Kindle highlights

When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose. The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By removing or limiting the obvious ways of getting to the goal, the rules push players to explore previously uncharted possibility spaces. They unleash creativity and foster strategic thinking. The feedback system tells players how close they are to achieving the goal. It can take the form of points, levels, a score, or a progress bar. Or, in its most basic form, the feedback system can be as simple as the players’ knowledge of an objective outcome: “The game is over when . . .” Real-time feedback serves as a promise to the players that the goal is definitely achievable, and it provides motivation to keep playing. Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity. (loc: 374-86)

Bernard Suits, the late, great philosopher, sums it all up in what I consider the single most convincing and useful definition of a game ever devised: Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.1 (loc: 394-96)

This variety and intensity of feedback is the most important difference between digital and nondigital games. In computer and video games, the interactive loop is satisfyingly tight. There seems to be no gap between your actions and the game’s responses. You can literally see in the animations and count on the scoreboard your impact on the game world. You can also feel how extraordinarily attentive the game system is to your performance. It only gets harder when you’re playing well, creating a perfect balance between hard challenge and achievability. In other words, in a good computer or video game you’re always playing on the very edge of your skill level, always on the brink of falling off. When you do fall off, you feel the urge to climb back on. That’s because there is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability—or what both game designers and psychologists call “flow.”4 When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes. (loc: 432-40)

zpd (loc: 440)

Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work. We don’t normally think of games as hard work. After all, we play games, and we’ve been taught to think of play as the very opposite of work. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”6 (loc: 489-93)

If only hard work in the real world had the same effect. In our real lives, hard work is too often something we do because we have to do it—to make a living, to get ahead, to meet someone else’s expectations, or simply because someone else gave us a job to do. We resent that kind of work. It stresses us out. It takes time away from our friends and family. It comes with too much criticism. We’re afraid of failing. We often don’t get to see the direct impact of our efforts, so we rarely feel satisfied. Or, worse, our real-world work isn’t hard enough. We’re bored out of our minds. We feel completely underutilized. We feel unappreciated. We are wasting our lives. When we don’t choose hard work for ourselves, it’s usually not the right work, at the right time, for the right person. It’s not perfectly customized for our strengths, we’re not in control of the work flow, we don’t have a clear picture of what we’re contributing to, and we never see how it all pays off in the end. Hard work that someone else requires us to do just doesn’t activate our happiness systems in the same way. It all too often doesn’t absorb us, doesn’t make us optimistic, and doesn’t invigorate us. 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 of the progress they’re making and a clear view of the impact they’re having on the world around them. (loc: 505-17)

The right hard work takes different forms at different times for different people. To meet these individual needs, games have been offering us increasingly diverse kinds of work for decades now. There’s high-stakes work, which is what many people think of first when it comes to video games. It’s fast and action oriented, and it thrills us with the possibility not only of success but also of spectacular failure. Whether we’re driving hairpin turns at top speeds in a racing video game like the Gran Turismo series or battling zombies in a first-person shooter game like Left 4 Dead, it’s the risk of crashing, burning, or having our brains sucked out that makes us feel more alive. But there’s also busywork, which is completely predictable and monotonous. Busywork generally gets a bad rap in our real lives, but when we choose it for ourselves, it actually helps us feel quite contented and productive. When we’re swapping multicolored jewels in a casual game like Bejeweled or harvesting virtual crops in a social game like FarmVille, we’re happy just to keep our hands and mind occupied with focused activity that produces a clear result. There’s mental work, which revs up our cognitive faculties. It can be rapid-fire and condensed, like the thirty-second math problems in Nintendo’s Brain Age games. Or it can be drawn-out and complex, like the simulated ten-thousand-year conquest campaigns in the real-time strategy game Age of Empires. Either way, we feel a rush of accomplishment when we put our brains to good use. And then there’s physical work, which makes our hearts beat faster, our lungs pump harder, our glands sweat like crazy. If the work is hard enough, we’ll flood our brains with endorphins, the feel-good chemical. But more importantly, whether we’re throwing punches in Wii Boxing or jumping around to Dance Dance Revolution, we just enjoy the process of getting ourselves completely worn out. There’s discovery work, which is all about the pleasure of actively investigating unfamiliar objects and spaces. Discovery work helps us feel confident, powerful, and motivated. When we’re exploring mysterious 3D environments, like a vast city hidden in the sea in the role-playing shooter game BioShock, or when we’re interacting with strange characters, like the fashionable undead teenagers who populate Tokyo in the handheld battle game The World Ends with You, we relish the chance to be curious about anything and everything. Increasingly in computer and video games today there’s teamwork, which emphasizes collaboration, cooperation, and contributions to a larger group. When we carve out special duties for ourselves in a complex mission like the twenty-five-player team raids in World of Warcraft, or when we’re defending our friends’ lives in a four-player cooperative game of the comic adventure Castle Crashers, we take great satisfaction in knowing we have a unique and important role to play in a much bigger effort. Finally, there’s creative work. When we do creative work, we get to make meaningful decisions and feel proud of something we’ve made. Creative work can take the form of designing our homes and families in the Sims games, or uploading video karaoke performances of ourselves to the SingStar network, or building and managing an online franchise in the Madden NFL games. For every creative effort we make, we feel more capable than when we started.   (loc: 521-47)

I’m not the first person to notice that reality is broken compared with games, especially when it comes to giving us good, hard work. In fact, the science of happiness was first born thirty-five years ago, when an American psychologist by the name of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi observed the very same thing. In 1975, Csíkszentmihályi published a groundbreaking scientific study called Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. The focus of the study was a specific kind of happiness that Csíkszentmihályi named flow: “the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning.”1 He spent seven years researching this kind of intense, joyous engagement: when and where do we experience it most, and how can we create more of it? (loc: 605-11)

Csíkszentmihályi argued that the failure of schools, offices, factories, and other everyday environments to provide flow was a serious moral issue, one of the most urgent problems facing humanity. Why should we needlessly spend the majority of our lives in boredom and anxiety, when games point to a clear and better alternative? “If we continue to ignore what makes us happy,” he wrote, “we shall actively help perpetuate the dehumanizing forces which are gaining momentum day by day.” The solution seemed obvious to Csíkszentmihályi: create more happiness by structuring real work like game work. (loc: 623-27)

Positive psychology is the relatively new field of science that studies “human flourishing,” or how we achieve different kinds of happiness. For just over a decade now, positive-psychology researchers have been accumulating a formidable body of knowledge about how our brains and bodies work to help us achieve well-being and life satisfaction. (loc: 644-46)

programming as flow for me (loc: 646)

IN 1983, a jazz pianist and sociologist named David Sudnow published a video game memoir, the first of its kind. It was a 161-page chronicle of his efforts to master one of the original home video games: the Atari ping-pong-style game Breakout. (loc: 668-70)

In the past, the deepest experiences of flow had required years of practice to achieve, or extraordinary settings. When Csíkszentmihályi first wrote about it, he was studying expert players of chess, or basketball, or rock climbing, or partner dancing. Flow was typically the result of years, if not decades, of learning the structure of an activity and strengthening the required skills and abilities. Otherwise, it required being immersed in a truly spectacular and unusual context, like dancing in the crowded streets during carnival or skiing down an exceptionally challenging mountainside. Flow wasn’t supposed to come easy. But, as Sudnow and millions of other early gamers discovered, video games made it possible to experience flow almost immediately. Video games took the traditional properties of potentially flow-inducing activities—a goal, obstacles, increasing challenge, and voluntary participation—and then used a combination of direct physical input (the joystick), flexible difficulty adjustment (the computer algorithms), and instant visual feedback (the video graphics) to tighten the feedback loop of games dramatically. And this faster, tighter feedback loop allowed for more reliable hits of the emotional reward fiero: each microlevel of difficulty you survived prompted a split-second emotional high. (loc: 700-709)

