Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (40 page)

This is true even in games that involve fierce competition. Consider the origins of the English word “compete”: it comes from the Latin verb
competere
, which means “to come together, to strive together” (from
com-
, or “with,” and
-petere
, meaning “to strive, seek”). To compete
against
someone still requires coming together
with them
: to strive toward the same goal, to push each other to do better, and to participate wholeheartedly in seeing the competition through to completion.

That’s why today competitive online gamers—even after they’ve been virtually beaten, bloodied, or blasted by each other—thank each other afterward by typing or saying “GG,” short for “good game.” It’s a grateful acknowledgment that, regardless of who wins or loses, everyone in a good game has tried hard, played fair, and worked together. That’s the fundamental act of collaboration at the heart of every good multiplayer game: the active and concerted creation of a positive experience. Gamers don’t just play a good game. They
make
a good game.

In fact, the ability to make a good game together has recently been identified by researchers as a distinctive human capability—indeed, perhaps
the
distinctive human capability. The developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, author of
Why We Cooperate
and codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has spent his career devising experiments to investigate what kinds of behaviors and skills set humans apart from other species. His research suggests that the ability to play complex games together, and to help others learn the rules of a game, represents the essence of what makes us human—something he calls “shared intentionality.”
²

Shared intentionality, according to Tomasello, is defined as “the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions.”
³
When we have shared intentionality, we actively identify as part of a group, we deliberately and explicitly agree on a goal, and we can understand what others expect us to do in order to work toward the goal. Tomasello’s research reveals that, in comparison with humans, other intelligent social species like chimpanzees simply do not appear to have shared intentionality. They don’t have the natural instinct and ability to focus their attention on the same object, coordinate group activity, assess and reinforce each other’s commitment to the activity, and work toward a common goal.

Without the distinctly human capacity for shared intentionality, we couldn’t collaborate; we would have no idea how to build common ground, set group goals, or take collective action. According to Tomasello, children are capable of shared intentionality at a very early age. His evidence: their natural ability to play a game with others, and their ability to recognize when someone isn’t playing the game in a way that favors the group.

In one of Tomasello’s key experiments at the Max Planck Institute, children between the ages of two and three are taught to play a new game together—either a dice game for the two-year-olds or a building-block game for the three-year-olds.
⁴
Then a puppet controlled by another experimenter joins the game and plays it incorrectly, according to its own made-up rules. Tomasello and his colleagues report that children immediately and universally object to this bad game behavior and attempt to correct the puppet, in order to keep the game successfully going—even though they haven’t been instructed to do so. This behavior was more “vociferous” among the three-year-olds, according to the published findings, but clearly widespread among the two-year-olds as well. We are able to make a good game together—and we are inclined to do so from nearly the moment we are born. We have a hardwired desire and capacity to cooperate and coordinate our actions with others, to effectively immerse ourselves in groups, and to actively cocreate positive shared experiences.

And yet this desire can be diminished and our natural abilities weakened or eventually lost, Michael Tomasello argues, if we grow up in a culture without sufficient opportunities to nurture and develop it.

If we are to achieve our human potential to be extraordinary collaborators, he urges, we must immerse ourselves in high-collaboration environments—and we must encourage young people to spend as much time as possible participating in groups that encourage and value cooperation. Fortunately, as online and multiplayer games become more and more central to global popular culture, we have all the encouragement we need to practice our natural collaboration abilities. Multiplayer and online games strengthen our capacity to build and exercise shared intentionality.

Every time we agree to play a game together, we are practicing one of the talents that makes us fundamentally human.

 

 

THIS IS NOT
to suggest that online gaming today is one giant cooperative utopia. The kill-or-be-killed adrenaline rush of player vs. player environments can easily overshadow the very real undertones of cooperation and collaboration that otherwise exist. Graphic violent content, combined with the anonymity of the Internet, doesn’t necessarily inspire camaraderie among strangers. That’s why toxic social interactions can and do erupt in hard-core, or especially competitive, communities, as normally playful gamer behaviors like taunting and trash-talking get out of hand.

Even in friendlier matches, many gamers care very deeply about whether or not they win. They’re seeking that fiero moment and wind up feeling disappointed or angry if they lose. In that case, even the fundamentally collaborative spirit of making a good game together can’t completely alleviate the sting of loss.

Yet despite all these potentially mitigating factors, gamer culture is moving insistently in the direction of more shared intentionality, not less. For the past few years, cooperative, or
co-op
, play and
collaborative creation
systems have consistently remained the most celebrated trends in gaming.

In
co-op mode,
gamers work together to defeat an AI opponent and to increase each other’s scores, rather than competing against each other. Classic examples of co-op play include
Rock Band
and the first-person shooter series
Left 4 Dead
. Although there are competitive elements to both games, the primary focus is on working together to achieve a goal.

