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

by Jane McGonigal

  But what would make flying more authentically rewarding? Forget frequent-flier miles and other travel reward programs. If you’re already frustrated or fearful about flying, earning more flights isn’t going to make you any happier.

  What we need are intrinsic reward programs—and two new games for fliers show exactly how it could be done: Jetset, the world’s first video game for airports, and Day in the Cloud, an in-flight scavenger hunt designed to be played plane versus plane, at ten thousand feet and higher.

  Jetset and Day in the Cloud

  Jetset, an iPhone game created by Atlanta-based developers Persuasive Games, is a cartoon simulation of an airport security line. Load the game and, on your iPhone screen, you get to watch virtual passengers march through a cartoon metal detector while virtual luggage rolls through the X-ray machine. Your role in the game is to play the part of the security agent: tap the screen to confiscate banned items and to pat down suspicious passengers. Go too slow, and passengers miss their flights; go too quickly, and you might miss a banned item or let the wrong passenger slip by. The longer you play, the longer the line gets, the faster the security belt runs, and the harder it is to keep up with new security restrictions, like “no pressurized cheese,” “no pet snakes,” “no pudding cups,” and “no robots.”

  The game’s lead designer, Ian Bogost, is a frequent business traveler who came up with the idea for the game after suffering endless frustration in the security line himself. The game has a decidedly satirical bent, and player reviews often mention laughing out loud as they play.3 That’s one of the main goals of the game, Bogost told me: to make players laugh during a stressful situation. “Hopefully, it helps frequent fliers laugh at the absurdity of the airport security process instead of being overwhelmed or infuriated by it.”

  Technically, you can play Jetset anywhere you take your mobile phone. But the only way to officially level up and unlock souvenir prizes to send to friends and family is by playing the game at real-world airports. That’s because Jetset uses the GPS data from your phone to figure out where in the world you really are. If your actual GPS coordinates match any of the hundred airports in the game’s database, you get access to a customized airport game level that perfectly matches your real-world location. Complete that level, and you unlock a local achievement, or, in Jetset-speak, a “souvenir.” For example, at Albuquerque International Sunport you can earn a virtual green chili pepper, while at Los Angeles International Airport, you win giant virtual sunglasses.

  Every time you earn a souvenir, you can use the game’s mobile Facebook application to send the virtual object as a gift to a friend or family member. The gift lets them know not only that you’ve scored a game victory at the airport, but also clues them in to the fact that you’re just about to start or finish a trip. In other words, Jetset helps you provide real-time travel updates to your social network as you play.

  The more airports you visit, the more strange items you can amass for your souvenir collection and the more travel trophies you can collect. And if you’re always flying in and out of the same airports? Then you can work on harder and harder levels to earn premium versions of your local souvenirs. Fly often enough in real life, and you’ll get promoted up the virtual security ranks at your local airport. It’s essentially FarmVille for airports, providing players with a sense of blissful productivity and social connectivity in an otherwise stressful environment. And that’s what makes Jetset an alternate reality game, and not just another diversion. It’s meant to improve players’ real-life experience of a real-world environment.

  Do the virtual souvenirs and power-ups have real value for the players? Bogost certainly hopes so. He specifically designed them to give frequent fliers something more fun and personally satisfying to aim for than miles and upgrades.

  “Too many business travelers are obsessed with getting more miles even as they complain about how much they travel,” Bogost told me. “It’s a self-defeating system: it rewards you with more of what you already hate.” Not to mention, relying on rewards of significant monetary value to keep people happy and motivated simply isn’t a scalable solution. There’s only so many free seats airlines are willing to give away, and only so many VIP members they’re willing to recognize. As soon as too many people start earning rewards, Bogost notes, airlines simply change the rules to make it harder to win. That’s not a very fair game.

  By contrast, the potential intrinsic rewards of a good game like Jetset are nonexhaustible. Positive emotions can be provoked for everyone who plays, without limitation, and personal feelings of satisfaction, pride, and social connection are completely renewable resources. You can simply reward more people more often when the goal is an intrinsic reward.

  Nothing epitomizes mandatory, mindless activity more than waiting in line at the security or boarding lines at the airport. But Jetset is a special, voluntary mission you can undertake while waiting—in other words, an unnecessary obstacle. By focusing on the unnecessary obstacle of the game, instead of the mandatory obstacle of the real security and boarding process, you can instantly change your state of mind from negative stress to positive activation. You can’t opt out of security and boarding rituals, but you can opt in to the game. It’s a subtle, but powerful, way to change the dynamics of the situation. Instead of feeling external pressure, you’re focused on the positive stress of the game.

  What I like about Jetset most is the fact that when you play, you’re not just sleep-walking through a part of your life that you hate. You’re actively participating in the moment, taking full advantage of your location by undertaking a game mission you could only play while at that airport.