The more we try to “find” happiness, the harder it gets. Positive psychologists call this process “hedonic adaptation,” and it’s one of the biggest hindrances to long-term life satisfaction. 16 The more we consume, acquire, and elevate our status, the harder it is to stay happy. Whether it’s money, grades, promotions, popularity, attention, or just plain material things we want, scientists agree: seeking out external rewards is a sure path to sabotaging our own happiness. (loc: 785-89)

On the other hand, when we set out to make our own happiness, we’re focused on activity that generates intrinsic rewards—the positive emotions, personal strengths, and social connections that we build by engaging intensely with the world around us. We’re not looking for praise or payouts. The very act of what we’re doing, the enjoyment of being fully engaged, is enough. The scientific term for this kind of self-motivated, self-rewarding activity is autotelic (from the Greek words for “self,” auto, and “goal,” telos).17 We do autotelic work because it engages us completely, and because intense engagement is the most pleasurable, satisfying, and meaningful emotional state we can experience. As long as we are regularly immersed in self-rewarding hard work, we will be happy more often than not—no matter what else is going on in our lives. This is one of the earliest hypotheses of positive psychology, and a fairly radical idea. It contradicts what so many of us have been taught to believe—that we need life to be a certain way in order for us to be happy, and that the easier life is the happier we are. But the relationship between hard work, intrinsic reward, and lasting happiness has been verified and confirmed through hundreds of studies and experiments. (loc: 789-99)

In fact, from a neurological and physiological point of view, “intrinsic reward” is really just another way of describing the emotional payoffs we get by stimulating our internal happiness systems. By undertaking a difficult challenge, such as trying to finish a task in a shorter time than usual, we can produce in our own bodies a rush of adrenaline, the excitement hormone that makes us feel confident, energetic, and highly motivated.19 By accomplishing something that is very hard for us, like solving a puzzle or finishing a race, our brains release a potent cocktail of norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine. These three neurochemicals in combination make us feel satisfied, proud, and highly aroused.20 When we make someone else laugh or smile, our brain is flooded with dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. If we laugh or smile, too, the effect is even more pronounced.21 Every time we coordinate or synchronize our physical movements with others, such as in dance or sports, we release oxytocin into our bloodstream, a neurochemical that makes us feel blissed out and ecstatic.22 When we seek out what we might describe as “powerful” and “moving” stories, media, or live performances, we’re actually triggering our vagus nerve, which makes us feel emotionally “choked up” in our chests and throats, or we’re firing up our nervous system’s pilomotor reflex, which gives us pleasurable chills and goose bumps.23 And if we provoke our curiosity by exposing ourselves to ambiguous visual stimulus, like a wrapped present or a door that is just barely ajar, we experience a rush of “interest” biochemicals also known as “internal opiates.” These include endorphins, which make us feel powerful and in control, and beta-endorphin, a “well-being” neurotransmitter that is eighty times more powerful than morphine. (loc: 822-38)

SO WHICH INTRINSIC rewards, exactly, are most essential to our happiness? There’s no definitive list, but a few key ideas and examples appear over and over again in the scientific literature. My analysis of significant positive-psychology findings from the past decade suggests that intrinsic rewards fall into four major categories.25 First and foremost, we crave satisfying work, every single day. The exact nature of this “satisfying work” is different from person to person, but for everyone it means being immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impact of our efforts.   Second, we crave the experience, or at least the hope, of being successful. We want to feel powerful in our own lives and show off to others what we’re good at. We want to be optimistic about our own chances for success, to aspire to something, and to feel like we’re getting better over time.   Third, we crave social connection. Humans are extremely social creatures, and even the most introverted among us derive a large percentage of our happiness from spending time with the people we care about. We want to share experiences and build bonds, and we most often accomplish that by doing things that matter together.   Fourth, and finally, we crave meaning, or the chance to be a part of something larger than ourselves. We want to feel curiosity, awe, and wonder about things that unfold on epic scales. And most importantly, we want to belong to and contribute to something that has lasting significance beyond our own individual lives. (loc: 851-65)

Nick Yee, a leading researcher of MMOs and the first person to receive a PhD for studying WoW, has argued that the MMOs are really massively multiplayer work environments disguised as games. As Yee observes, “Computers were made to work for us, but video games have come to demand that we work for them.” This is true—but, of course, we are really the ones who are asking to have more work. We want to be given more work—or rather, we want to be given more satisfying work. (loc: 946-49)

Well-designed work, on the other hand, leaves no doubt that progress will be made. There is a guarantee of productivity built in, and that’s what makes it so appealing. (loc: 958-59)

Why do we crave this kind of guaranteed productivity? In The How of Happiness , Sonja Lyubomirsky writes that the fastest way to improve someone’s everyday quality of life is to “bestow on a person a specific goal, something to do and to look forward.”10 When a clear goal is attached to a specific task, she explains, it gives us an energizing push, a sense of purpose. (loc: 975-78)

In Shop Class as Soul Craft, author and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford reflects on the psychological differences between manual labor and everyday office work. As he observes: Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive…. Is there a more “real” alternative?17 (loc: 1024-29)

But there are also microexamples of games that generate the rewarding sense of capability and productivity. They’re called “casual games,” and they provide satisfying work in very quick bursts of productive play: as short as a few minutes to an hour. When interspersed with everyday work, they can be surprisingly boosting to everyday life satisfaction. (loc: 1056-58)

Lazzaro has long suspected that gamers love to fail, and a team of psychologists at the M.I.N.D. Lab in Helsinki, Finland, recently confirmed it with scientific evidence. When we’re playing a well-designed game, failure doesn’t disappoint us. It makes us happy in a very particular way: excited, interested, and most of all optimistic.2 If that finding surprises you, then you’re not alone—the Finnish researchers weren’t expecting that result, either. But today, the “fun failure” study is considered one of the most important findings in the history of video game research.3 It helped pinpoint for the first time exactly how a well-designed game helps players develop exceptional mental toughness. (loc: 1102-7)

Koster has written a book much beloved in the game industry, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, in which he argues that games are “fun” only as long as we haven’t mastered them. He writes, “Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension…. With games, learning is the drug.” And that’s why fun in games lasts only as long as we’re not consistently successful .7 (loc: 1167-70)

Happy Embarrassment If there’s one thing Lexulous players do even better than making obscure words out of random letters, it’s gently teasing each other in a way that makes them feel good. And the most effective way they tease each other is through trash-talking. Trash-talking, when it’s a playful way to insult your competition, is almost as important to our enjoyment of social network games as the actual core gameplay. We crave the distinctly rewarding feeling we get from a good game when we soundly beat, or are beaten, by people we really like. More importantly, we crave the experience of teasing each other about it, in private and in public. (loc: 1420-25)

Teasing each other, recent scientific research has shown, is one of the fastest and most effective ways to intensify our positive feelings for each other. Dacher Keltner, a leading researcher of prosocial emotions at the University of California, has conducted experiments on the psychological benefits of teasing, and he believes that teasing plays an invaluable role in helping us form and maintain positive relationships.19 “The tease is like a social vaccine,” Keltner explains. “It stimulates the recipient’s emotional system.” Teasingly trash-talking allows us to provoke each other’s negative emotions in a very mild way—we stimulate a very small amount of anger or hurt or embarrassment. This tiny provocation has two powerful effects. First, it confirms trust: the person doing the teasing is demonstrating the capacity to hurt, but simultaneously showing that the intention is not to hurt. Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really would, hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being. By letting someone tease us, we’re also helping them feel powerful. We’re giving them a moment to enjoy higher status in our social relationship—and humans are intensely attuned to shifts in social status. By letting someone else experience higher status, we intensify their positive feelings for us. Why? Because we naturally like people more when they enhance our own social status. This is the essence of happy embarrassment and, according to Keltner’s research, we’re hardwired to feel it. He has documented the physiological basis for this complicated social effect in studies of face-to-face playful teasing and trash-talking. According to Keltner’s findings, the recipient of the tease almost invariably showed signs of lowered status, followed by an effort at reconciliation: gaze aversion, bowed head, nervous smile, hand touching the face, and so on. All of this is followed by a fleeting smile, a microexpression that indicates we actually enjoy being teased by people we trust. Meanwhile, the more obvious the display of lowered status, the more the teasers reported liking the teased afterward. (loc: 1437-55)

