We breeze by in life because it is too easy. It is the same mundane thing everyday: get up, go to school, go to work, go to bed.. Games, on the other hand, challenge us with voluntary obstacles and put our personal strengths to the test. Games aren’t depressing like reality because they focus our energy with optimism on something we are good at. Gaming gives us tons of chances to improve and retry while we barely hold on to our one chance at reality.

Gaming builds strong social bonds and helps to reconnect our social environment. The more we play games, the more likely we are to develop “prosocial emotion,” a subset of positive emotion. Everyone wants to feel like they are doing something bigger than themselves, and games give us that satisfaction. They give us an epic meaning to our actions. Games motivate us to participate more in whatever, whether it be stacking blocks or blowing up zombies. Games are set up to reward you for the countless hours you spent fighting that boss, unlike in life where fighting your boss is punished. We get a visual feedback as soon as we win, and the noise and bright colors makes us feel good. Even though many people play games by themselves, they are really playing together. Games help us create strong social communities such as large online communities, forums, and nationwide conventions.

In games, life is simpler; it's easy to take good advice and try happier things. It often takes us long periods of time to receive continual satisfaction while video games provide constant reinforcement through every little battle and treasure chest. Games help define awe-inspiring goals and tackle impossible social missions that are made possible in the virtual world. People commonly lose focus, but with games, they are set on a specific goal that they have this desire to complete and it gives them organization. In a game world, you can be in the wild west or in the future on planet Nebulon. Games have infinite playgrounds that can draw in any kind of gamer.

Games all over the world bring people together whether it be through a "Guitar Hero" tournament or a huge online "Halo" game. Jane McGonigal said in her book "Reality is Broken" that when there are no kids in the neighborhood, it is late at night, or your best friend is miles away, video games give you an opportunity to interact with other people and be social. We use games as a way to connect with family, like in the game "Lexulous," a game similar to Scrabble. Family members across the country can play with each other and catch up on each other lives. This ensures a daily opportunity to actively connect with the people we care about most. This helps us step out of our comfort zone and making the bridge to becoming friends with someone. Games played online like "World of Warcraft" (WoW) or "Minecraft" force us into interacting with people. In WoW, in order to complete a mission you may need to call on strangers to help you form a raid. There are top secret dance-offs, where you put on a disguise and complete mission that require funky dancing and mad moves to compete for various prizes. Games are rather beneficial because they help us reconnect with people and form new bonds with strangers.

Kids are taught at a young age that opposite of play is work, when really it's depression. Depression is the despondent lack of activity or a pessimistic sense of inadequacy. When people play games, they get this positive emotion that makes them want to keep playing. They feel a sense of “fiero” (the Italian word for pride). When you beat the hard mission on "Call of Duty" before all your buddies, you gain these instant bragging rights and pride. This pride boosts us to work harder, and it makes us crave for challenges that we can overcome, battles we can win, and dangers we can vanquish. There is obviously an opposite feeling to all this pride and good feeling. This feeling makes us angry and combative, it makes us want to escape and shut down emotionally. This actually pushes us to work harder because even if we do choose to shut down, we still have this feeling and we just want to get rid of it. I know that when I start stressing over a boss I can't beat, I get mad at yell at the game. I also quit but after a while, the feeling is still there and it makes me stronger, it makes me want to defeat the boss.

Failure is something everybody who has ever played a game before as felt. But what they probably didn't realize is that the failure makes us happy. We are overjoyed when we fail, and we love it. A study done of 32 gamers playing "Super Monkey Ball 2" to determine when they were at their happiest and when they were at their saddest. After carefully reviewing the data, scientists concluded that gamers were most happy when they failed. Failure was something gamers could be proud of because when the ball rolled off the lane, there was a sound and animation that excited the player, it was like a reward for the gamer.

If it wasn't for the fun animation we got when we rolled the ball off the track or the sense of

fiero we get from winning, we would have no drive to play the game. While we can’t spend our entire life in a game, we can receive a weekly or daily, depending on how hardcore of a gamer you are, fix to help cope with the mundane reality of life