Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
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Once you have completed the five big missions, your challenge is to stay in constant contact with your allies, collect power-ups by battling the bad guys and making great escapes, and tackle items on your superhero to-do list. You might want to “lock in” your gameplay by keeping a game journal, posting daily videos on YouTube, or using Twitter to announce your achievements.
Near the end of every day, hold a secret meeting with one of your allies. Add up your great escapes, your power-ups, and your superhero points.
Talk to your other allies as often as possible, and tell them what you’ve been doing to get superbetter. Ask them for ideas about new things to add to your to-do list.
Be sure you have at least one ally who is giving you daily achievements. Share these achievements with your friends online, using Twitter or Facebook status updates, to keep them posted on your progress.
So that’s how you play SuperBetter. But does it actually improve the reality of getting better?
The first few days I was playing, I was in a better mood than I had been at any time since I hit my head. I felt like I was finally doing something to get better, not just lying around and waiting for my brain to hurry up and heal itself.
My symptoms didn’t improve instantly—but I was so much more motivated to get something positive out of my day, no matter what. Every day, no matter how bad I felt otherwise, I would score at least one great escape, grab at least one power-up, rack up some points, and unlock an achievement. Doing these things didn’t require being cured; it just required making an effort to participate more fully in my own recovery process.
There’s not a whole lot you can prove with a scientific sample of one. I can say only that, for me, the fog of misery lifted first, and then, soon after, the fog of symptoms started to lift as well. Within two weeks of playing Jane the Concussion Slayer, my symptoms were improved by roughly 80 percent, according to the log Kiyash helped me keep of my pain and concentration problems on a ten-point scale, and I was up to working as many as four hours a day. Within a month, I felt almost completely recovered.
I can’t say for sure if I got better any faster than I would have without playing the game—although I suspect it helped a great deal. What I can say for sure is that I suffered a great deal less during the recovery as a direct result of the game. I was miserable one day, and the next day I wasn’t; and I was never that miserable again as long as I was playing the game. When my allies joined the game, I finally felt like they really understood what I was going through, and I never felt quite so lost in the fog again.
After declaring my victory over the concussion in a Twitter post, I received dozens of requests to post all the rules and missions, so that other people could game their own injuries and illnesses—for everything from chronic back pain and social anxiety to lung disorders, migraines, the side effects of quitting smoking, newly diagnosed diabetes, chemotherapy, and even mononucleosis.
I published the rule set on my blog, and I gave it the more general name SuperBetter (after all, most people probably don’t dream of being like Buffy the Vampire Slayer).9 I suggested that people use the hashtag “#SuperBetter” for their own videos, blog posts, and Twitter updates, in case they wanted to find each other online. (A hashtag is a way to easily add context to your online content, and to find other people talking about the same topic.) And that was it. I didn’t build a Web application, or develop an automated scoring system, or even set up a social network for playing the game. A game doesn’t have to be a computer program. It can simply be like chess or hide-and-seek: a set of rules that one player can pass on to another.
An alternate reality game can be as simple as a good idea, a fresh way of looking at a problem. SuperBetter, of course, isn’t meant to replace conventional medical advice or treatment. It’s meant to augment good advice, and to help patients take a more active role in their own recovery.
When you’re sick or in pain, getting better is all you want. But the longer it takes, the harder it gets. And when the tough reality we have to face is that getting better won’t be easy, a good game can better prepare us to deal with that reality. In an alternate reality linked to our favorite superhero mythology, we’re more likely to stay optimistic, because we’ll set more reasonable goals and keep better track of our progress. We’ll feel successful even when we’re struggling, because our friends and family will define fiero moments for us every day. We’ll build a stronger social support system, because it’s easier to ask someone to play a game than it is to ask for help. And we’ll hopefully find real meaning and develop real character in our epic efforts to overcome what may be the toughest challenge we’ve ever had to face. And that’s how we get superbetter, thanks to a good game.
THE THREE GAMES discussed in this chapter represent three of the main approaches to developing an alternate reality and solving a quality-of-life problem.
Chore Wars is an example of a life-management ARG—a software program or service that helps you manage your real life like a game.
Quest to Learn is an example of an organizational ARG. It uses game design as a guiding philosophy for creating new institutions and inventing new organizational practices.
And SuperBetter is a concept ARG. It uses social media and networking tools to virally spread new game ideas, missions, and rule sets, which players can repurpose and adapt for their own lives as they see fit.
These three methods aren’t the only ways to create an alternate reality. In later chapters in this book, you’ll also read about live event ARGs, which gather players at physical locations for a game that takes only an hour or a day to play, and narrative ARGs, which use multimedia storytelling—video, text, photographs, audio, and even graphic novels—to weave real-world game missions into a compelling fiction that plays out over weeks, months, or even years.
