assumption, given that I have made quite a habit of encouraging people to spend more time playing games. For example, in my first TEDTalk, I did propose that we should spend 21 billion hours a week as a planet playing video games.

Now, 21 billion hours, it's a lot of time. It's so much time, in fact, that the number one unsolicited comment that I have heard from people all over the world since I gave that talk, is this: Jane, games are great and all, but on your deathbed, are you really going to wish you spent more time playing Angry Birds? This idea is so pervasive -- that games are a waste of time that we will come to regret -- that I hear it literally everywhere I go. For example, true story: Just a few weeks ago, this cab driver, upon finding out that a friend and I were in town for a game developer's conference, turned around and said -- and I quote -- "I hate games. Waste of life. Imagine getting to the end of your life and regretting all that time."

Now, I want to take this problem seriously. I mean, I want games to be a force for good in the world. I don't want gamers to regret the time they spent playing, time that I encouraged them to spend. So I have been thinking about this question a lot lately. When we're on our deathbeds, will we regret the time we spent playing games?

Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out there is actually some scientific research on this question. It's true. Hospice workers, the people who take care of us at the end of our lives, recently issued a report on the most frequently expressed regrets that people say when they are literally on their deathbeds. And that's what I want to share with you today -- the top five regrets of the dying.

Number one: I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number two: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Number three: I wish I had let myself be happier. Number four: I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self. And number five: I wish I'd lived a life true to my dreams, instead of what others expected of me.

Now, as far as I know, no one ever told one of the hospice workers, I wish I'd spent more time playing video games, but when I hear these top five regrets of the dying, I can't help but hear five deep human cravings that games actually help us fulfill.

For example, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. For many people, this means, I wish I'd spent more time with my family, with my kids when they were growing up. Well, we know that playing games together has tremendous family benefits. A recent study from Brigham Young University School of Family life reported that parents who spend more time playing video games with their kids have much stronger real-life relationships with them.

I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. Well, hundreds of millions of people use social games like FarmVille or Words With Friends to stay in daily contact with real-life friends and family. A recent study from [University of Michigan] showed that these games are incredibly powerful relationship-management tools. They help us stay connected with people in our social network that we would otherwise grow distant from, if we weren't playing games together.

I wish I'd let myself be happier. Well, here I can't help but think of the groundbreaking clinical trials recently conducted at East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression. Just 30 minutes of online game play a day was enough to create dramatic boosts in mood and long-term increases in happiness.

I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self. Well, avatars are a way to express our true selves, our most heroic, idealized version of who we might become. You can see that in this alter ego portrait by Robbie Cooper of a gamer with his avatar. And Stanford University has been doing research for five years now to document how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making us more courageous, more ambitious, more committed to our goals.

I wish I'd led a life true to my dreams, and not what others expected of me. Are games doing this yet? I'm not sure, so I've left a question mark, a Super Mario question mark. And we're going to come back to this one.

But in the mean time, perhaps you're wondering, who is this game designer to be talking to us about deathbed regrets? And it's true, I've never worked in a hospice, I've never been on my deathbed. But recently I did spend three months in bed, wanting to die. Really wanting to die.

Now let me tell you that story. It started two years ago, when I hit my head and got a concussion. Now the concussion didn't heal properly, and after 30 days I was left with symptoms like nonstop headaches, nausea, vertigo, memory loss, mental fog. My doctor told me that in order to heal my brain, I had to rest it. So I had to avoid everything that triggered my symptoms. For me that meant no reading, no writing, no video games, no work or email, no running, no alcohol, no caffeine. In other words -- and I think you see where this is going -- no reason to live.

Of course it's meant to be funny, but in all seriousness, suicidal ideation is quite common with traumatic brain injuries. It happens to one in three, and it happened to me. My brain started telling me, Jane, you want to die. It said, you're never going to get better. It said, the pain will never end.

And these voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life, which is the time that I said to myself after 34 days -- and I will never forget this moment -- I said, I am either going to kill myself or I'm going to turn this into a game.

Now, why a game? I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game -- and this is in the scientific literature -- we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we're more likely to reach out to others for help. And I wanted to bring these gamer traits to my real-life challenge, so I created a role-playing recovery game called Jane the Concussion Slayer.

Now this became my new secret identity, and the first thing I did as a slayer was call my twin sister -- I have an identical twin sister named Kelly -- and tell her, I'm playing a game to heal my brain, and I want you to play with me. This was an easier way to ask for help.

