The Therapeutic Power of Video Games and Visual Processing

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Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) is a future-forecaster and a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games that improve real lives and solve real problems. She’s the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future and the lead instructor for their series on the Coursera platform. She also teaches the course How to Think Like a Futurist at Stanford University.

Jane is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality Is Broken and SuperBetter, and the forthcoming Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today. Her TED talks on how games can make a better world and the game that can give you 10 extra years of life have more than 15 million views. Her innovative games and ideas have been recognized by the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, O magazine, and The New York Times, among many others.

Please enjoy!

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Good video games to play for quieting your mind before bedtime, and an update on research we discussed during Jane’s last visit that linked Tetris positively to preventing episodes of PTSD. [07:16]

Find yourself waking up for a few hours in the middle of the night? It’s perfectly natural. Here’s how to deal with it. [11:13]

From a research standpoint, why is Tetris uniquely effective at treating PTSD? [13:34]

McGonigal to McNostradamus: what spooky thing happened when, in 2010, Jane led 20,000 gamers in a social simulation trying to imagine the world of 2020? 10 years later, what does Jane consider to be the most important outcome of this exercise? [15:31]

Further predictions from this 2010 simulation and another one that ran simultaneously — including a tick-borne pandemic that could make people allergic to meat (and how the world might adjust to such a scenario). [22:25]

What predicted threat does Jane see as having a silver lining, and what economic concepts and policies have recently “radicalized” her? [40:59]

Predictions for the future of cryptocurrency as politics get involved, and how current play-to-earn gaming platforms may have to adapt. [50:25]

Cult recruitment and podcasting in the age of trust warfare. [54:21]

Pornography always finds a way. [1:00:11]

What is urgent optimism? [1:10:38]

Future Fridays and habits to cultivate for feeling good when contemplating an uncertain future. [1:13:58]

Future power examples: small preparations Jane has found helpful toward easing her more comfortably into what tomorrow has in store for us. [1:18:54]

Do you have an action plan for total electrical blackout or climate migration? Here are some preventative and reactive steps Jane’s been thinking about, and how I address such problems to people who may be politically disinclined to consider them at all. [1:24:44]

Three questions you can ask to measure your urgent optimism and give you a sense of which of those three habits or skills you might want to practice more, and an example of how Jane’s recently applied these questions. [1:31:46]

Jane details an Urgent Optimist group activity you can join to better spot the future’s hopeful signals — especially if you’re hardwired to only see what’s in a shadow of perpetual pessimism. [1:39:41]

Journaling from the future as a form of specificity training. [1:43:14]

Who Alvin Toffler was, and how Jane feels about his maxim that “it’s more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be 100 percent right” about the future. [1:47:29]

Why Jane thinks the technological solutions to climate change will rely more on socio optimism than techno-optimism, and what these solutions may look like. [1:52:05]

Jane’s recommendations for people who would like to study incentives and how they might be applied to solving the world’s biggest problems. [1:57:10]

Further resources, audience asks, and final thoughts. [2:00:58]

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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Margaret Atwood, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Balaji Srinivasan, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Michio Kaku, and many more.

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