Vicarious Pride In a recent major study of more than one thousand gamers, a little-known prosocial emotion called “naches” ranked number eight on the top ten list of emotions that gamers say they want to feel while playing their favorite games. Naches, a Yiddish word for the bursting pride we feel when someone we’ve taught or mentored succeeds, ranked just below surprise and fiero.21 The term “naches” hasn’t caught on in the gamer world the way “pwn” or “fiero” has. But players in the study frequently described a kind of vicarious pride from playing over someone else’s shoulder, and giving advice and encouragement—especially on games they themselves had already mastered. The author of the study, Christopher Bateman, an expert in both cognitive psychology and game design, adopted the term “naches” to describe this phenomenon, reporting, “Players seem to really enjoy training their friends and family to play games, with a whopping 53.4 percent saying it enhances their enjoyment.”22 It’s no surprise that mentoring our friends and family in gameplay makes us happy and brings us closer together. Paul Ekman, a pioneering emotions researcher and an expert on the phenomenon of naches, explains that this particular emotion is also likely an evolved mechanism, designed to enhance group survival. The happiness we get from cheering on friends and family ensures our personal investment in other people’s growth and achievements. It encourages us to contribute to someone else’s success, and as a result we form networks of support from which everyone involved benefits.23 And because naches is so strongly correlated with survival, Ekman says, we feel it intensely. We don’t describe ourselves as “bursting with pride” over our own success, but we do for others; this language suggests that the feeling of naches is even more explosive than personal fiero. (loc: 1476-91)

Ambient Sociability Sometimes we want company, but we don’t want to actively interact with anybody. That’s where the idea of playing alone together comes in. MMOs are famous for their collaborative quests and group raids. But it turns out that a majority of players prefer to play the game solo. An eight-month study of more than 150,000 World of Warcraft players discovered that players were spending on average 70 percent of their time pursuing individual missions, barely interacting with other players. (loc: 1519-24)

The researchers conducted interviews to explore these findings and found that players enjoyed sharing the virtual environment, even if there was little to no direct interaction. They were experiencing a high degree of “social presence,” a communications theory term for the sensation of sharing the same space with other people.31 Although the players were not fighting each other or questing together, they still considered each other virtual company. The Stanford and PARC research team dubbed this phenomenon “playing alone together.”32 One World of Warcraft player explains on her blog why she prefers to play alone together: “It’s the feeling of not being alone in the world. I love being around other real players in the game. I enjoy seeing what they’re doing, what they’ve achieved, and running across them out in the world ‘doing their thing’ while I’m doing mine.”33 What she describes here is actually a special kind of social presence: a presence enhanced by sharing goals and engaging in the same activities. The players can recognize each other because they have a common understanding of what they’re doing and why. Their actions are intelligible and meaningful to each other. (loc: 1526-36)

To participate wholeheartedly in something means to be self-motivated and self-directed, intensely interested and genuinely enthusiastic. (loc: 2058-59)

If we’re forced to do something, or if we do it halfheartedly, we’re not really participating.   If we don’t care how it all turns out, we’re not really participating.   If we’re passively waiting it out, we’re not really participating. (loc: 2060-63)

alternate realities are the antiescapist game. (loc: 2077-78)

Increasingly, some education innovators, including Prensky, are calling for a more dramatic kind of game-based reform. Their ideal school doesn’t use games to teach students. Their ideal school is a game, from start to finish: every course, every activity, every assignment, every moment of instruction and assessment would be designed by borrowing key mechanics and participation strategies from the most engaging multiplayer games. And it’s not just an idea—the game-reform movement is well under way. And there’s already one new public school entirely dedicated to offering an alternate reality to students who want to game their way through to graduation. Quest to Learn is a public charter school in New York City for students in grades six through twelve. It’s the first game-based school in the world—but its founders hope it will serve as a model for schools worldwide. (loc: 2133-40)

9:00 a.m. In English class, Rai isn’t trying to earn a good grade today. Instead, she’s trying to level up. She’s working her way through a storytelling unit, and she already has five points. That makes her just seven points shy of a “master” storyteller status. She’s hoping to add another point to her total today by completing a creative writing mission. She might not be the first student in her class to become a storytelling master, but she doesn’t have to worry about missing her opportunity. As long as she’s willing to tackle more quests, she can work her way up to the top level and earn her equivalent of an A grade. Leveling up is a much more egalitarian model of success than a traditional letter grading system based on the bell curve. Everyone can level up, as long as they keep working hard. Leveling up can replace or complement traditional letter grades that students have just one shot at earning. And if you fail a quest, there’s no permanent damage done to your report card. You just have to try more quests to earn enough points to get the score you want. This system of “grading” replaces negative stress with positive stress, helping students focus more on learning and less on performing. (loc: 2157-66)

11:45 a.m. Rai logs on to a school computer to update her profile in the “expertise exchange,” where all the students advertise their learning superpowers. She’s going to declare herself a master at mapmaking. She didn’t even realize mapmaking could count as an area of expertise. She does it for fun, outside of school, making maps of her favorite 3D virtual worlds to help other players navigate them better. Her geography teacher, Mr. Smiley, saw one of her maps and told her that eighth-graders were just about to start a group quest to locate “hidden histories” of Africa: they would look for clues about the past in everyday objects like trade beads, tapestries, and pots. They would need a good digital mapmaker to help them plot the stories about the objects according to where they were found, and to design a map that would be fun for other students to explore. The expertise exchange works just like video game social network profiles that advertise what games you’re good at and like to play, as well as the online matchmaking systems that help players find new teammates. These systems are designed to encourage and facilitate collaboration. By identifying your strengths and interests publicly, you increase the chances that you’ll be called on to do work that you’re good at. In the classroom, this means students are more likely to find ways to contribute successfully to team projects. And the chance to do something you’re good at as part of a larger project helps students build real esteem among their peers—not empty self-esteem based on nothing other than wanting to feel good about yourself, but actual respect and high regard based on contributions you’ve made. (loc: 2166-78)

As the Quest website explains, boss levels are “two-week ‘intensive’ [units] where students apply knowledge and skills to date to propose solutions to complex problems.” “Boss level” is a term taken directly from video games. In a boss level, you face a boss monster (or some equivalent thereof)—a monster so intimidating it requires you to draw on everything you’ve learned and mastered in the game so far. It’s the equivalent of a midterm or final exam. Boss levels are notoriously hard but immensely satisfying to beat. Quest schedules boss levels at various points in the school year, in order to fire students up about putting their lessons into action. Students get to tackle an epic challenge—and there’s no shame in failing. It’s a boss level, and so, just like any good game, it’s meant to whet your appetite to try harder and practice more. Like collaborative quests, the boss levels are tackled in teams, and each student must qualify to play a particular role—“mathematical specialist,” for example. Just as in a big World of Warcraft raid, each participant is expected to play to his or her strengths. This is one of Quest’s key strategies for giving students better hopes of success. Beyond the basic core curriculum, students spend most of their time getting better at subjects and activities—ones they have a natural talent for or already know how to do well. This strategy means every student is set up to truly excel at something, and to focus attention on the areas in which he or she is most likely to one day become extraordinary. (loc: 2183-94)

should we focus on what we do well (loc: 2194)

