Season one of Evoke has been a great experience. I learned about Evoke by watching Jane McGonigal's talk on TED.com during my lunch hour. I was so excited about playing Evoke that I got on the site immediately after putting the kids to bed that night.
I've been hooked on gaming since I picked up an Atari 2600 controller as a young child, but gaming has always been a guilty pleasure. After playing a great game for hours on end I would feel worse about myself. I would feel, no matter how much fun I just had, that I had wasted some valuable time. Thankfully, Evoke has given me the opposite experience. It doesn't give me the same feeling of enthrallment that playing Batman: Arkham Asylum on my PS3 does, but I am hooked on Evoke nonetheless. And when I am done playing Evoke (no matter how many hours I've spent on it) I feel great about what I have accomplished.
Evoke works because it taps into human beings' desire to play, socialize, and find meaning in their lives. And though I love to play and sometimes socialize (I'm an introvert) it is the meaningfulness of Evoke that has kept me coming back. Pychologist Martin Seligman's research suggests that there are three kinds of happiness, and the most venerable of the types of happiness is "the meaningful life" (
http://bit.ly/AeM0E). It is this meaningfulness that sets Evoke apart from Farmville and other online social games and it is what will keep me coming back to play again and again.
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