Of course, by the time you read this book, dozens—probably hundreds—of new alternate reality games will no doubt be widely playable. This movement is just getting started. When we imagine how the ARG movement might unfold, we can—as always—look for guidance from the past.
In the early 1970s, just before the computer and video game revolution, another game revolution took place, with significantly less fanfare but a rather important and lasting legacy. It was called the New Games movement, and its goal was to reinvent sports to be more cooperative, more social, and more inclusive.
The New Games philosophy was simple, composed of two parts. First, no one should ever have to warm the bench because they’re not good enough to play. And second, competitive gameplay shouldn’t be about winning. It should be about playing harder and longer than the other team, in order to have more fun.
The founders of the movement, a group of San Francisco-based counterculturists, invented dozens of new sports, all sillier and more spectacular than traditional athletic activities. The most well known were the “earth ball” games (played with a ball six feet in diameter, so that it takes multiple people to move the ball together) and parachute games (in which twenty to fifty people stand around the rim of a piece of parachute material and flap and billow it together, working to create various shapes and ripples). They held large New Games festivals in the Bay Area and eventually trained tens of thousands of schools and parks and recreation departments across the country, so that they could include New Games in their physical education and public recreation programs.
Many of today’s leading game developers grew up playing New Games at school and local parks—and it’s not hard to see the influence of New Games on multiplayer and massively multiplayer game designers today. From the cooperative missions in MMOs to the 256-player combat environments on consoles, video gameplay today often looks a lot like a New Game, set in a virtual world. In fact, New Games theory has come up at every single Game Developers Conference I’ve attended over the last decade—which is how I know that many game designers have managed to acquire for themselves a copy of the long out-of-print and little-known New Games Book, published in 1976.
I’ve nearly worn the print off the page of my favorite essay in the book. It’s called “Creating the Play Community,” by Bernie DeKoven, then the codirector of the New Games Foundation and today a leading play theorist. In the essay, DeKoven calls for a community of players to volunteer to be of service to the movement. He asks: Who will be willing to try these new games and help assess whether they are, in fact, better than the old games? If they are better, the community should teach others how to play. If they’re not better, the players should suggest ways to improve them, or start inventing their own new games to test. He explains:Because the games are new, we get a sense that we’re experimenting. No one guarantees anything. If a game doesn’t work, we try to fix it, to see if we can make it work. After all, it’s a new game. It’s not official yet. In fact, we’re the officials, all of us, every one of us who has come to play. We make the judgments. We each take the responsibility for discovering what we can enjoy together.10
This is the kind of community that is currently coming together around alternate reality games. As we develop alternate realities, we need to be both open-minded and critical about what actually raises our quality of life, what helps us participate more fully in our real lives, and what simply serves as yet another distraction. There will be many, many different alternate realities proposed in the coming years, and it’s not up to just the game developers to shape this movement. The players, more than anyone else, will get to decide if a new alternate reality is indeed a good game.
The “how” of alternate reality game design boils down to the game-design principles that best generate the four rewards we crave most. Traditional computer and video game developers are leading the way, constantly innovating new ways to reap these rewards; ARG developers are already borrowing and refining these design strategies and development tools as their go-to solutions for how to make the world work more like a game.
But as we playtest different possibilities to decide what makes a good alternate reality, three additional sets of criteria are certain to emerge.
First: When and where do we need an alternate reality? Which situations and spaces call for it—and when are we better off leaving reality alone?
Second: Who should we include in our alternate reality games? Besides our close friends and family, who else would we benefit from inviting to play with us?
And third: What activities should we be adopting as the core mechanics of our alternate reality games? Game design is a structure—goals, restrictions, feedback—but within that structure, we can ask players to do almost anything. What habits should we be encouraging? What actions should we be multiplying?
These three different sets of criteria are the subjects of the next three chapters, which in turn cover three key kinds of alternate reality projects: alternate realities designed to make difficult activities more rewarding, alternate realities designed to build up new real-world communities, and alternate realities designed to help us adopt the daily habits of the world’s happiest people in our real, everyday lives.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Leveling Up in Life
HOW ALTERNATE REALITIES CAN MAKE DIFFICULT ACTIVITIES MORE REWARDING
If I have one regret in life,” I complained to the crowd at the Austin Convention Center, “it’s that my undead priest is smarter than I am.” Technically speaking, it’s true: if you were to add up every A I’ve gotten in my real life, from junior high through graduate school, the total still wouldn’t come close to my World of Warcraft character’s intellect stat. Never mind the fact that there’s no score at all for getting smarter once you’re out of school for good.