6:00 p.m. Rai is at home, interacting with a virtual character named Betty. Rai’s goal is to teach Betty how to divide mixed numbers. Betty is what Quest calls a “teachable agent”: “an assessment tool where kids teach a digital character how to solve a particular problem.” In other words, Betty is a software program designed to know less than Rai. And it’s Rai’s job to “teach” the program, by demonstrating solutions and working patiently with Betty until she gets it. At Quest, these teachable agents replace quizzes, easing the anxiety associated with having to perform under pressure. With a teachable agent, you’re not being tested to see if you’ve really learned something. Instead, you’re mentoring someone because you really have learned something, and this is your chance to show it. There’s a powerful element of naches—vicarious pride—involved here: the more a student learns, the more he or she can pass it on. This is a core dynamic of how learning works in good video games, and at Quest it’s perfectly translated into a scalable assessment system. Secret missions, boss levels, expertise exchanges, special agents, points, and levels instead of letter grades—there’s no doubt that Quest to Learn is a different kind of learning environment, about as radically different a mission as any charter school has set out in recent memory. It’s an unprecedented infusion of gamefulness into the public school system. And the result is a learning environment where students get to share secret knowledge, turn their intellectual strengths into superpowers, tackle epic challenges, and fail without fear. (loc: 2195-2206)

THE THREE GAMES discussed in this chapter represent three of the main approaches to developing an alternate reality and solving a quality-of-life problem. Chore Wars is an example of a life-management ARG—a software program or service that helps you manage your real life like a game.   Quest to Learn is an example of an organizational ARG. It uses game design as a guiding philosophy for creating new institutions and inventing new organizational practices.   And SuperBetter is a concept ARG. It uses social media and networking tools to virally spread new game ideas, missions, and rule sets, which players can repurpose and adapt for their own lives as they see fit. (loc: 2366-73)

live event ARGs, which gather players at physical locations for a game that takes only an hour or a day to play, and narrative ARGs, which use multimedia storytelling—video, text, photographs, audio, and even graphic novels—to weave real-world game missions into a compelling fiction that plays out over weeks, months, or even years. (loc: 2375-77)

The New Games Book includes instructions for how to play the new sports and, more importantly, essays explaining the philosophy of the movement. Many of my friends in the industry have acknowledged they’ve flipped through its pages for game-design inspiration. I’ve nearly worn the print off the page of my favorite essay in the book. It’s called “Creating the Play Community,” by Bernie DeKoven, then the codirector of the New Games Foundation and today a leading play theorist. In the essay, DeKoven calls for a community of players to volunteer to be of service to the movement. He asks: Who will be willing to try these new games and help assess whether they are, in fact, better than the old games? If they are better, the community should teach others how to play. If they’re not better, the players should suggest ways to improve them, or start inventing their own new games to test. He explains: Because the games are new, we get a sense that we’re experimenting. No one guarantees anything. If a game doesn’t work, we try to fix it, to see if we can make it work. After all, it’s a new game. It’s not official yet. In fact, we’re the officials, all of us, every one of us who has come to play. We make the judgments. We each take the responsibility for discovering what we can enjoy together.10 (loc: 2395-2405)

But what about activities that we already enjoy? Can games motivate us to make a better effort, even when we already love what we’re doing? Trying to improve an already enjoyable activity by adding points, levels, and achievements has its risks. Economists have demonstrated that offering people an extrinsic reward (like money or prizes) for something they’re already doing—and already enjoying—actually makes them feel less motivated and less rewarded. But game points and achievements don’t have extrinsic value yet—so as long as the main prize is glory, bragging rights, and personal fiero, the danger of devaluing a pleasurable experience with game feedback is relatively low. But it’s not nonexistent. Like money or prizes, the opportunity to earn points and level up could potentially distract us from the initial reasons we like to do an activity. Clearly, we have to be thoughtful about where and when we apply game-like feedback systems. If everything in life becomes about tackling harder challenges, scoring more points, and reaching higher levels, we run the risk of becoming too focused on the gratifications of positive feedback. And the last thing we want is to lose our ability to enjoy an activity for its own sake. So why risk it at all? Because measuring our efforts with gamelike feedback systems makes it easier for us to get better at any effort we undertake. As the great nineteenth-century mathematical physicist Lord Kelvin famously said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” We need real-time data to understand our performance: are we getting better or worse? And we can use quantitative benchmarks—specific, numerical goals we want to achieve—to focus our efforts and motivate us to try harder. Real-time data and quantitative benchmarks are the reason why gamers get consistently better at virtually any game they play: their performance is consistently measured and reflected back to them, with advancing progress bars, points, levels, and achievements. It’s easy for players to see exactly how and when they’re making progress. This kind of instantaneous, positive feedback drives players to try harder and to succeed at more difficult challenges. That’s why it’s worth considering making things we already love more gamelike. It can make us better at them, and help us set our sights higher. (loc: 2605-23)

four square as a way to make introverts getout of the house more (loc: 2774)

some kind of reward system for cscl intro that is more built in and more automatic (loc: 2775)

In order to turn a group of strangers into a community, you have to follow two basic steps: first, cultivate a shared interest among strangers, and, second, give them the opportunity and means to interact with each other around that interest. That’s exactly what a good multiplayer game does best. It focuses the attention of a group of people on a common goal, even if they think they have nothing in common with each other. And it gives them the means and motivation to pursue that goal, even if they had no intention of interacting with each other previously. Does a game community among strangers last? Not always. Sometimes it lasts only as long as the game itself. The players might never see or talk to each other again. And that’s perfectly okay. We often tend to think of communities as best when they’re long-term and stable, and certainly the strength of a community can grow over time. But communities can also confer real benefits even when they last for mere days, hours, or even minutes. (loc: 2854-61)

like when a train breaks down (loc: 2861)

does reading in my system make it feel more like a game .. knowing that notes will be shared. planning to blog about it. (loc: 2862)

a game that encourages young people to call older ones to find common experiences. something similar for cscl course. skype with another member abt article for points... competition between courses for community spirit. or sub groups of same course. include incentive to produce artefact visit others review etc. check out d hickey. gamify similar to scripting jigsaw etc (loc: 2971)

Our team spent the better part of a summer brainstorming potential concepts for a game to help bridge the generation gap more gamefully, and as part of that process I personally spent quite a lot of time on the phone with two important seniors in my life: my grandfather Herb, who was ninety-two years old that summer, and my husband’s grandmother Bettie, who was eighty-seven. I was doing “user research” with them, figuring out what kind of game-play might be fun and easy to grasp quickly—particularly for older people who are not used to playing computer games—as well as to figure out the best way to get them to interact with the game technologies. It was immensely rewarding to spend so much time on the phone with them. Phones were, of course, a familiar technology for both parties, easy for all concerned to access and use anytime. Talking on the phone was so rewarding and easy, in fact, that it eventually became obvious that giving young people a fun reason to call seniors on the phone should be the objective of our game. But how do you build a computer game around making a phone call? We decided that we would make the game for two players at a time, since phone calls are most satisfying between two parties. The only rule? The players should be at least twenty years apart in age. Both players would need to be on the phone, of course, but since seniors are less likely to have constant access to a personal computer, we decided that only one of the two players should need to be in front of a computer. That player would log in to the game website, then call the other player. We called the game Bounce, after the kind of exchanges we hoped to inspire: a quick, easy bouncing of life stories off each other. The website prompts the players with collaborative interview questions: What’s a body of water you’ve both swum in? What’s a book you’ve both recommended to a friend? What’s an experience that has made both of you nervous? The challenge is to discover a single answer for each question that is true for both players. Answers could include, for example, “We’ve both swum in the Pacific Ocean” or “We’ve both been nervous going on a first date.” When you come up with a shared answer, one player types it into the game database. You have ten minutes to answer up to ten different questions total from the database of one hundred possible questions, and you can pass on any question. The game website counts down the ten minutes and reveals your score at the end. (loc: 2960-78)

