Most of my childhood was spent in the 80s, when I got to play awesome, rewarding games like Life. The point of the game was to collect little baby blue and pink pegs and make some fake money so someday you could retire in a plastic mansion. The pegs were your husband and children.

YAWN. Still, I played. But it could be very depressing at times. I mean, no playtime should end with someone losing at the game of Life.

Yesterday I read that happiness research (a burgeoning field, comrades!) indicates some of us would be feeling a little better if life were more like a game. After all, the rewards in games are clearly visible (in the sense that you earn points or pegs, for example) and fairly immediate—and compared to real life, the narrative is relatively straightforward. Jane McGonigal of the Institute for the Future discussed this in her keynote speech at the SXSW Interactive Conference:

“For a lot of gamers, their experience of life is that it is not sufficiently designed for them to be good at, in the way that games are,” McGonigal said.

Games reward people and give them feedback. A player is told incessantly how valuable he or she is, how much he or she contributes to the team and is given rewards for his or her accomplishments.

Contrast that to life, in which people are rarely given this kind of positive feedback and sense of accomplishment so frequently, McGonigal said.

Is it childish to desire these pats on the back, this regular positive reinforcement? If you need frequent external approval, is there something wrong with you? And if so . . . so what?

Let’s say you realize that you do indeed exhibit this tendency. You can battle for the rest of your life to change who you are . . . or you can turn life into a little bit of a game so that you feel more rewarded by it. The idea is intriguing. Maybe the true joys in life do lie in those fleeting smiles, fluttering heartbeats, and blue skies . . . but you know what? The bulk of life is the time in between, the drudge work, straight faces, the plodding forward.

I can tell you one thing: If I got points for the workshop I’m nervous about presenting this afternoon, I think it might improve my perspective a little bit. I’d focus on completing the task at hand and doing the best I could to get as many points as possible. At other times during the week, I’d take a special secret pleasure with each business email responded to promptly, each telephone call greeted with a smile rather than a scowl. To what purpose would I be building up points? To “level up”? I’ll let my gamer boyfriend figure that one out ;).

I will say that some very successful business enterprises (beyond the obvious interactive media companies) seem to have picked up on making the grunt work of life more like a game for grownups. Just think about Weight Watchers, a program I am oh-so-intimately familiar with: You work with Points rather than calories, receive a colorful slider to calculate food and activity values, and get prizes (like key chains and gold stars) for staying the course. If that’s not making dieting a game, I don’t know what is.

I think sometimes we simply want to know we’ve succeeded at a task and to be extrinsically rewarded for it, no matter how small the accomplishment.