She became my first ally in the game, my husband Kiyash joined next, and together we identified and battled the bad guys. Now this was anything that could trigger my symptoms and therefore slow down the healing process, things like bright lights and crowded spaces. We also collected and activated power-ups. This was anything I could do on even my worst day to feel just a little bit good, just a little bit productive. Things like cuddling my dog for 10 minutes, or getting out of bed and walking around the block just once.

Now the game was that simple: Adopt a secret identity, recruit your allies, battle the bad guys, activate the power-ups. But even with a game so simple, within just a couple days of starting to play, that fog of depression and anxiety went away. It just vanished. It felt like a miracle. Now it wasn't a miracle cure for the headaches or the cognitive symptoms. That lasted for more than a year, and it was the hardest year of my life by far. But even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was still in pain, I stopped suffering.

Now what happened next with the game surprised me. I put up some blog posts and videos online, explaining how to play. But not everybody has a concussion, obviously, not everyone wants to be "the slayer," so I renamed the game SuperBetter.

And soon I started hearing from people all over the world who were adopting their own secret identity, recruiting their own allies, and they were getting "super better" facing challenges like cancer and chronic pain, depression and Crohn's disease. Even people were playing it for terminal diagnoses like ALS. And I could tell from their messages and their videos that the game was helping them in the same ways that it helped me. They talked about feeling stronger and braver. They talked about feeling better understood by their friends and family. And they even talked about feeling happier, even though they were in pain, even though they were tackling the toughest challenge of their lives.

Now at the time, I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here? I mean, how could a game so trivial intervene so powerfully in such serious, and in some cases life-and-death, circumstances? I mean, if it hadn't worked for me, there's no way I would have believed it was possible. Well, it turns out there's some science here too. Some people get stronger and happier after a traumatic event. And that's what was happening to us.

The game was helping us experience what scientists call post-traumatic growth, which is not something we usually hear about. We usually hear about post-traumatic stress disorder. But scientists now know that a traumatic event doesn't doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives.

Here are the top five things that people with post-traumatic growth say: My priorities have changed. I'm not afraid to do what makes me happy. I feel closer to my friends and family. I understand myself better. I know who I really am now. I have a new sense of meaning and purpose in my life. I'm better able to focus on my goals and dreams.

Now, does this sound familiar? It should, because the top five traits of post-traumatic growth are essentially the direct opposite of the top five regrets of the dying. Now this is interesting, right? It seems that somehow, a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets.

But how does it work? How do you get from trauma to growth? Or better yet, is there a way to get all the benefits of post-traumatic growth without the trauma, without having to hit your head in the first place? That would be good, right?

I wanted to understand the phenomenon better, so I devoured the scientific literature, and here's what I learned. There are four kinds of strength, or resilience, that contribute to post-traumatic growth, and there are scientifically validated activities that you can do every day to build up these four kinds of resilience, and you don't need a trauma to do it.

Now, I could tell you what these four types of strength are, but I'd rather you experience them firsthand. I'd rather we all start building them up together right now. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to play a quick game together. This is where you earn those seven and a half minutes of bonus life that I promised you earlier. All you have to do is successfully complete the first four SuperBetter quests. And I feel like you can do it. I have confidence in you.

So, everybody ready? This is your first quest. Here we go. Pick one: Stand up and take three steps, or make your hands into fists, raise them over your head as high as you can for five seconds. Go! All right, I like the people doing both. You are overachievers. Very good. (Laughter)

Well done, everyone. Now that is worth plus-one physical resilience, which means that your body can withstand more stress and heal itself faster. Now we know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still. That's all it takes. Every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the health of your heart, and your lungs and brains.

Everybody ready for your next quest? I want you to snap your fingers exactly 50 times, or count backwards from 100 by seven, like this: 100, 93 ... Go!

(Snapping)

Don't give up.

(Snapping)

Don't let the people counting down from 100 interfere with your counting to 50.

(Laughter)

Nice. Wow. That's the first time I've ever seen that. Bonus physical resilience. Well done, everyone. Now that's worth plus-one mental resilience, which means you have more mental focus, more discipline, determination and willpower. We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you exercise it. So tackling a tiny challenge without giving up, even one as absurd as snapping your fingers exactly 50 times or counting backwards from 100 by seven is actually a scientifically validated way to boost your willpower.

So good job. Quest number three. Pick one: Now because of the room we're in, fate's really determined this for you, but here are the two options. If you're inside, find a window and look out of it. If you're outside, find a window and look in. Or do a quick YouTube or Google image search for "baby [your favorite animal.]"