Our prototype was highly successful. Nearly everyone who played once came back (or called back) to play again, and the senior players reported much higher moods after playing the game. The simple fact that they were described as “senior experience agents” in the game seemed to play an important role in their enjoyment. It set a playful tone and gave them confidence that they could participate. But perhaps the most successful design element was the score, which was both a number—your total answers out of a possible ten—and a poem. We wanted both players to leave feeling like they had not only talked to each other, but created something together. So at the end of the game, the website turned the players’ answers into a simple, free-verse poem. Players could print the poem out or e-mail it. Poems are also captured and viewable online. Here’s an example of one of the free-verse poems that two players created as their final score together: Rougemont, making wedding pictures, tango in a barn, Bend paper clips, cinnamon buns, tongue of a cow, In a skirt, in the Pacific, putting together a darkroom. (loc: 2991-3000)

an excuse to interact w a stranger. overcome barrier. i dont want to talk to anyone who wants to talk to me. also time limit makes it much less threatening. visiting a stranger in northern norway. (loc: 3004)

Shout compliments at strangers on the sidewalk. Play poker in a cemetery. Dance without moving your feet. Maybe these aren’t exactly your typical doctor’s orders. In fact, I’m pretty sure no psychologist has ever prescribed these activities. But each of these three unusual instructions is directly inspired by practical recommendations taken straight from positive-psychology manuals. For example: • Practice random acts of kindness twice a week. (The reward center of the brain experiences a stronger “dopamine hit” when we make someone else smile than when we smile first.) • Think about death for five minutes every day. (Researchers suggest that we can induce a mellow, grateful physiological state known as “posttraumatic bliss” that helps us appreciate the present moment and savor our lives more.) • Dance more. (Synchronizing physical behavior to music we like is one of the most reliable—not to mention the safest—ways to induce the form of extreme happiness known as euphoria.) (loc: 3021-30)

sounds almost situationist (loc: 3030)

These three guidelines represent some of the most commonly prescribed happiness activities today; the first set of instructions just offers more gameful interpretations of them. What, exactly, are happiness activities? They’re like the daily multivitamins of positive psychology: they’ve been clinically tested and proven to boost our well-being in small doses, and they’re designed to fit easily into our everyday lives. There are dozens of different happiness activities in the scientific literature to choose from in addition to the three listed above, ranging from expressing our gratitude to someone daily to making a list of “bright-side” benefits whenever we experience a negative life event. And they all have one thing in common: they are backed by multiple million-dollar-plus research studies, which have conclusively demonstrated that virtually anybody who adopts one as a regular habit will get happier. (loc: 3031-37)

she discovered that despite their incontrovertible effectiveness, many people resist even trying them. The most common complaint, according to Lyubomirsky? Happiness activities sound “corny,” “sentimental,” or Pollyannaish.4 “Such reactions are authentic, and I can’t dispute them,” Lyubomirsky admits.5 We instinctively resist activities that feel forced and inauthentic, and many people are deeply suspicious of unadulterated feel-goodness. Shouldn’t expressions of gratitude be spontaneous, not scheduled? Isn’t it naive to constantly look for silver linings? What if I just plain don’t feel like making a gesture of kindness today? When it comes to doing good and feeling good, we seem to think it’s more “real” if we wait for inspiration to strike, rather than committing to doing it whether we “feel like it” or not. On top of that, there’s just plain suspicion and skepticism of these unabashedly positive activities. There’s an undeniable tendency toward irony, cynicism, and detachment in popular culture today, and throwing ourselves into happiness activities just doesn’t fit that emotional climate. (loc: 3054-63)

Happiness hacking is the experimental design practice of translating positive-psychology research findings into game mechanics. It’s a way to make happiness activities feel significantly less hokey, and to put them in a bigger social context. Game mechanics also allow you to escalate the difficulty of happiness activities and inject them with novelty, so they stay challenging and fresh. When I design games today, I always embed at least one proven happiness activity into the game mechanics—and sometimes I invent games based entirely on a handful of new research findings. It’s my way of enacting the tenth fix for reality: FIX #10: HAPPINESS HACKS Compared with games, reality is hard to swallow. Games make it easier to take good advice and try out happier habits. (loc: 3116-23)

HAPPINESS HACK # 1 : UNLOCKING THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS The two most frequently recommended happiness activities across the scientific literature are to express gratitude and practice acts of kindness. Recent research has shown that we don’t even have to know someone to experience the benefits of thanking and being nice to them. Even fleeting acts of gratitude and kindness toward strangers can have a profound impact on our happiness. And positive gestures from strangers can make a big difference in how rich and satisfying our everyday lives feel. Sociologists call the positive relationships we have with strangers “transitory public sociality.” We experience it in all kinds of public places: sidewalks, parks, trains, restaurants, stadiums, and coffee shops, for example. These transitory social interactions, when they happen, are usually brief and anonymous: we catch another’s eye, we smile, we make room for someone else, we pick up something someone has dropped, we go on our way. But these brief encounters, taken cumulatively, have an aggregate impact on our mood over time. Researchers have shown that sharing the same space for even just a few minutes a day with kind and friendly strangers makes us more optimistic, improves our self-esteem, makes us feel safer and more connected to our environment, and generally helps us enjoy our lives more.12 And if we return the favor, we benefit as well: when we give to others, or act cooperatively, the reward centers of the brain light up.13 But strangers aren’t always inclined to be friendly to each other—and some researchers believe our shared spaces are becoming less friendly over time. Dacher Keltner has devised a simple way to test this theory: a mathematical method for measuring the social well-being of any shared environment. It’s called the “jen ratio,” from the ancient Chinese word for human kindness. It compares the total positive interactions between strangers to the total negative interactions, in a given period of time and in a given place.14 The higher the ratio, the better the social well-being of the space and the happier you’re likely to feel after spending time in it. The lower the ratio, the poorer the social well-being, and the unhappier you’ll be if you spend too much time there. To measure the jen ratio of a space, you simply watch it very closely for a fixed period of time—say, one hour. You count up all the positive and negative microinteractions between strangers, keeping track of two different totals: how many times people smile or act kindly toward each other, and how many times people act unfriendly, rude, or openly uninterested. All the positive microinteractions—such as big smiles, a hearty thank-you, a door being held open, a concerned question—get tallied on the left side of the ratio. All the negative microinteractions—a sarcastic comment, an eye roll, an unexcused bump, someone cursing under their breath—get tallied on the right side. The jen ratio is a simple but powerful way to predict whether being in a particular place will make us happier or unhappier. When Keltner surveyed several years’ worth of recent research on social well-being and social spaces, he concluded, “Signs of a loss of jen in the United States are incontrovertible . . . with a jen ratio trending toward zero.”15 So how can we raise the jen ratio of everyday shared spaces? The solution is obvious, if hard to enact: we need to convince large numbers of people to do things like smile more, be more welcoming, express more gratitude, or pay more compliments. Positive psychologists, of course, have already given us this recommendation—but, as Lyubomirsky’s research shows, such recommendations rarely inspire direct individual action. Who wouldn’t feel daunted by the challenge of trying to increase the jen ratio of a big public space singlehandedly ? More likely, it would take a crowd, and not a single person, to effectively bump up the jen ratio. But there simply aren’t any well-established social traditions for going out and expressing gratitude or being kind to strangers together. As a game designer, it is clear to me that we can tackle these problems by making this behavior more challenging and social. All it needs are a few arbitrary limitations, some multiplayer obstacles, and a feedback system in order to turn unlocking the kindness of strangers into a game. So what exactly would a kindness game look like? And who would play it? These are questions I asked myself a few years ago, and, together with my good friend and fellow game developer Persuasive Games cofounder Ian Bogost, I decided to invent a game with the core mechanism of performing acts of kindness on strangers—as sneakily and stealthily as possible. It would work just like the popular college campus game Assassins, in which players are assigned targets via e-mail, and then proceed to stalk each other across campus for days or even weeks to eliminate their targets with water guns and other toy weapons. But in our version, the game would be shorter (an hour or two) and confined to a much smaller space (a few city blocks, a park, or a large public plaza). And players wouldn’t kill each other with toy weapons—they’d kill each other with kindness. Most importantly, they wouldn’t be given specific targets, so anyone nearby was fair game for a thank-you or a compliment. And instead of being eliminated from the game when “killed,” players would join forces and cooperate with each other to keep performing bigger and more spectacular acts of kindness. We called it Cruel 2 B Kind, or C2BK for short, after the famous line from Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. We debuted it in 2006 in San Francisco and New York City; it’s since been played everywhere from Detroit, Michigan, and Johannesburg, South Africa, to Stockholm, Sweden, and Sydney, Australia. Here’s how it works: Cruel 2 B Kind is a game of benevolent assassination. At the beginning of the game, you are assigned three secret weapons via e-mail or text message. To onlookers, these weapons will appear like random acts of kindness. But to other players, the friendly gestures are deadly maneuvers that will bring them to their knees. Some players will be killed by a compliment. Others will be slain by a smile. You and your partner might be taken down by a happy offer to help. You can attempt to kill anyone else who is playing the game. However, you will have no idea who else is playing the game. You will be given no information a bout your targets. No names, no photos—nothing but the guarantee that they will remain within the game boundaries during the designated playing time. Anyone you encounter could be your target. The only way to find out is to attack them with your secret weapon. Watch out: the hunter is also the hunted. Other players have been assigned the same secret weapons, and they’re coming to get you. Anything out of the ordinary you do to assassinate your targets may reveal your own secret identity to the other players who want you dead. So be cool when you attack. You don’t want to alarm innocent bystanders . . . or give away your secret identity. In many cases, you and another player will spot and attempt to kill each other at the same time! For this reason, the weapons are assigned powers according to the classic rock-paper-scissors model: a hearty welcome beats a thank-you, for example, or a killer compliment beats a wink and a smile. And if both players deploy the same weapon at the same time? It’s a standoff—you turn and run in the opposite direction, and both players must wait thirty seconds before attacking again. As targets are successfully assassinated, the dead players join forces with their killers to continue stalking the surviving players. The teams grow bigger and bigger until two final mobs of benevolent assassins descend upon each other for a spectacular, climactic kill. Will innocents be caught in the cross fire? Oh, yes. But when your secret weapon is a random act of kindness, it’s only cruel to be kind to other players … (loc: 3124-87)

