I just picked up good ol' Wave Race 64 for the first time in years and had a blast. It got me thinking about Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken.. Rereading it, I stumbled upon this passage:

What a boost to global net happiness it would be if we could positively activate the minds and bodies of hundreds of millions of people by offering them better hard work. We could offer them challenging, customizable missions and tasks, to do alone or with friends and family, whenever and wherever. We could provide them with vivid, real-time reports on the progress they're making and a clear view of the impact they're having on the world around them.

That's exactly what the games industry is doing today. It's fulfilling our need for better hard work—and helping us choose for ourselves the right work at the right time. So you can forget the old aphorism "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." All good gameplay is hard work. It's hard work that we enjoy and choose for ourselves. And when we do hard work that we care about, we are priming our minds for happiness.

I'll chime in and say art does a wonderful job of this as well.

Music, for example, checks off several of the different types of "Hard work" McGonigal highlights as present in games:

• High-stakes work (giving a performance, recording)
• Busywork (repeating a passage over and over)
• Mental work (arranging and voice leading)
• Physical work (eh, it depends here. I've played music that makes me sweat, but let's just say that the motor skills used are close enough)
• Discovery work (learning new pieces or genres)
• Teamwork (collaboration)
• Creative work (composing)

The timeline for achievement in art, though, is usually loads longer. Games provide an addictively quick feedback loop.

Games also just do a dang good job of making failure fun. More on that later on in the book, but I'll leave it here for now.