Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (50 page)

As I write this chapter, plans to develop future seasons of EVOKE are already under way, based on its early success. New seasons of the game will focus attention and engagement on a single issue, such as energy, food security, or women’s rights. Meanwhile, the first season of the game—EVOKE’s core curriculum—will be translated into Arabic for the Middle East, Spanish for Latin America, Mandarin for China, and more, in order to reach even more students. And in order to support EVOKE play in regions of Africa without reliable Internet access, episodes from the first season of EVOKE are being compiled into a single graphic novel, with all of the missions and quests adapted into workbook-style exercises. SMS-based interactivity—as most young people in the developing world do have access to mobile phones—will ensure that these “pen and paper” players are still connected to the global EVOKE network.

The goal of all of these adaptations? To ensure, over time, that every young person on this planet receives an education in urgent problem solving and planet crafting—and has free and open access to a global network of potential world-changing collaborators, investors, and mentors.

 

 

SO HOW MIGHT
future-making games like World Without Oil, Superstruct, and EVOKE evolve in a best-case-scenario future?

At the end of Superstruct, all of the IFTF game masters had an opportunity to select and honor their favorite superstructure during an online streaming Superstruct Honors broadcast. I chose a superstructure called The Long Game, proposed by player Ubik2019, one of Superstruct’s most active players. The Long Game represents, to me, what future-making games must aspire to become by the end of the twenty-first century: an
epic collaboratory
for our most awe-inspiring global development efforts.

In real life, Ubik2019 is Gene Becker, formerly the worldwide director of product development for extreme performance and mobility at Hewlett-Packard, and now the founder and managing director of Lightning Laboratories, an emerging-technology consulting company that works with a range of Global 2000 companies and preinvestment start-ups. Becker brought to Superstruct a particularly keen sensibility about how to develop initiatives on a global scale, and how to leverage new network technologies for innovation. Here is Becker’s best idea for a new superstructure:

Fostering a long-term mind-set by playing a game that lasts a thousand years.

A thousand-year game, combining financial and nonfinancial investment of our most important resources—how exactly would such a game work?

During the Superstruct experiment, we brainstormed different ideas, focusing largely on structure rather than theme, story, or content. For example, we imagined the entire world setting aside one day each year to play the game, as a kind of global holiday. Of course, like all good games, participation would be optional. But the supergoal of the game would be, by the end of one thousand years, to engage virtually 100 percent of the human population in playing.

Enthusiastic players could spend as much time as they wanted throughout the year preparing for the global game day. Casual players could simply show up to a game site (online or in the real world) and take part for a few minutes, a few hours, or even all twenty-four hours in the year’s game day.

That entire global game day would represent one “move” in the game. And perhaps, we imagined, The Long Game would be played in rounds of fifty moves each. So if you played The Long Game your entire life, you would hope to be able to experience a complete round at least once, if not twice.

Every tenth move would represent a bigger and more significant occasion, to provide a kind of momentous leveling-up occasion each decade. Each twenty-fifth and each fiftieth move, the halfway mark and the end of each round, would be an even more momentous occasion—each time the culmination of a quarter century of gamers’ efforts.

What specifically would making a move in the game entail? We envisioned a combination of events. Social rituals and circle games to build common ground. Crowdsourced challenges and collective feats—in the style of a traditional barn raising—to focus the world’s energy and attention on a single problem and a single transformation. And forecasting exercises to create shared momentum for the future, and to collectively decide the challenges and themes of the next year’s set of games.

No one would ever live to see both the start and the end of the game, of course—not even close. But the game would be a
throughline
for humanity, a tangible connection between our actions today and the world our descendants inherit tomorrow. It would create a sense of awe and wonder, inspiring us to imagine how this massively scaled adventure we are a part of could play out, and to make as meaningful an impact in the game as possible, so we can make a difference in our lifetime that lasts for many lifetimes more.

It’s not that hard to imagine people spending their entire lives playing a single game. Many
World of Warcraft
gamers have now been playing their favorite game for nearly an entire decade already; so has the
Halo
community. Countless among us spend a lifetime mastering a game like chess, poker, or golf.

And we already have a historical precedent for societies successfully keeping a game tradition alive for an entire millennium—the ancient Greeks ran their Olympiad every four years without interruption for roughly one thousand years.

The Long Game doesn’t exist yet. But it just might be what the world needs now.

Aspiring to engage every single human being on the planet in a single game isn’t an arbitrary goal. To accomplish that goal would mean transforming the planet and global society in key ways.

It would require every single village in the world to have some level of access to the Internet, via personal computers or mobile phones, so that truly everyone could contribute to the game. Universal Internet access is in its own right a significant and worthy goal. Today, roughly one in four people on the planet has reliable, daily Internet access.
³⁰
When every family in the remote villages of Africa, or in what today are the slums of India, or throughout Nicaragua—when they and everyone else in the world has access to The Long Game, that will mean greater access to education, culture, and economic opportunity as well.

Furthermore, for every person on the planet to play the same game, there would need to be free communications across all geopolitical borders. What would it take before every citizen of North Korea, for example, could play The Long Game?

The Long Game, if we have the will to design it, and if we create the means for universal participation, could be the good game that humanity plays to collectively take us to the next level, achieving a new scale of cooperation, coordination, and cocreation. As Kathi Vian urged in her introduction to the Superstruct Ten-Year Forecast:

It seems clear to me that games are the most likely candidate to serve as the next great breakthrough structure for life on earth.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that evolution will continue along any given path, other than the path of improved survivability in a given environment. But all of the historic evidence seems to suggest that collaboration improves human survivability, and will continue to do so, as long as we can innovate new ways of working together.

First humans invented language. Then farming, and cities; trade and democratic forms of government and the Internet—all ways of supporting human life and collaboration at bigger and more complex scales.

We have been playing good games for nearly as long as we have been human. It is now time to play them on extreme scales.

Together, we can tackle what may be the most worthwhile, most epic obstacle of all: a whole-planetary mission, to use games to raise global quality of life, to prepare ourselves for the future, and to sustain our earth for the next millennium and beyond.

—FUTURIST ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY
¹

 

 

 

W
e can play any games we want.

We can create any future we can imagine.

W That is the big idea we started with, fourteen chapters ago, as we set off to investigate why good games make us better, and how they can help us change the world.

Along the way, we’ve gleaned industry secrets—more than thirty years’ worth—from some of the most successful computer and video game developers in the world. We’ve compared these secrets alongside the most important scientific findings of the past decade, from the field of positive-psychology research. We’ve identified key innovations in the emerging landscape of alternate reality design. And we’ve tracked how game design is creating new ways for us to work together at extreme scales, and to solve bigger real-world problems.

We have thoroughly assessed all the ways that games optimize human experience, how they help us do amazing things together, and why they enable lasting engagement. As a result, we’re now equipped with fourteen ways to fix reality—fourteen ways we can use games to be happier in our everyday lives, to stay better connected to people we care about, to feel more rewarded for making our best effort, and to discover new ways to make a difference in the real world.

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.