Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (39 page)

Now let’s say I told you that I had a hundred dollars riding on your ability to reduce your overall energy usage by at least 20 percent this weekend. How hard would you try to help me win?

Finally, one more scenario. This time, I’ve got a hundred dollars riding
against
your ability to reduce your overall energy usage this weekend by 20 percent. How hard would you try to prove me wrong?

I’m not able to bet on your energy usage yet—but when the Lost Joules game launches, I will be. It’s an online stock market game that lets players make wagers (in virtual currency) on each other’s real-world energy usage. Players have a strong motivation to place good bets: if they win the bet, they’ll be able to spend the virtual currency they earn inside the Lost Joules “virtual theme park,” which will house a number of FarmVille-type games. The more energy bets you win, the more powerful and rich your Lost Joules avatar will become.

The game works with smart meters, home electricity meters that are connected to the Internet. Smart meters allow you to monitor and analyze how and where your energy is being consumed—they can even calculate exactly how much each appliance in your house is costing you. Studies have shown that having this kind of feedback makes it much easier to reduce energy consumption: on average, a smart meter user will be able to decrease his or her consumption permanently by 10 percent.
¹⁵
And that’s without friends, family, and strangers cheering you on, or trying to beat your best effort. Can you imagine how much more energy could be saved if using smart meters was turned into a good game?

Lost Joules is set to find out. The application collects personal smart-meter data from players and challenges them to achieve concrete, energy-saving missions. Then it makes that data public to other players—who will place bets on your ability to achieve energy-saving missions. If they think you can do it, they’ll bet with you—and if they doubt you, they’ll invest in someone else. The players who achieve the most missions regularly will become superstars in the Lost Joules world, generating returns not only for themselves, but also for everyone who cheers them on.

By creating a sense of urgency, presenting a clear challenge, and adding a layer of social competition, the game turns what would otherwise feel like an ordinary, mundane effort to do a bit of good into an extraordinary effort. Suddenly, turning off an appliance becomes an epic win, with multiple rewards: emotional rewards, like more fiero and better social connectivity,
and
virtual rewards, in the form of game-world currency.

It’s a very big, very new idea. Lost Joules is seeking to create a sustainable engagement economy around what is currently an unsustainable energy economy. To motivate people to consume less nonrenewable energy, it offers them the opportunity to consume completely renewable emotional and virtual rewards.

It’s also creating a new way of helping to save the world: by investing our social attention in people who are doing good. As the game’s cocreator Richard Dorsey likes to say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if every time we unplugged an appliance or flipped a switch, somebody noticed?”
¹⁶
By turning energy saving into a massively multiplayer experience, Lost Joules takes advantage of the network effect: it amplifies my private epic wins into spectacular social achievements.

Of course, many people won’t want their energy consumption to be scrutinized and wagered on by the playing public. But given the history of increasing public disclosure on the Internet—from blogs to videos to social network to real-time status updates—it’s a safe bet that the lure of being lauded in the public spotlight will attract plenty of players. And thanks to the game’s two-tier design, even people not ready to expose their own energy consumption can help drive energy-saving behavior just by making a virtual investment.

In this way, Lost Joules represents an important design innovation in the social participation game space. It’s creating two different kinds of equally important social participation tasks, for people with smart meters and people without smart meters.

First, and most obviously, players with smart meters can tackle the social participation task of reducing their energy consumption. This is the core “do-good” mission of the game. But there’s also the SPT of lavishing our attention on each other’s good acts. People who don’t have access to smart meters yet can still play the game, by making wagers on players who do have smart meters. And this is a real contribution to the common good, since it creates social rewards for the energy savers. Everyone likes to feel valued; Lost Joules uses virtual currency to help us show just how much we value the world-changing contributions of others.

So what’s the best-case-scenario outcome for a game like Lost Joules? Games are a major driver of technology adoption; people are often more willing to try new technologies when there’s a good game attached. And getting people to try smart-meter technology is increasingly important, as we try to become more informed, efficient consumers of energy. Smart meters have been proven remarkably effective at changing our energy consumption behaviors for the better. The more people who use them, the better.

In the bigger picture, the real potential of Lost Joules is to demonstrate how to make better use of the abundant emotional and virtual rewards that games provide to motivate change-the-world behavior. Right now, it’s easier and more fun to be a superhero in a video game than it is to help solve real global problems in everyday life. But social participation games like Lost Joules are starting to tip the balance: soon, we may find ourselves able to do both at the same time.

The three projects described in this chapter—The Extraordinaries, Groundcrew, and Lost Joules
—
are just starting to unfold. They are all highly speculative, still in development, with modest if any results so far. They are beyond leading edge. They’re
bleeding edge
: so new, there’s significant risk that they will fail.

In fact, there’s a very good chance some of them may even wind up being examples of an epic fail rather than an epic win. But, as any good gamer knows, failure can be both rewarding and empowering, if you learn from your mistakes. Testing our potential to do more than we thought possible brings us closer to achieving it someday. As the familiar saying goes, “Even if you fall flat on your face, you’re still moving forward.”

Epic wins, when connected to real-world causes, help us discover an ability to contribute to the common good that we didn’t know we had. They help us upset other people’s expectations of what is possible for ordinary people to accomplish in their spare time. And they help us set goals that would have seemed ludicrous—impossible—before we had so many volunteers so well equipped to help each other, and so effectively mobilized.

