Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (51 page)

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.

 

 

ALONG THE WAY
to crafting these fourteen fixes, we’ve inventoried fourteen ways that, compared with our very best games, reality is broken.

Reality is too easy. Reality is depressing. It’s unproductive, and hopeless. It’s disconnected, and trivial. It’s hard to get into. It’s pointless, unrewarding, lonely, and isolating. It’s hard to swallow. It’s unsustainable. It’s unambitious. It’s disorganized and divided. It’s stuck in the present.

Reality is all of these things. But in at least one crucially important way, reality is also
better
: reality is our destiny.

We are hardwired to care about reality—with every cell in our bodies and every neuron in our brains. We are the result of five million years’ worth of genetic adaptations, each and every one designed to help us survive our natural environment and thrive in our real, physical world.
²

That’s why our single most urgent mission in life—the mission of every human being on the planet—is to engage with reality, as fully and as deeply as we can, every waking moment of our lives.

That doesn’t mean we can’t play games.

It simply means that we have to stop thinking of games as only escapist entertainment.

So how should we think of games, if not as escapist entertainment?

We should think of them the same way the ancient Lydians did.

Let’s turn back one more time to the provocative history that Herodotus told of why the ancient Lydians invented dice games: so that they could band together to survive an eighteen-year famine, by playing dice games on alternate days and eating on the others.

There are three key values we share in common with the ancient Lydians when it comes to how and why we play games today.

For the starving and suffering Lydians, games were a way to raise real quality of life. This was their primary function: to provide real positive emotions, real positive experiences, and real social connections during a difficult time.

This is still the primary function of games for us today. They serve to make our real lives better. And they serve this purpose beautifully, better than any other tool we have. No one is immune to boredom or anxiety, loneliness or depression. Games solve these problems, quickly, cheaply, and dramatically.

Life is hard, and games make it better.

 

 

ORGANIZING LARGE GROUPS
of people is also hard—and games make it easier.

Dice games provided the Lydians with new rules of engagement. The rules of engagement were simple: play on these days, eat on those days. But these two simple rules, at least as Herodotus imagined it, supported the Lydians’ kingdom-wide efforts to coordinate scarce resources and to cooperate together for the entire duration of the famine—eighteen long years.

It was the institution of daily gameplay that united the kingdom and made it possible to put in so strong an effort over such a long period of time. Increasingly, we, too, are using games to create better rules of engagement and to broaden our circle of cooperation. More and more, we recognize the unrivaled power of gameplay to create common ground, to concentrate our collective attention, and to inspire long-term efforts.

Games are a way of creating new civic and social infrastructure. They are the scaffold for coordinated effort. And we can apply that effort toward any kind of change we want to make, in any community, anywhere in the world.

Games help us work together to achieve massively more.

 

 

AND FINALLY,
as the Lydians were so quick to realize, games do not rely on scarce or finite resources.

We can play games endlessly, no matter how limited our resources.

Moreover, when we play games, we consume less.

This is perhaps the most overlooked lesson of the story that Herodotus told. For the ancient Lydians, games were actually a way to introduce and support a more sustainable way of life. It was impossible for them to consume their natural resources at the old rate, so new games enabled them to adopt more sustainable habits.

We are just starting to realize this possibility for ourselves today. We are starting to question material wealth as a source of authentic happiness. We are starting to look for ways to avoid exhausting the planet, and each other, with our escalating need for more stuff. We are looking to increase our wealth of experiences, relationships, and positive emotions instead.

The closer we pay attention to the real and completely renewable rewards we get from games, the better we understand: games are a sustainable way of life.

 

 

WE SHARE
with the ancient Lydians these three timeless truths about games: Good games can play an important role in improving our real quality of life. They support social cooperation and civic participation at very big scales. And they help us lead more sustainable lives and become a more resilient species.

But we are also different from the ancient Lydians, in one crucial way, when it comes to the games we play.

Their dice games did many things, but what they did
not
do, as far as we know from Herodotus, is actually solve the problem of famine itself. The games eased the problem of individual suffering. They solved the problem of social disorganization. They solved the problem of how to consume fewer scarce resources. But they did not solve the problem of the collapse of the food supply itself. They did not bring the greatest minds together to test and develop new ways of getting or making food.