  Taking full advantage of the moment is an important quality-of-life skill: it builds up your sense of self-efficacy by reminding you that you have the power at any time to make your own happiness. Jetset might not permanently resolve the ongoing frustrations of airport security and boarding, but it reminds us of our power to improve our own experience. And for that reason, it’s an excellent signal of the role that location-based games can play in improving our quality of life in the future.

  A good location-based game can transform any space into sites of intrinsic reward. Imagine the possibilities. Three of my favorite potential game sites are dentist offices, the department of motor vehicles, and public transportation.

  Wherever there is a mandatory experience that is unpleasant or frustrating, a surefire way to improve it is to design a good game you can only play in that space. Jetset effectively tackles that problem for airports. But what about the experience of actually being in the air?

  Enter the Day in the Cloud challenge.

  Accept the challenge.

  Scour the earth.

  Please remain seated.

  —Invitation to play Day in the Cloud4

  Take two ordinary commercial flights, flying at the same time in opposite directions between the same two airports. Pit them against each other in an epic battle of online wits and creativity. Passengers spend the duration of the flight working together to earn as many points for their plane as possible. When both planes land, everyone on the plane with the highest score wins.

  Day in the Cloud was a promotion dreamed up by Virgin America and Google Apps. It was initially run as a small playtest, on planes traveling between the Los Angeles and San Francisco international airports. And while it hasn’t yet been implemented across the Virgin America fleet, it serves as a powerful indication of the kind of innovation that is possible in the air, using technology that’s already fully in place.

  The game takes advantage of Virgin America’s sophisticated in-flight entertainment system, which includes seat-to-seat chat and instant messaging; a real-time Google map that displays the plane’s location, altitude, and speed; and WiFi Internet access for laptops, mobile phones, and PDAs.

  Once the plane gets above ten thousand feet—which is when the plane’s WiFi system is turned on—players can power up, log in, and join the game, which consis
ts of a series of several dozen puzzles and creative challenges that must be completed before the plane descends back below ten thousand feet.

  Each puzzle and challenge corresponds to a different altitude—the higher the altitude, the trickier it is. A low-altitude puzzle, for example, might be as simple as completing a maze or answering a movie trivia riddle, such as: “Ma’am, I believe you are doing more than just flirting with me. What 1967 movie features a more memorable version of that line?” (Check the footnotes for the answer.)5

  Higher-altitude puzzles involve trickier tasks, like Mensa-level code breaking, and juicier goals, like snooping through a game character’s “real” online e-mail account to find secret bits of personal information. And if you’re not a puzzle person, you can tackle creative challenges, like: “Write a theme song for Day in the Cloud. The lyrics should have one four-line verse and one catchy four-line chorus. You must include at least one rhyme for ‘cloud,’ ‘cirrus,’ ‘stratus,’ ‘cumulus,’ or ‘nimbus’ somewhere in your lyrics.”6

  The collection of puzzles and challenges is designed to be virtually impossible to complete alone over the course of the flight. That’s where your planemates come in. (“Planemates” might not be a recognized English word yet, but that’s simply because we’ve been woefully underutilizing planes as social spaces.) Travelers are encouraged to work together, dividing and conquering the various challenges, and sharing solutions. You can partner with someone in your row, sharing a laptop together. Or you can use the seat-back communications system to trade ideas and answers.

  The more passengers who play on a given plane, the higher the plane’s potential score. So there’s a real incentive to reach out to people who look friendly, curious, or just plain bored. And it’s not just planemates that you can collaborate with during the game. The online game requires players to connect to the Internet, and once you’re online it’s easy to pick your friends’ and family members’ brains via e-mail or Twitter or IM. In fact, many Day in the Cloud players set up informal Twitter teams on the ground to help them out during the game. (Not everyone on the chosen flights knew about the game in advance—but one of the game’s organizers told me afterward that about a dozen people on board each flight came prepared to play.) These on-the-ground collaborators serve as a kind of personal support system during the flight—not only good for the game, but also good for any anxiety and boredom you might ordinarily feel while flying.

  A game timer shows you how long you have left in the flight, which is how long you have to finish solving your puzzles and completing your creative challenges. After the plane descends below ten thousand feet, the final scores are calculated and reported to both planes. As one player blogged after the flight, “Suddenly, I hear a big cheer come up from the whole plane behind me. ‘We’ve won!’”7 Winning passengers are greeted by Virgin America gate agents like conquering heroes when they walk off the plane.

  All in all, it makes for quite a brilliant image: two planes passing in the sky, one heading north, the other south, trying to solve the same problems from above the clouds as they race along at hundreds of miles an hour.

  Okay. So maybe this sounds fun, but you’re still thinking: Why bother? Why add games to flights, when they already do what they’re supposed to—get us safely from one part of the world to another? Do we really need to have “fun” and “adventure” and make “progress” all the time?

  No, of course we don’t.

  If you’re a good sleeper or worker on flights, or the kind of person who can relax and read a good book or just enjoy the view, then tuning out the game would be easy. You can and should go about your travel reality as usual. Many people will—during the Day in the Cloud playtests, roughly half the fliers on the test flights chose to play, while the other half went about their business.