In short, social participation games are turning us into superheroes in our real lives.

And every superhero needs superpowers.

What kind of superpowers do we need most? Collaboration superpowers—the kind that enable us to combine forces, amplify each other’s strengths, and tackle problems at a planetary scale.

B
y the age of twenty-one, the average young American has spent somewhere between two and three thousand hours reading books—and more than
ten thousand
hours playing computer and video games.
¹
With each year after 1980 you’re born, these statistics are increasingly likely to be true.

To put that number in perspective, ten thousand hours is almost exactly the same amount of time an average American student spends in the classroom from the moment they start fifth grade all the way through high school graduation—if they have perfect attendance. In other words, as much time as they spend learning reading, writing, math, science, history, government, geography, foreign languages, art, physical education, and so on over the course of their middle school and high school careers they spend teaching themselves (and each other) to play computer and video games. And unlike their formal education, which diffuses their attention across myriad different subjects and skills, every single gaming hour is concentrated on improving at just one thing: becoming a better gamer.

With ten thousand hours under their belts by age twenty-one, most of these young people will be more than just good gamers. They’ll be
exceptionally
good gamers.

That’s because ten thousand hours of practice before the age of twenty-one, according to at least one theory, is the number one predictor of extraordinary success later in life.

Malcolm Gladwell first proposed the ten-thousand-hour theory in his best-selling book
Outliers: The Story of Success
. In
Outliers
, Gladwell reports on the life stories of high-achieving individuals, from violin virtuosos to all-star hockey players to Bill Gates, and he finds that they all have one autobiographical fact in common. By the age of twenty, the top performers in any given field had each accumulated at least ten thousand hours of practice at the one thing that eventually made them superstars. Meanwhile, the runnersup—the second tier of successful, but not extraordinarily successful, musicians, athletes, technologists, businesspeople, and so on—had on average eight thousand or fewer practice hours each.

Natural talent matters, of course, but not as much as practice and preparation. And, according to Gladwell, ten thousand hours of practice and preparation appears to be the crucial threshold, marking the difference between simply being good at something and becoming extraordinary at it.

This means that we are well on our way to creating an
entire generation
of virtuoso gamers. Every young person who achieves ten thousand hours of gaming practice will be capable of extraordinary success in gaming environments later in life.

It’s potentially an unprecedented human resource: hundreds of millions of people worldwide who are going to be exceptionally good at the same thing—whatever it is games make us good at.

Which brings us to the million-dollar question for the future: What, exactly, are gamers getting good at?

I’ve been researching that question for nearly a decade, first as a PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley and later as the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future. Over the years, it has become increasingly clear to me that gamers—especially online gamers—are exceptionally skilled at one important thing: collaboration. In fact, I believe online gamers are among the most collaborative people on earth.

Collaboration
is a special way of working together. It requires three distinct kinds of concerted effort:
cooperating
(acting purposefully toward a common goal),
coordinating
(synchronizing efforts and sharing resources), and
cocreating
(producing a novel outcome together). This third element, cocreation, is what sets collaboration apart from other collective efforts: it is a fundamentally
generative
act. Collaboration isn’t just about achieving a goal or joining forces; it’s about creating something together that it would be impossible to create alone.

You can collaborate to create just about anything: a group experience, a knowledge resource, a work of art. Increasingly, gamers are collaborating to create all of these outcomes. In fact, they’re collaborating even when they’re competing against each other to win. More and more, gamers are collaborating even when they’re playing alone.

It seems counterintuitive: how can you collaborate with someone when you’re actively opposing them? Or even harder to imagine: how on earth can you collaborate all by yourself? But in fact, online gamers are increasingly doing both, thanks to two factors: the fundamentally collaborative aspects of playing any good game, and new game technologies and design patterns that support entirely new ways of working together.

Since ancient times, gaming with others has always required making a concerted effort to collaborate. This is true of dice games, card games, chess, sports, and any other kind of multiplayer game you can think of.

Every multiplayer game begins with a cooperative agreement. Gamers agree to play by the same rules and to value the same goal. This establishes a
common ground
for working together.

Games also require us to coordinate attention and participation resources. Gamers must show up at the same time, in the same mind-set, to play together. They actively focus their attention on the game, and they agree to ignore everything else for as long as they’re playing. They practice
shared concentration
and
synchronized engagement.

Gamers depend on each other to play as hard as they can, because it’s no fun winning without a challenge. In this way, gamers foster
mutual regard
.
Out of respect for each other, they put in their best effort, and they fully expect to encounter a worthy partner or adversary.

Gamers rely on each other at all times to keep the game going, even if it’s not working out in their favor. Whenever they see a game through to completion, gamers are honing their ability to honor a
collective commitment.

Perhaps most importantly, gamers actively work together to make believe that the game truly matters. They conspire to give the game real meaning, to help each other get emotionally caught up in the act of playing, and to reap the positive rewards of playing a good game. Whether they win or lose, they’re creating
reciprocal rewards.

In short, good games don’t just happen. Gamers work to make them happen. Any time you play a game with someone else, unless you’re just trying to spoil the experience, you are actively engaged in highly coordinated,
prosocial
behavior. No one forces gamers to play by the rules, to concentrate deeply, to try their best, to stay in the game, or to act as if they care about the outcome. They do it voluntarily, for the mutual benefit of everyone playing, because it makes a better game.