Now, you could do this on your phones, or you could just shout out some baby animals, I'm going to find some and put them on the screen for us. So, what do we want to see? Sloth, giraffe, elephant, snake. Okay, let's see what we got. Baby dolphin and baby llamas. Everybody look. Got that? Okay, one more. Baby elephant. We're clapping for that? That's amazing.

All right, now what we're just feeling there is plus-one emotional resilience, which means you have the ability to provoke powerful, positive emotions like curiosity or love, which we feel when we look at baby animals, when you need them most.

And here's a secret from the scientific literature for you. If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of an hour, a day, a week, you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing. And this is called the three-to-one positive emotion ratio. It's my favorite SuperBetter trick, so keep it up.

All right, pick one, last quest: Shake someone's hand for six seconds, or send someone a quick thank you by text, email, Facebook or Twitter. Go!

(Chatting)

Looking good, looking good. Nice, nice. Keep it up. I love it! All right, everybody, that is plus-one social resilience, which means you actually get more strength from your friends, your neighbors, your family, your community. Now, a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude. Touch is even better.

Here's one more secret for you: Shaking someone's hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream, now that's the trust hormone. That means that all of you who just shook hands are biochemically primed to like and want to help each other. This will linger during the break, so take advantage of the networking opportunities.

(Laughter)

Okay, well you have successfully completed your four quests, so let's see if I've successfully completed my mission to give you seven and a half minutes of bonus life. And here's where I get to share one more little bit of science with you. It turns out that people who regularly boost these four types of resilience -- physical, mental, emotional and social -- live 10 years longer than everyone else. So this is true. If you are regularly achieving the three-to-one positive emotion ratio, if you are never sitting still for more than an hour at a time, if you are reaching out to one person you care about every single day, if you are tackling tiny goals to boost your willpower, you will live 10 years longer than everyone else, and here's where that math I showed you earlier comes in.

So, the average life expectancy in the U.S. and the U.K. is 78.1 years, but we know from more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies that you can add 10 years of life to that by boosting your four types of resilience. So every single year that you are boosting your four types of resilience, you're actually earning .128 more years of life or 46 more days of life, or 67,298 more minutes of life, which means every single day, you are earning 184 minutes of life, or every single hour that you are boosting your four types of resilience, like we just did together, you are earning 7.68245837 more minutes of life.

Congratulations, those seven and a half minutes are all yours. You totally earned them.

(Applause)

Yeah! Awesome. Wait, wait, wait. You still have your special mission, your secret mission. How are you going to spend these seven and a half minutes of bonus life?

Well, here's my suggestion. These seven and a half bonus minutes are kind of like genie's wishes. You can use your first wish to wish for a million more wishes. Pretty clever, right? So, if you spend these seven and a half minutes today doing something that makes you happy, or that gets you physically active, or puts you in touch with someone you care about, or even just tackling a tiny challenge, you are going to boost your resilience, so you're going to earn more minutes.

And the good news is, you can keep going like that. Every hour of the day, every day of your life, all the way to your deathbed, which will now be 10 years later than it would have otherwise. And when you get there, more than likely, you will not have any of those top five regrets, because you will have built up the strength and resilience to lead a life truer to your dreams. And with 10 extra years, you might even have enough time to play a few more games.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!

Everything I do, and everything I do professionally -- my life -- has been shaped by seven years of work as a young man in Africa. From 1971 to 1977 -- I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) -- I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia, in projects of technical cooperation with African countries.

I worked for an Italian NGO, and every single project that we set up in Africa failed. And I was distraught. I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. Instead, everything we touched we killed.

Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book, "Ripples from the Zambezi," was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River, and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini and ... And of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that, so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. (Laughter) And we were amazed that the local people, in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, "Thank God we're here." (Laughter) "Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation."

And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully. We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomato would grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size. And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians, "Look how easy agriculture is." When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything. (Laughter)

And we said to the Zambians, "My God, the hippos!"

And the Zambians said, "Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here." (Laughter)

"Why didn't you tell us?" "You never asked."

I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa, but then I saw what the Americans were doing, what the English were doing, what the French were doing, and after seeing what they were doing, I became quite proud of our project in Zambia. Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.

You should see the rubbish — (Applause) -- You should see the rubbish that we have bestowed on unsuspecting African people. You want to read the book, read "Dead Aid," by Dambisa Moyo, Zambian woman economist. The book was published in 2009. We Western donor countries have given the African continent two trillion American dollars in the last 50 years. I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done. Just go and read her book. Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done.