Even in game series that have previously specialized in single-player and player vs. player experiences, co-op mode is becoming more and more central. The counterterrorist-themed
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
, the fastest-selling entertainment product in world history—it grossed $550 million in five days, more than any book, movie, album, or other game ever produced—has been particularly praised for its new Spec Ops mode, a series of twenty-three extremely challenging missions designed to be played cooperatively with a friend.

The industry’s increased attention to co-op mode represents an extremely significant development in gaming culture. It’s a recognition that many gamers are happier tackling challenges together than taking on each other as opponents. Co-op games deliver all the emotional rewards of a good game, while helping gamers avoid activating the negative emotions that can come with highly competitive play: feelings of aggression, anger, disappointment, or humiliation. That’s why it’s not surprising that surveys and polls repeatedly have shown that, on average, three out of four gamers prefer co-op mode to competitive multiplayer.
⁵

Game developers aren’t just designing more co-op play; they’re also creating new
real-time coordination tools
to help us find the right people at the right time to cooperate with. The Xbox Live platform, for example, enables players to monitor who else in their social network is logged in to the game console, what they’re playing at the moment, and what other games they have in their library to play with you. You can browse your friends’ records of game achievements and compare them against your own—which helps you figure out who would make a good partner on a given mission or in a particular game. You can also receive alerts on your mobile phone or your computer whenever, for example, a friend logs in to Xbox Live to play a game or he or she unlocks an achievement. As a result, Xbox gamers have an unusually high level of awareness of what potential coplayers are doing at any given time, what they’re good at, and what resources they have to play with. The ambient awareness dramatically amplifies their ability to coordinate good gameplay.

Meanwhile, in
collaborative creation systems
, gamers get to create their own digital content, in order to build up their favorite worlds for the benefit of other players. Take
Little Big Planet
for example—it’s one of the most acclaimed collaborative creation games released in recent years. In the traditional “play mode” of the game, you cooperate with up to three friends to traverse the game world and collect game objects together—stickers, gadgets, toys, and craft and building materials. At any time, you can switch from play mode to “create mode”; here you find yourself in a collaborative building environment called Popit, in which you can design your own original action-adventure landscapes out of the objects and materials you’ve already collected. It’s a level-building system that you might call the game-design equivalent of Google Docs. Multiple people can view and edit the level at the same time; it can then be shared, or “published,” to the rest of the world.

Within a year, more than 1.3 million player-created levels had been published by
LBP
players. Compare this epic number with the relatively small number of official
LBP
levels: forty-five. Collectively, the
LBP
player base has dramatically expanded the playable
LBP
universe by a factor of nearly thirty thousand. As one games journalist observed on the one-year anniversary of the game’s release, “[It] would likely take multiple lifetimes to play through every single creation out there.”
⁶

The ability to create your own levels and share them with other players was the signature selling feature of
Little Big Planet
. But increasingly, successful game series are offering similar systems as a “value-add,” in order to give players more explicit collaboration opportunities. For example,
Halo 3
introduced the new Forge system, which invites players to design their own original multiplayer
Halo
levels, or “maps,” by customizing what weapons, vehicles, and tools are distributed where. Like LBP’s Popit system, players can upload and share their custom configurations with each other, and using the Forge tools, it’s possible to create literally billions and billions of different maps. So instead of being restricted to a finite number of play environments, the
Halo
community can keep the game going, increasing and diversifying the playing challenges for each other indefinitely.

It’s not easy to design a good world, of course. So alongside the growing collection of collaborative creation systems, there are also a growing number of player-created guides to creating better levels and maps. Take, for example, the Forge Hub, a resource for becoming a better
Halo 3
world builder. It offers extensive tutorials in various mapmaking skills and curates player-created maps into different collections. It’s a natural extension of the knowledge sharing and collective intelligence culture already taking place on the more than ten thousand player-created game wikis. Gamers aren’t just making each other better players; they’re making each other better designers.

But perhaps the most unusual innovation in gamer collaboration culture in recent years is the notion of the
massively single-player online game.
It’s a twist on the traditional massively multiplayer online concept—and, on first impression, it sounds like an impossible paradox. How can you have a “massively” single-player experience when by definition a single-player experience occurs alone?

The inventor of the term is Will Wright, the famed creator of
SimCity
and
The Sims
games. He coined it to describe his 2008 game
Spore
, a simulation of the universe that invites players to design a galaxy from scratch, starting with a single-cell creature and evolving it up into a land-dwelling species, then into tribes, complex civilizations, and ultimately a space-faring, planet-designing megacivilization.

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.