C2BK also produces adrenaline. Paying a compliment becomes an act of courage: you have to work up your nerve to overcome the social norms of ignoring strangers, and you have to do it as quickly as possible, because every second that passes is a second that another player could be targeting you. C2BK also has more pronounced fiero moments. Players and teams let out big hollers and cheers when they’ve made a successful kill, and the fiero moment is intensified by the number of misfires you’ve made on the way. My rough estimate from observing several games is that C2BK participants attack on average five times as many nonplayers as players. (loc: 3225-29)

According to cemetery industry statistics, the average grave receives just two visits in its lifetime—total, by any friend or family member—after the initial flurry of visits that immediately follows the burial. (loc: 3323-24)

In The Happiness Myth, happiness historian Jennifer Michael Hecht devotes an entire chapter to “the age-old advice to remember death, to keep it in the forefront of our minds for the sake of bettering the life we lead now.”21 She traces the idea all the way back to Plato, who advised students to “practice regular meditation upon death,” and to Buddha, who said, “Of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.” Even Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher best known for encouraging followers to seek simple pleasures, put death at the center of his vision of happiness, arguing that it is only when we shake free our fear of death that we can truly enjoy life. According to Hecht, since ancient times meditations on death have served the same purpose: to replace fear and anxiety with a kind of calm, mellow gratitude for the life that we’re given. And today, these traditions have the backing of contemporary science. Positive psychologists have found that grappling with the reality of death forces a kind of mental shift that helps us savor the present and focus our attention on the intrinsic goals that matter most to us. Hecht has coined a term for this realignment of priority and attention: posttraumatic bliss. “There are feelings in this life—good and bad—that cannot be conquered by intellect or force of will,” she writes. “Almost dying can realign you in a way that is the positive incarnation of trauma: posttraumatic bliss.”22 (loc: 3350-61)

Perhaps more than any other project I’ve worked on, Tombstone Hold ’Em has demonstrated one of the most vital powers of gameplay: it gives us explicit permission to do things differently. We are accustomed to being asked to behave and think unconventionally in a game. We’re used to being creative and playing outside of social norms when we’re inside the socially safe “magic circle” of a game. And the more people who come together to play an unconventional game like Tombstone Hold ’Em, the safer it feels. A crowd carries the social authority to redefine norms. (loc: 3405-9)

The heart of the TSDO experience is the never-ending list of potential dance quests, each of which adds a unique, unnecessary obstacle to dancing. By putting an obstacle in your way, TSDO makes it much harder to be self-conscious about dancing: you’re focused on completing the challenge, not necessarily on how you look. It also gives you permission to dance badly, by restricting “normal” ways of dancing. The first dance quest—to dance without moving your feet—is a perfect example of this design strategy in action: it automatically rules out pretty much any kind of traditional or obvious dancing. Excelling at stationary dancing requires silliness, creativity, or just plain enthusiasm—not necessarily grace, sexiness, strength, or whatever else we might associate with natural dance talent. (loc: 3485-91)

WHETHER WE’RE KILLING each other with kindness, turning tombstones into full houses, or dancing in disguise, there’s no way around it: sometimes we have to sneak up on our happiness. Two hundred years ago, the British political philosopher John Stuart Mill suggested a subversive approach to self-help. It’s an approach that has much in common with the growing community of happiness hackers. Mill argued that while happiness might be our primary goal, we can’t pursue it directly. It’s too tricky, too hard to pin down, too easy to scare off. So we have to set other, more concrete goals, and in the pursuit of those goals, we capture happiness as a kind of by-product. He called this approaching happiness “sideways, like a crab.”30 We can’t let it know we’re coming. We just kind of sneak up on it from the side. That’s exactly what happiness hacks are designed to help us do: approach happiness sideways, and as a group. In fact, with crowd games, it might be more accurate to say that hacks let us encircle happiness—we’re all sneaking up on it from different angles together. We play these crowd games because we enjoy them in the moment and because we crave the social connectivity of a multiplayer experience. But a few intense and memorable exposures to a happiness hack can shift our ways of thinking and acting in the long run, about things as diverse as kindness to strangers, dancing, and death. And if you get enough people to shift in one place, you really can change the larger culture. The best part about happiness hacks is that it doesn’t take a lot of technological know-how or sophisticated development to create one that works. It just takes a good understanding of how games motivate, reward, and connect us. With the creativity to invent some unnecessary obstacles and the courage to playtest them with as many people as possible, anyone can dream up and share new solutions to the happiness challenges of everyday life. Alternate reality games of all kinds are designed to make us better: happier, more creative, and more emotionally resilient. When we are better in these ways, we are able to engage with the real world more wholeheartedly—to wake up each day with a stronger sense of purpose, optimism, community, and meaning in our lives. (loc: 3537-54)

the Guardian launched Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, the world’s first massively multiplayer investigative journalism project. HOW (loc: 3590-92)

The Foldit team is well on its way to doing just that. In the August 2010 issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, the team declared its first significant breakthrough: In a series of ten challenges, gamers beat the world’s most sophisticated protein-folding algorithms five times, and drew even three times. The authors concluded that gamer intuition can successfully compete with supercomputers—especially when the problems being solved require taking radical, creative risks.24 Most notably, the Nature study wasn’t just about the Foldit players; it was by the Foldit players. More than 57,000 gamers were listed as official coauthors alongside Popović and his university colleagues.25 (loc: 3942-48)