We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries, and there are only two ways we deal with people: We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic. The two words come from the Latin root "pater," which means "father." But they mean two different things. Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different culture as if they were my children. "I love you so much." Patronizing, I treat everybody from another culture as if they were my servants. That's why the white people in Africa are called "bwana," boss.

I was given a slap in the face reading a book, "Small is Beautiful," written by Schumacher, who said, above all in economic development, if people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid. The first principle of aid is respect. This morning, the gentleman who opened this conference lay a stick on the floor, and said, "Can we -- can you imagine a city that is not neocolonial?"

I decided when I was 27 years old to only respond to people, and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation, where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion, the servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. So what you do -- you shut up. You never arrive in a community with any ideas, and you sit with the local people. We don't work from offices. We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. We have zero infrastructure. And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do.

The most important thing is passion. You can give somebody an idea. If that person doesn't want to do it, what are you going to do? The passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing. The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. And then we help them to go and find the knowledge, because nobody in the world can succeed alone. The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available.

So years and years ago, I had this idea: Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the community to tell people what to do, why don't, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings.

Let me tell you a secret. There is a problem with community meetings. Entrepreneurs never come, and they never tell you, in a public meeting, what they want to do with their own money, what opportunity they have identified. So planning has this blind spot. The smartest people in your community you don't even know, because they don't come to your public meetings.

What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one, you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn't exist. You have to create a new profession. The profession is the family doctor of enterprise, the family doctor of business, who sits with you in your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe, and helps you find the resources to transform your passion into a way to make a living.

I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia. I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time, trying to go away from this patronizing bullshit that we arrive and tell you what to do. And so what I did in Esperance that first year was to just walk the streets, and in three days I had my first client, and I helped this first guy who was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy, and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth, to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say, "You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?" And I helped these five fishermen to work together and get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albany for 60 cents a kilo, but we found a way to take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo, and the farmers came to talk to me, said, "Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?" In a year, I had 27 projects going on, and the government came to see me to say, "How can you do that? How can you do — ?" And I said, "I do something very, very, very difficult. I shut up, and listen to them." (Laughter)

So — (Applause) — So the government says, "Do it again." (Laughter) We've done it in 300 communities around the world. We have helped to start 40,000 businesses. There is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are dying of solitude.

Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history, died age 96, a few years ago. Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophy before becoming involved in business, and this is what Peter Drucker says: "Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy." Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.

So now you're rebuilding Christchurch without knowing what the smartest people in Christchurch want to do with their own money and their own energy. You have to learn how to get these people to come and talk to you. You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy, you have to be fantastic at helping them, and then they will come, and they will come in droves. In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients. Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people, the intelligence and the passion? Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning? Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded.

So what I'm saying is that entrepreneurship is where it's at. We are at the end of the first industrial revolution -- nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing -- and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable. The internal combustion engine is not sustainable. Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable. What we have to look at is at how we feed, cure, educate, transport, communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way. The technologies do not exist to do that. Who is going to invent the technology for the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it! Government? Forget about it! It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now.

There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazine many, many years ago. There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860. And in 1860, this group of people came together, and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of New York in 100 years, and the conclusion was unanimous: The city of New York would not exist in 100 years. Why? Because they looked at the curve and said, if the population keeps growing at this rate, to move the population of New York around, they would have needed six million horses, and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with. They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter) So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of New York.

So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies -- 1,001. The idea of finding a different technology had absolutely taken over, and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters. Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford.

However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs. First, you have to offer them confidentiality. Otherwise they don't come and talk to you. Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated, passionate service to them. And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship. The smallest company, the biggest company, has to be capable of doing three things beautifully: The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic, you have to have fantastic marketing, and you have to have tremendous financial management. Guess what? We have never met a single human being in the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money. It doesn't exist. This person has never been born. We've done the research, and we have looked at the 100 iconic companies of the world -- Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford, all the new companies, Google, Yahoo. There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common, only one: None were started by one person. Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-olds in Northumberland, and we start the class by giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography, and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline, in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography how many times Richard uses the word "I" and how many times he uses the word "we." Never the word "I," and the word "we" 32 times. He wasn't alone when he started. Nobody started a company alone. No one. So we can create the community where we have facilitators who come from a small business background sitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddies who will do to you, what somebody did for this gentleman who talks about this epic, somebody who will say to you, "What do you need? What can you do? Can you make it? Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money?" "Oh, no, I cannot do this." "Would you like me to find you somebody?" We activate communities. We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitator to help you to find resources and people and we have discovered that the miracle of the intelligence of local people is such that you can change the culture and the economy of this community just by capturing the passion, the energy and imagination of your own people.

Thank you. (Applause)