How To Break Anything

The following is a collection of research and insights that point to how games are at least as valuable as reality.

A year ago, games researcher Jane McGonigal developed SuperBetter as a game-based method for recovering from the traumatic brain injury she was suffering from at the time, and has now announced the upcoming launch of a Kickstarter project aimed at funding a published game guide. In the 5-minute video below (and in a longer TED talk here) she gives her take on how games can change behavior and the world.

Jane’s thesis challenges our notion of what it means to play a “game.” A glance at traditional definitions of “game” will lead the reader to notions of a game as an abstraction of reality (and therefore less valuable than reality) or a mere form of entertainment: games are what children play, reality is what adults engage in.

Jane argues that it is in fact this very abstraction from reality that makes games valuable. Games can provide an environment where:

• difficult things are possible, encouraging optimism
• things are naturally interesting, provoking curiosity
• players have a sense of agency, providing motivation
• actions are immediately meaningful, inspiring awe and wonder
• there are plenty of collaborators ready to tackle complex tasks along with the player, as in MMORPGs, fostering trust and cooperation

In her other works, Jane goes on to describe how games are in fact developing important skills within societies (and have been, since the advent of dice) - skills that will be critical to overcoming global challenges facing humanity.

Games as design for the better

Jane’s charge is in opposition to the idea that reality is the only proper training ground for developing these skills. The primary difference invoked between games and reality is that games are narrated by a designer, while real life is complex and unscripted. Other opponents to the rise of gaming often point to the value of the classroom.

As for the narration issue, it’s worth noting that to the extent that games are designed and “less than real,” so too is the professor’s lecture. Both can be well designed, constructed for efficiently challenging others towards real learning. Alternatively, either can be a mind-dulling exercise built to captivate people just long enough to accomplish some short-term goal – beating the game or passing a test – doing nothing for long-term or valuable learning.

In a discussion of how to build systems for understanding the impact of pollution and CO2, professor and game programmer Greg Niemeyer of UC Berkeley talks about the critical difference between telling someone something important – however critical it is – and having them experience the meaning behind it themselves. Games provide an means through which difficult environments can be more directly experienced in this way.

On the inherent value of reality

It’s also worth considering the inclination to view reality as a value in itself. This is sometimes based on the complexity of reality as the source of it’s value, as noted above. Kevin Slavin of the game design firm Area/Code has noted that it is again abstraction of reality from complexity to simplicity that shows the value games have, by isolating key concepts. The value of virtual currencies in games like Farmville (”who would pay $1 for a sheep that doesn’t even exist?” is the question often asked) helps illustrate the strong social component of the things people actually value – something doesn’t necessarily need to be tangible and ‘real’ to be valuable.

More often than not, though, the argument is simply “reality is just better – period.” Psychologist Joanna Starek studies the nature of self-deception, and takes issue with the absolute value of reality, most notably in a Radiolab episode on deception. She primarily studies athletes, finding a relationship between those who are able to perform better than others who are their physiological equals, and their ability to better abstract themselves from reality (as measured by Sackeim & Gur’s classic self-deception test) - in this case, the measurable physiological reality of their ability to perform. In short, the athletes who recognize the reality of potentially over-exerting themselves fall short of their physiological equals – “reality” does not necessarily translate to “better.”

As we see increasingly more innovators abandon the traditional conception of “games” as subordinate to “reality,” we will see more developments encouraging behavior change for the better through the values McGonigal points to above. These will range from the Epic Win to-do application with individual-level implications to IBM’s CityOne Smarter Planet game with global-scale implications.

A primary principle in studies of behavior and motivation is the idea of the feedback loop; this basic concept describes a cycle initiated by us engaging in some behavior or action, that action impacting something external, and that external thing responding back to us in a way that we can infer the link between how x action causes y result.

This principle helps illuminate many manifestations of motivation or behavior (and lack of). As a basic example, many healthy living behaviors result in no feedback that we can causally link in ways that are intuitive to us; the result of living well is “not being unhealthy” – in other words a lack of feedback.

A similar thing can be said for many of the things we mentally think of as chores. As relatively short-sighted beings, we often have a hard time making that intuitive jump between how the daily tasks we do today translate into long-term value years or even months down the road.

It is with these principles at work that we see the development and spread of applying game mechanics to more parts of daily life. Epic Win is a app-based task manager that brings elements from the role-playing game world to the daily to-do list. As items are marked off as done, experience points are collected to improve a player’s avatar, turning slow-developing long-term tasks (say the task of working out every day) into discrete and immediate forms of feedback. The user’s selectable character moves along a quest map towards new locations, unlocking items that are sharable on Facebook and Twitter for instant social feedback as well.

Watch a video explanation below:

We are seeing the points concept emerge in other disciplines as well. The XP system is something that professor Lee Sheldon of Indiana University has implemented into his courses on game design. Instead of work detracting from a students final evaluation for being wrong, students’ work is translated into experience points that accumulate as learning tasks are accomplished.

As new ideas develop that attempt to uncover new ways of inspiring better behavior,  we expect them to follow closer to themes of social motivation and immediate feedback loops, and further from the idea of the coldly rational, will-driven individual.

Epic Win

5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

This article is fascinating and of course hilarious, being Cracked (though I'm not prone to calling these types of things "creepy"...). Some things it calls to mind:

• Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing, a brief section where she makes a bit of a case analogous to the "you're in a prison" idea of The Matrix
• Skinner Box? There's an app for that.
• Seth Godin's Linchpin, and the work culture we've created to indoctrinate employees. From the Cracked article:

Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to Everything Expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don't even have two of them:

Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day);

Complexity (so it's not mind-numbing repetition);

Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

GS: Why can't you just tell people what the meaning of, say, polluting is?

GN: You can. It's called propaganda.

GS: Why shouldn't we use propaganda then? Why do you have to let people discover the meaning of such things for themselves?

GN: The discovery of radical alternatives happens in smaller steps and in individual minds and hearts. For example, I love baking and I used to do a lot of it in my big old gas oven. Then I put a sensor in my kitchen and learned that a lot of CO2 gets produced. Even after I turn the oven off, hours afterward, CO2 was still sitting in my kitchen to a tune of 2,000 parts per million. The cookies were long gone and I was still sitting in a soup of gas. Once I became aware of that, my wife and I got  a convection oven instead, and now we bake with that. I bake less and the oven is a little smaller, but I don't have a CO2 lake in my kitchen anymore. It became actionable to do less because of harm reduction, essentially.

Greg Niemeyer is an artist and game programmer working with interactive art at UC Berkeley. He integrates game mechanics and behavioral economics into projects that get people to change their behavior. I love the above quote from his interview with CITRUS, referencing one of his latest sensor projects that allows people to easily monitor their own air quality.

We try to force meaning onto people all the time. It's not just called propaganda. It's also called advertising.