The Extraordinaries is a Web and mobile phone application designed to help you do good in your spare time, wherever you happen to be. Created by a team of San Francisco-based designers, entrepreneurs, and activists, its primary objective is to make being heroic in the real world as easy as being heroic in a virtual world. The game’s motto is “Got two minutes? Be extraordinary!” Players can log in to the game from wherever they are and browse a list of “microvolunteer” missions that they can start and finish in literally just a few minutes. Each mission helps a real nonprofit organization accomplish one of its goals. (loc: 4065-70)

What happens next? If Tom’s defibrillator does help save a life, he’ll know. The First Aid Corps updates its global map with links to news stories about each defibrillator’s usage. If “Live Saved” pops up next to your AED location, then you know that the AED you found really has helped save the day. Right now, it’s up to players to proactively check the status of their AEDs. But it’s easy to imagine a platform like The Extraordinaries evolving to push updates directly to players via text message or social network update whenever their small act of good helps accomplish something bigger. In that case, the small yet epic win of discovering and sharing a defibrillator’s location could lead to an even bigger epic win down the road. (loc: 4100-4105)

A woman was at a dance rehearsal in a basement somewhere in Boston. She was completely exhausted, she couldn’t leave rehearsal, and she was dying for a latte so she could keep dancing. That’s the wish she posted on Groundcrew: “Help. I need a latte.” At this exact moment, someone else in Boston is watching the system. He sees her wish. And he realizes he’s only a few blocks away from the dancer. It feels like fate. He can do this! He knows how to order a latte! He can save the day! Five minutes later, he walks into the basement and declares, “I have a latte!” as if it were the most important thing in the world. And it is the most important thing in the world, at that minute, to that dancer! She is overjoyed. She says it’s the best latte she’s ever had. He feels like a superhero. All of this all transpires within a few minutes of the wish alert.9 (loc: 4187-93)

All Spore gameplay is single-player: an individual controls all the simulation details and conducts all the fighting, mating, crafting, and exploring alone. There are no other players in the simulated ecosystem; everything in the world is controlled by artificial intelligence. So what makes it massively single-player, as opposed to simply single-player? A very large percentage of the content in each player’s game world—the other creatures you encounter and the civilizations you visit—has been created by other players who have contributed them to the online Sporepedia, a massive database of ecosystem content. When you play Spore online, your computer checks the Sporepedia for new and interesting content and downloads it into your personal Spore ecosystem, making your game world a mix of your own original contributions and those of many, many others. Although there is no direct interaction with other players, you indirectly collaborate with each other to invent the Spore universe. You can randomly populate your world with other players’ creations, or you can handpick creations you like from the Sporepedia. You can even subscribe to a Sporecast, which will automatically update your game world with new content created by your friends or favorite players. Players use Sporepedia and the Spore forums and wikis to learn what other players are making and to improve their own creation techniques. They don’t collaborate in the real-time gameplay, but ultimately the world that players help design is a collaborative product: a unique combination of each player’s own creations mingled with content from hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other players, depending on how far they get in the game and how much content they choose to download. A massively single-player game like Spore suggests that epic contexts combined with collaborative production tools and sophisticated content-sharing platforms can create opportunities for what we might call lightweight, asynchronous collaboration. It’s less immediately interactive, but it can still produce extreme-scale results. So far, Spore players from more than thirty countries have created and shared more than 144 million ecosystem objects, from creatures to buildings to space-faring vehicles. (loc: 4487-4504)

In my research at the Institute for the Future, I’ve developed a model of how someone with collaboration superpowers works. It involves three key new skills and abilities. Extraordinary collaborators are extremely extroverted or outgoing in a network environment—even if they’re introverted or shy in face-to-face settings. They have what I call a high ping quotient, or high PQ. (In tech speak, a “ping” is a computer network tool that sends a message from one computer to another in order to check whether it is reachable and active. If it is, it will send back the message “pong,” thus establishing an active line of communication.) Extraordinary collaborators have no qualms about pinging—or reaching out via electronic means—to others to ask for their participation. They’re also highly likely to pong back when other people ping them. That’s what makes a high ping quotient a form of social capital. Of course, it helps to have a good sensibility about who to ping when. (Otherwise, you become a participation spammer.) That’s why extraordinary collaborators develop a kind of internal collaboration radar, or sixth sense, about who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission. This sixth sense comes from building up a very strong social network and maintaining a kind of peripheral awareness of what other people are doing, where they are, and what they’re getting good at. And it’s not just an internal system: collaboration radar is often augmented with “ambient information systems,” like Twitter lists, the Xbox 360 friends dashboard, or the Groundcrew volunteer availability system. The stronger your collaboration radar, the faster you can leverage individuals’ abilities toward the right effort. Finally, the most extraordinary collaborators in the world exercise a superpower I call emergensight. It’s the ability to thrive in a chaotic collaborative environment. The bigger and more distributed a collaborative effort gets, the more likely it is to become both chaotic and hard to predict. We know this from physics and systems theory: bigger isn’t more; it’s different. That’s the principle of emergence. It’s impossible to predict what will happen at scale until you get there, and it’s likely to be vastly more complex than you expected. Of course, with increased complexity comes increased potential for chaos. (loc: 4528-46)

For me, it was an opportunity to create a world-class global collaboratory. That’s why every element of The Lost Ring was designed to challenge players to practice extraordinary cooperation, coordination, and cocreation. To inspire global cooperation, we used the strategy of massively distributing game content in different languages, on localized Web communities, and across far-flung real-world geographic locations in order to make it impossible for any single country, let alone a single player, to experience the game alone. Key online game clues were hidden on regional websites and social networks—for example, the social network Hi5, which is popular in Argentina; the video-sharing site 6rooms, which is popular in China; and Skyrock, a popular blogging community in France. And, of course, physical game objects were hidden in virtually every corner of the world. None of these clues or objects was redundant; each added an important piece of information to the history of the lost sport. Players therefore needed to work together to collect everything and translate it for other players. To do so, they had to radically expand their collaboration horizons, pinging their way through multiple levels of extended social networks to find people capable of showing up at the right place and the right time, or translating one language into another, so someone else could accomplish the next step in the chain that would lead them to their goal. We also adopted the strategy of telling what gamers call a “chaotic story.”8 Instead of presenting players with a single means of consuming the game story, we broke it into thousands of pieces like a jigsaw puzzle and then diffused it across many different media platforms: podcasts and blog posts; videos and online photographs; e-mails and Twitter posts from game characters; even live instant message conversations and face-to-face interactions with characters portrayed by “game masters.” This kind of chaotic storytelling mode forces players to actively make sense of the game content for themselves and for each other, using collective intelligence skills and collaborative authoring platforms. Until players put a chaotic story together, it doesn’t really exist—it’s just a web of evidence, the raw materials for a story. It’s up to the players to do the actual final storytelling, which typically occurs on a wiki that ultimately represents an “official” story of the game. In the case of The Lost Ring, the players pieced together the chaotic story and worked through the translation challenges primarily on a special Find the Lost Ring wiki they created. By the end of the game, it contained a total of 730 audio, video, and image files, as well as 943 articles—all created by players. The site’s user-created pages included the Timeline, a detailed record of every major discovery and event during the six-month game; the Codex, a compilation of high-resolution scans of the twenty-seven manuscript pages found around the world, accompanied by their translation into nine additional languages; and Labyrinth Training Reports, where best times, videos, and other details of significant training events were recorded. Of course, beyond the chaotic storytelling, the lost sport itself was designed to require intense collaboration. The rules of the game were cooperative—and they ensured that players would train locally as a team to improve their collective performance as a group, as opposed to competing locally with other athletes. For teams who became good at the game, the synchronized movement would provide a collective experience of flow similar to group dancing. And as in all of my live-action games, I snuck in some oxytocin-releasing touch—the wall members joining hands or gripping each other’s shoulders—in order to strengthen the players’ cooperative bonds. By making the human labyrinth together, they would be engaged in cocreating a peak experience. But beyond the rules of the sport, what really required intense cooperative effort and coordination was the simple fact that no one had ever played this human labyrinth sport before. No one would know the rules and no one would be any good at it yet. Together, the participants would have to bootstrap their way to mastering the sport. They would have to work together as a global network to discover—to invent—the ins and outs of the sport for the very first time, to teach each other their best tricks, and to spread the secrets of the game online to as many people as possible. Players started scheduling their training sessions to maximize the number of time zones that could participate at the same time in normal waking hours. They spontaneously decided to stream video of their training sessions live via cell phone networks so that other cities’ teams could watch and learn. These were extraordinary acts of coordination. Finally, mass collaboration works only when everyone in the “mass” has something useful to contribute. Everyone needs to be given an opportunity to contribute from a position of personal strength—who they are and what they do best. So as I developed The Lost Ring as a collaboratory, one of my primary goals was to pioneer a system for helping players identify their own signature strengths, in order to help guide them to the kinds of contributions they could most effectively make in the game. That’s why one of the centerpieces of the Lost Ring Codex was the legend of six ancient strengths, each named for an ancient Greek virtue, and each describing a distinctive way of contributing value to a group: • Sofia: I bring wisdom, creativity, and cleverness to our mission. I am one of the knowledge seekers. • Thumos: I bring courage, energy, and determination to our mission. I am one of the adventurers. • Chariton: I bring heart, humanity, and charm to our mission. I am one of the connectors. • Dikaiosune: I bring leadership, direction, and focus to our mission. I am one of the pilots. • Sophrosune: I bring balance, self-control, and an open mind to our mission. I am one of the advisors. • Mythopoeia: I bring optimism, vision, and artistry to our mission. I am one of the truth finders. The codex included a twelve-question test to help you identify your primary and secondary signature strength. Players would choose from sets of statements the one that described them best. For example: • I am an original thinker. • I prefer to lead a life of adventure. • I enjoy helping others. And: • I like being in charge. • I am a fair and honest person. • I always see the beauty around me. (These choices respond to sofia, thumos, chariton, dikaiosune, sophrosune, and mythopoeia, respectively.) Although the game presented these six strengths as a kind of ancient lore, in fact they are drawn directly from seminal positive-psychology research. In 2004, researchers Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson published Character Strengths and Virtues, a manual with twenty-four such categories, divided into six groups: wisdom and knowledge—cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge; courage—emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal; humanity—interpersonal strengths that involve tending to and befriending others; justice—civic strengths that underlie healthy community life; temperance—strengths that protect against excess; and transcendence—strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning.9 Together with the Values in Action (VIA) Institute on Character, Seligman and Peterson devised a 240-question inventory for measuring the positive emotional strengths that contribute to our success and well-being in life.10 The goal of the inventory is “to help people evolve toward their highest potential,” and it’s the most scientifically validated test of personal character in the world. Yet many people have never heard of it, let alone taken it. (loc: 4669-4735)

