SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal

Author:Jane McGonigal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Now that you’ve completed this quest, you’ve not only sparked some helpful social emotions, you’ve also identified three potential allies to recruit for your game. (Or perhaps, you’ve identified three people you’d like to become an ally to!) So let’s talk more about exactly what an ally does.

This SuperBetter story captures the ally experience perfectly—much to the surprise of its hero, Alex, who never wanted any allies in the first place.

A SuperBetter Story: The Reluctant Hero

Alex Goldman, thirty, a public radio show producer who lives in New York City, is the last person you’d ever expect to recruit allies. “There’s nothing in the world I hate more than asking for help,” he told me on the air, when we chatted on his radio show in late 2011.

Alex is an avid bike rider, but in the summer of 2011, he suffered a terrible accident when he was knocked off his bike and run over by a car. “I had multiple fractures in my leg,” he recounted, “and I needed two surgeries to fix them. After my first surgery, I spent three weeks with rods and clamps drilled into the bones in my leg. I had a second surgery to remove them, and then I spent six weeks on crutches.”6

Even after he started walking again, Alex faced a long road to recovery. “I walk with a limp now, and every step is pretty painful,” he said. “My leg swells up in the afternoons. I can’t do any of the exercise I used to do, especially riding my bike. The medical professionals looking at my injury have not been all that clear about whether this is permanent or not. As you can imagine, this has left me incredibly depressed.”

Alex turned to SuperBetter during this difficult time. I spoke with him on air before he started playing, to go over the rules. He was convinced that recruiting allies would be the toughest part of the game for him, harder even than running a marathon on his broken leg! But when we spoke again, six weeks later, he had not only achieved his first epic win—a three-mile bike ride around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park—but to his great surprise, he also had a whopping eleven allies by his side when he did it.

How did he get from refusing to ask anyone for help, ever, to being surrounded by friends and coworkers cheering him on?

It started slowly, with just two allies—his wife, Sarah, and his colleague PJ. He told them about his goal and asked them to spend the next six weeks helping him achieve it. To break the ice, he showed Sarah and PJ his list of bad guys: “Stuff like not socializing, staying up really late but not getting anything done, junk food, generally things that kept me sedentary and lethargic and unhappy.” Then he shared his power-up list: “Anything that would get me physically moving or interacting with other people.” With PJ at work and Sarah at home, he had someone around essentially 24/7 to help him keep moving and avoid succumbing to the bad guys.

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