  But flying is difficult for many millions of people. It causes untold stress, anxiety, exhaustion. When something is that hard for so many people, when it causes so much daily suffering, needlessly, we should try to make it better if we can. If you’re a nervous flier or get bored easily or just can’t sleep on planes, an in-flight game could provide the kind of engagement and positive stimulation you need to actually start to enjoy and appreciate flying.

  Day in the Cloud demonstrates quite clearly that the technology and desire is already here for a very different travel reality.

  Consider some other possibilities. For example, an in-flight-only role-playing game that remembers exactly where you left off and picks up again whenever you board the plane. Its fantasy maps would overlay perfectly on top of the real-time Google maps. Each quest could be undertaken only while you’re actually flying through that part of the realm.

  Collaborative, GPS-enabled challenges would require you to partner up with someone on the ground within a hundred-mile radius of your plane and synchronize your virtual actions together as you fly overhead. Suddenly, flying over Nebraska is very different from flying over Kansas—because perhaps you have allies in Nebraska who can help you score more points, if you can get them to log on and play during those exact fifteen minutes you’re flying overhead.

  Of course, frequent-flier miles could also be made to be much more useful than they are now. For instance, you could distribute them as experience points across various categories of skill, talent, and ability to power up your in-flight avatar.

  In-flight games even suggest a new model for earning seat upgrades—first player to score a certain number of points wins a first-class seat. As one Day in the Cloud player reported from the playtest, “At this point one of the attendants asks if I would like to move to first class since there’s more room and I’m effectively the star player. I’m a bit reluctant, being that I’d lose my newfound friends sitting next to me.”8 (In case you’re wondering, he eventually convinced the attendant that they should all move up together, so they could keep collaborating.)

  Ultimately, when every mile you cover in the air is a chance to rack up more mission points, and every passenger on the plane is a potential ally, and flying over a town or city is a chance to connect with the people who live there, the whole experience becomes charged with potential to do more than just get where you’re going.

  THE EXAMPLE OF in-flight games presents the basic case for developing games that connect with our everyday lives: these games can help people suffer less and enjoy the real world more. When an experience is difficult for us, offering challenging goals, tracking points and levels and achievements, and providing virtual rewards can make it easier to get through the experience. Ultimately, that’s the most important work that game designers can do in the future: to make things that are hard for us as rewarding—as intrinsically rewarding—as possible.

  But what about activities that we already enjoy?

  Can games motivate us to make a better effort, even when we already love what we’re doing?

  Trying to improve an already enjoyable activity by adding points, levels, and achievements has its risks. Economists have demonstrated that offering people an extrinsic reward (like money or prizes) for something they’re already doing—and already enjoying—actually makes them feel less motivated and less rewarded. But game points and achievements don’t have extrinsic value yet—so as long as the main prize is glory, bragging rights, and personal fiero, the danger of devaluing a pleasurable experience with game feedback is relatively low. But it’s not nonexistent. Like money or prizes, the opportunity to earn points and level up could potentially distract us from the initial reasons we like to do an activity.

  Clearly, we have to be thoughtful about where and when we apply game-like feedback systems. If everything in life becomes about tackling harder challenges, scoring more points, and reaching higher levels, we run the risk of becoming too focused on the gratifications of positive feedback. And the last thing we want is to lose our ability to enjoy an activity for its own sake.

  So why risk it at all? Because measuring our efforts with gamelike feedback systems makes it easie
r for us to get better at any effort we undertake. As the great nineteenth-century mathematical physicist Lord Kelvin famously said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” We need real-time data to understand our performance: are we getting better or worse? And we can use quantitative benchmarks—specific, numerical goals we want to achieve—to focus our efforts and motivate us to try harder.

  Real-time data and quantitative benchmarks are the reason why gamers get consistently better at virtually any game they play: their performance is consistently measured and reflected back to them, with advancing progress bars, points, levels, and achievements. It’s easy for players to see exactly how and when they’re making progress. This kind of instantaneous, positive feedback drives players to try harder and to succeed at more difficult challenges.

  That’s why it’s worth considering making things we already love more gamelike. It can make us better at them, and help us set our sights higher.

  Nike+

  Let’s consider the gamelike Nike+ (or “Nike plus”) running system, a motivational platform that is wildly popular among people who already love to run—especially those who want to run farther and faster.

  Nike+

  Stats! Stats! It got me out of bed to run this morning cuz I need BETTER STATS. It’s real world achievement points! Who else will play with me? I seek challengers!9

  —Message board post from a new Nike+ runner

  The very first time I went running with the Nike+ system, I ran faster than I had in my entire life.

  I was running my favorite route, a four-and-a-half-mile course in the Berkeley Hills. In six years, running it a couple times a week, I’d never once finished faster than 41:43. But on my first Nike+ run, I clocked in at 39:33, more than two minutes ahead of my all-time personal best. How in the world did I suddenly get so much faster? It’s no mystery: I was motivated by better, real-time feedback and by the promise of online rewards when I got home.