I was giving a keynote address at the annual design and technology conference SXSW Interactive when I made this lament. The topic was, naturally, the failures of the real world to be as engaging as a good game, and what we could do to fix it. As I told the crowd, “I’d feel a lot better if I got plus-one intellect for every smart thing I said during this talk. Or at least a few plus-one public speaking points.” Giving talks is exhausting, even when I enjoy it, I explained. It would be energizing to see some +1s pop up right on top of my PowerPoint slides as I worked my way through the deck.
A few days later, back home in California, I received an e-mail from an unfamiliar sender: ratings@plusoneme.com. The subject was “Clay has acknowledged your strengths.” Clay who? I wondered. I didn’t know anyone named Clay. I opened the e-mail anyway.
A friend of yours, Clay Johnson, +1d you to acknowledge some of your strengths. Specifically they’re acknowledging these attributes:
+1 Intelligence
+1 Public Speaking
+1 Inspiration
Enjoy your day. And congratulations!
A second e-mail arrived a few minutes later, from Clay Johnson himself.
Your +1 in public speaking as you requested at SXSW! It should have arrived in your inbox a little while ago. When you said that during your speech, I thought, “Why shouldn’t she be able to get a +1 in public speaking?!” and built plusoneme.com. Great talk. Check out what you inspired.
I followed the link, and sure enough, there was a perfect little Web application dedicated to giving and tracking stats in an array of thirty-seven different personal strengths: creativity, generosity, speed, fashion, listening, and backbone, for example.
It was definitely a broader and more diverse set of stats than I’d even seen in a role-playing game. For every plus-one you send, you can also attach a reason: “+1 backbone for sticking up for our idea in the meeting,” for example, or “+1 endurance for getting through the long drive home tonight.” And you can send a plus-one to anyone via e-mail, regardless of whether or not they’ve signed up to play. If they join the site and create a profile, their plus-ones “stack,” or add up over time. (So far, I’m up to +25 innovation, because I asked my colleagues to plusoneme when I do something innovative at work.)
You can add a plus-one feed to your blog or social network page so that your friends and family can see exactly how fast you’re leveling up, in what strengths. All in all, Plusoneme is pretty much exactly what you’d wish for if you wanted to level up in real life—that is, if you wanted to have an objective measure of how much better you’re getting at the things you’re working hard at.
Since he gave me my first plus-one, I’ve gotten to know Clay Johnson better. It turns out that he’s the director emeritus of Sunlight Labs, a community of open-source developers dedicated to making government more transparent and participatory. We’ve had some very interesting conversations about how to use game feedback systems to increase democratic participation. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Plusoneme.gov someday, to help constituents give better feedback to their elected officials.
Plusoneme isn’t a game—there aren’t any built-in goals, and there are no restrictions on how you give or earn a plus-one. It’s more like a gesture toward a game, a kind of musing out loud: How would it feel to get constant, real-time positive feedback in our real lives, whenever we’re tackling obstacles and working hard? Would we be more motivated? Would we feel more rewarded? Would we challenge ourselves more?
A growing number of alternate reality projects suggest that, for all these questions, the answer is a resounding yes. Systems that help us level up in real life, by providing us with voluntary obstacles related to our real-world activity and by giving us better feedback really can help us make a better effort. And that gives us our next fix:FIX # 8 : MEANINGFUL REWARDS WHEN WE NEED THEM MOST
Compared with games, reality is pointless and unrewarding. Games help us feel more rewarded for making our best effort.
I hate flying, and I spend a lot of time hating it—on the order of over 150 hours a year.
I’m a nervous flie
r. I’ve gotten better over the years, but I still can’t really work on planes, eat on planes, or sleep on planes. I certainly can’t enjoy myself on planes. Half the time, I literally make myself sick with anxiety. Even after a good flight, I’m so exhausted from the stress and the jet lag that it takes hours or even a whole day or more to recover.
More than 25 million Americans have a fear of flying, while 52 percent of frequent fliers say that the number one word to describe air travel is “frustrating.” 1 And this has significant consequences for our health and well-being.
Being out of control is a fundamentally stressful feeling. Researchers have shown that it takes a huge hit on both our happiness and our physical health. And it’s not just in the moment that we’re negatively affected. When we go through an experience that makes us feel endangered or powerless, our immune system suffers and we experience higher levels of anxiety, depression, and pessimism in the hours and days that follow.2
Games, of course, help put people back in control. Real gameplay is always by definition voluntary; it is always an exercise of our own freedom. Meanwhile, progressing toward goals and getting better at a game instills a sense of power and mastery.
The fact that commercial flying puts so many people on edge, so reliably, makes airports and airplanes the perfect target for a game-design intervention. If we could look forward to flights instead of dreading them, and if we could feel powerful at the start of our trip instead of helpless, the quality of life of frequent fliers worldwide would skyrocket. And the most fearful fliers would be able to go on more of the trips they want to take but currently avoid.