Today, games have sufficiently evolved to support this fourth crucial function. Games today often have content—serious content—that directs our attention to real and urgent problems at hand. We are wrapping real problems inside of games: scientific problems, social problems, economic problems, environmental problems. And through our games, we are inventing new solutions to some of our most pressing human challenges.

The ancient Lydians just had dice games. Today, we are developing a much more powerful kind of game. We are making
world-changing
games, in order to solve real problems and drive real collective action.

 

 

SO WHAT
ever happened to the ancient Lydians?

If Herodotus is to be believed, their story has a surprise happy ending.

After eighteen years of dice games, Herodotus writes, the Lydians saw that there still was no end to the famine in sight. They realized that they couldn’t simply survive the famine by waiting it out and distracting themselves from their misery. They had to rise to the occasion and tackle the obstacle directly.

And so it was decided: they would play one final game together.

The kingdom’s population was divided into two, Herodotus tells us, and by the chance drawing of lots, it was decided which half of the population would stay in Lydia and which half would set out in search of more hospitable land.

This final game is what led the Lydians to their own epic win—an unexpected but profoundly triumphant solution to the problem of the famine. The food resources of Lydia, it turned out, could much more easily sustain half as many people, and indeed we know from other historical accounts that the kingdom subsequently not only survived for centuries more, but flourished. Meanwhile, according to Herodotus, the Lydians who’d sailed off in search of a new home settled to great success in what is now the Tuscan region of Italy, where they developed into the highly sophisticated Etruscan culture.

The Etruscans, of course, are known today as the single most important influence on Roman culture. Historians widely agree that it was the Etruscans who originally developed the great skills of urban planning and civil engineering, and that it was the Etruscans’ efforts to advance art, agriculture, and government that provided the foundations for the world-changing Roman Empire—and, therefore, much of Western civilization as we know it.

But were the game-playing Lydians really so influential in the course of human civilization? Competing histories of the Italian region have claimed for centuries, as a point of local pride, that the Etruscans were native to the region, not immigrants. Meanwhile, like many of the histories written by Herodotus, this account of the Etruscans’ origins has been met with some skepticism. The tale of the starving Lydians and their gaming is so fanciful that many modern historians have dismissed it as a myth or fable, perhaps inspired by facts but not bound by them.

However, recent scientific research appears at long last to conclusively confirm several key details of Herodotus’ account of the Lydians, both of the famine they faced and their eventual mass migration.

Geologists today believe that a catastrophic global cooling occurred between the years 1159 and 1140 BC—a nineteen-year time frame they’ve identified using tree-ring dating.
³
A tree ring is a layer of wood produced during one tree’s growing season; during droughts and famines, tree rings are extremely narrow compared with normal seasons. By examining the rings in petrified trees, geologists have concluded that global cooling caused severe droughts and famines lasting for almost two decades in the twelfth century BC, particularly in Europe and Asia. Historians now believe this global cooling may have prompted the eighteen-year famine in Lydia that Herodotus described.

Meanwhile, in 2007, a team led by Alberto Piazza, a geneticist at the University of Turin, Italy, made what was widely considered a breakthrough finding in human genetics. The research team analyzed the DNA of three different present-day Tuscan populations known to be direct descendants of the Etruscans. They discovered that the Etruscans’ DNA was much more closely linked with near-Eastern peoples than with other Italians, and, crucially, they found one genetic variant that is shared only by people from Turkey, the region once populated by the Lydians. As Piazza reported at the time of his team’s discovery, “We think that our research provides convincing proof that Herodotus was right, and that the Etruscans did indeed arrive from ancient Lydia.”
⁴

With this modern-day scientific confirmation of two crucial details of Herodotus’ account, the legend of the ancient Lydians takes on new significance. An astonishing claim becomes suddenly much more plausible: we may owe much of Western civilization as we know it to the Lydians’ ability to come together and play a good game.

It turns out the dice games weren’t just a way to be happier during difficult times. They were also teaching the entire society to work together wholeheartedly toward collectively agreed-upon goals. They were training the Lydians to hold on to a sense of urgent optimism even in the face of daunting odds. They were building a strong social fabric. And they constantly reminded every Lydian that they were a part of something bigger.