Once they had completed the ancient-strengths test and had determined their primary and secondary strengths, players were invited to post strength badges on their social network pages, declaring, for example, “I am Sofia,” with a description of what that meant. These badges became a visual cue for other players to start keeping track of others’ strengths—in other words, they were building up their collaboration radar. Eli Hunt and other game characters then began giving players game missions based on their strengths: for example, the brainy sofia players were challenged to research little-known facts about other games that really had been banned from the ancient Olympics, while the adventurous thumos players were given the task of going out into the real world to hunt down the physical artifacts, and the highly social chariton players were encouraged to be the social engineers of the game and figure out how to extend the social network of the Lost Ring community. Even the lost sport itself had special roles for every kind of strength to play: • Sofia: You are the best engineers. Study the labyrinth plans—and arrive early to design and build the labyrinth. • Thumos: You make the fastest runners. Get blindfolded and go for it! • Chariton: You are the best coaches. Cheer on your team and trash-talk others. • Dikaiosune: You make the best captains. Keep your team strong and focused on getting faster. Keep your wall coordinated and working together! • Sophrosune: You make the best referees. Make sure everyone follows the rules. Keep time of the best scores. • Mythopoeia: You tell the best stories. Take film and video of the game! And spread news of the best times from other cities—help your local team keep up-to-date on how the rest of the world is training. (loc: 4741-56)

We’ve learned that a good game is simply an unnecessary obstacle—and that unnecessary obstacles increase self-motivation, provoke interest and creativity, and help us work at the very edge of our abilities (Fix #1: Tackle unnecessary obstacles). We’ve learned that gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression: it’s an invigorating rush of activity, combined with an optimistic sense of our own capability (Fix #2: Activate extreme positive emotions). That’s why games can put us in a positive mood when everything else fails—when we’re angry, when we’re bored, when we’re anxious, when we’re lonely, when we’re hopeless, or when we’re aimless. We’ve discovered how game designers help us achieve a state of blissful productivity: with clear, actionable goals and vivid results (Fix #3: Do more satisfying work). We’ve seen how games make failure fun and train us to focus our time and energy on truly attainable goals (Fix #4: Find better hope of success ). We’ve seen how they build up our social stamina and provoke us to act in ways that make us more likeable (Fix #5: Strengthen your social connectivity) , and how they make our hardest efforts feel truly meaningful, by putting them in a much bigger context (Fix #6: Immerse yourself in epic scale). If we want to keep learning about how to improve our real quality of life, we need to continue mining the commercial game industry for these kinds of insights. The industry has consistently proven itself, and it will continue to be, our single best research laboratory for discovering new ways to reliably and efficiently engineer optimal human happiness. WE’VE ALSO EXPLORED how alternate reality games are reinventing our real-life experience of everything from commercial flying to public education, from health care to housework, from our fitness routines to our social lives. We’ve seen how these games can help us enjoy our real lives more, instead of feeling like we want to escape from them (Fix #7: Participate wholeheartedly wherever, whenever we can). We’ve considered how points, levels, and achievements can motivate us to get through the toughest situations and inspire us to work harder to excel at things we already love (Fix #8: Seek meaning ful rewards for making a better effort). We’ve looked at how games can be a springboard for community and build our capacity for social participation, connecting us in spaces as diverse as museums, senior centers, and busy city sidewalks (Fix #9: Have more fun with strangers). We’ve even looked at ways that big crowd games can make it easier for us to adopt scientific advice for living a good life—to think about death every day, for example, or to dance more (Fix #10: Invent and adopt new happiness hacks). These early alternate realities may not represent full, complete, or scalable solutions to the problems they’re attempting to solve. But they’re vivid demonstrations of what’s just now becoming possible. And as more and more of the world’s leading organizations and most promising start-up companies begin to test the alternate reality waters, this experimental design space will become an increasingly important wellspring of both technological and social innovation.     FINALLY, WE’VE EXPLORED how playing very big games can help save the real world—by helping to generate more participation bandwidth for our most important collective efforts. We’ve looked at crowdsourcing games that successfully engage tens of thousands of players in tackling real-world problems for free—from curing cancer to investigating political scandals (Fix #11: Contribute to a sustainable engagement economy). We’ve looked at social participation games that help players save real lives and grant real wishes, by creating real-world volunteer tasks that feel as heroic, as satisfying, and as readily achievable as online game quests (Fix #12: Seek out more epic wins). We’ve learned that young people are spending more and more time playing computer and video games—on average, ten thousand hours by the time they turn twenty-one. And we’ve learned that these ten thousand hours are just enough time to become extraordinary at the one thing all games make us good at: cooperating, coordinating, and creating something new together (Fix #13: Spend ten thousand hours collaborating). And we’ve seen how forecasting games can turn ordinary people into super-empowered hopeful individuals—by training us to take a longer view, to practice ecosystems thinking, and to pilot massively multiple strategies for solving planetary-scale problems (Fix #14: Develop massively multiplayer foresight). Very big games represent the future of collaboration. They are, quite simply, the best hope we have for solving the most complex problems of our time. They are giving more people than ever before in human history the opportunity to do work that really matters, and to participate directly in changing the whole world. (loc: 5634-74)