Some people, of course, are natural social butterflies or nightlife adventurers. For others—workaholics, homebodies, introverts—getting out and doing something new is no small feat, especially when there are so many compelling reasons to stay in our own living rooms.
There’s a popular gamer T-shirt that shows an Xbox Live-style badge of a door ajar with these words alongside: “Achievement unlocked: Left the house.”13 It’s a joke, but it also speaks to the real challenges of trying to lead a meaningful, balanced life in the nonvirtual world. As we struggle to find the right balance between virtual and real-life adventures, a game like Foursquare can nudge us in the right direction and help us put our best efforts where we can reap the most satisfying rewards: back in the real world, with the help of a good game.
CHAPTER NINE
Fun with Strangers
HOW ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES CAN CREATE NEW REAL-WORLD COMMUNITIES
It’s a cold and dreary afternoon, and you’re walking down a busy street. You’re lost in your thoughts when suddenly a woman’s voice whispers in your ear, “There’s a lover nearby. . .” You look around, but everyone seems as lost in their own world as you were just a few seconds ago. If there’s a lover nearby, you have no idea who it is.
Then you hear the voice again, this time updating you on your game statistics : “Your life is now at level six.” That’s one level higher than it was before the lover passed by.
Some stranger on the street just gave you a life.
But who was it? Is it that kid sitting on the steps now a few buildings behind you, with his earbuds tucked in? He looks like he’s listening to music—but is he listening for lovers, too? Or is the lover that man in the suit with his Bluetooth earpiece, pacing back and forth? He looks like he’s on a business call—but could he be your secret benefactor?
Or has the lover moved on? Perhaps you are on your own again.
You haven’t gone another half block when the voice interrupts, this time more insistently, “There’s a dancer nearby.” Then, right away: “There’s another dancer nearby. Your life is now at level four.” Damn! Who just stole two lives from you?
It must be a couple, playing together, because you’ve lost two lives in such rapid succession. You spin around and notice a couple holding hands walking in the opposite direction. They might be wearing headphones under their hoods. You didn’t notice them before, but they must be the dancers. You hurry down the block before they circle back and take another life from you.
Clearly, you need to find some other lovers as quickly as possible, team up, and restore each other’s life levels. If your life falls to zero, you’re out of the game. But how do you discover the other players hidden in the crowd? As the game instructions suggest, “You could find a stranger and ask them, ‘Are you a Lover or a Dancer?’” But that feels too forward, too abrasive. You feel more comfortable scanning the crowd, looking for people who seem to be looking for others. That way, you can gravitate toward the most promising strangers, stand near them, and wait to see if your life level goes up or down.
If nothing happens, you know they’re not playing the game and you don’t have to bother them. But if your life level goes up, you can try to smile and make eye contact. You can try to show the stranger that you can be trusted....
Learning how to offer comfort to strangers, and how to receive it, is the primary challenge of a game called, naturally, the Comfort of Strangers. It’s a game for outdoor city spaces, designed by British developers Simon Evans and Simon Johnson. It’s played on PDAs and phones with Bluetooth detection that alert you via your headphones or earpiece whenever other players are within a few yards’ distance. The PDAs automatically detect other players within a few yards and register a gain or loss of life whenever you cross paths. Half the players are “lovers”; they form one team. The other half are “dancers,” and they form the opposing team. If you encounter a player on your team, you gain a life; if you encounter a player on the opposing team, you lose one.
The Comfort of Strangers is played anonymously; you can download and start the application and wander out into the city streets without any idea of who else is playing or how many players there are. There’s no visual or screen element to the game, so you can play it quite discreetly, with your PDA tucked into a pocket. The only clue that you’re playing is that you’re wearing headphones—but it’s easy to blend in with the increasing number of people who wear earbuds or earpieces while out in public spaces.
At the start of the game, you don’t know what side you’re on. You have to learn whether you’re a lover or a dancer by listening to the voice that whispers in your ear and keeping track of whether your life is going up or down. Everyone starts the game with ten lives, and when only one team remains alive, the game ends.
According to Evans and Johnson, the game is designed to evoke the feelings of loneliness and anonymity that are a mainstay of urban life—as well as to provide opportunities for strangers to mean something to each other, if only briefly. As they explain, “The game immerses players in the crowd, exposing them to the ambivalent feelings aroused by city life, the freedom of anonymity and its loneliness. Out of the drive to stay in the game, players create ad hoc, or improvised, social groups.”1 They have to develop their intuition about how to tell who else is playing, and therefore who represents a part of the game community. They learn to see strangers for the potential relationships they represent, not just as obstacles to avoid as they pass by.
The emotional impact of the Comfort of Strangers is intense. It not only heightens your awareness of the potential for strangers to play a role in your life, it also provokes a real curiosity about others, and a longing to connect. When you start the game, you feel like you might be the only one playing. Each time you encounter another player, it’s reassuring—even if they’re on the other team. When I asked Simon Johnson about the social goals of the game, he told me this was intentional:We wanted our players to find some way to connect with the strangers around them, so we tried to make them feel lost and alone. We set the game up to create a degree of uncertainty in players as to who was and was not playing. We played with the boundary between players and nonplayers so that finding another playing stranger always brings you comfort, even if they’re on the opposite side. Because at least they understand your actions, they understand that you are part of the same game.2
The Comfort of Strangers can be a short game or a long game, depending on how willing players are to overcome their hesitations about reaching out to strangers, and depending on how tightly they can learn to stick together in the crowd.
In theory, if such a game became immensely popular, you could play it all the time, as part of your regular routine—you’d simply turn the game on whenever you walked outside and always keep open the possibility of running across another player as you went about your ordinary business. But in practice, while games like this are still relatively new, there isn’t a critical mass of players to accommodate continuous play. Instead, players organize games online and set precise windows of time and playing fields: for example, in a certain neighborhood, during a certain hour, on a particular date. This kind of advanced schedule keeps players anonymous, but ensures there will be enough density of play for players to have a good chance of encountering each other.
Because a critical mass is so important to games like the Comfort of Strangers, in 2008 Evans and Johnson cofounded an annual Bristol-based festival called Interesting Games, or Igfest, for innovative outdoor games. The festival is meant to provide support for and exposure to other game developers who are working to make cities more interesting and friendlier spaces. And it’s one of an increasing number of urban game festivals worldwide—from the annual Come Out & Play festival in New York City, founded in 2006, and the Hide & Seek Weekender festival in London, founded in 2007, to the Urban Play festival in Seoul, South Korea, founded in 2005—that are designed to test the power of games to improve the feeling of community in real-world spaces.<
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These outdoor game festivals gather critical masses of players together for an entire week or weekend of games with the aim of helping to introduce these games to the public at large. They also embody our ninth fix for reality in action: FIX # 9 : MORE FUN WITH STRANGERS
Compared with games, reality is lonely and isolating. Games help us band together and create powerful communities from scratch.
What does it mean to create a community from scratch?
It’s hard to pin down the difference between a community and a crowd, but we know it when we feel it. Community feels good. It feels like belonging, fitting in, and actively caring about something together. Community typically arises when a group of people who have a common interest start to interact with each other in order to further that interest. It requires positive participation from everyone in the group.
In order to turn a group of strangers into a community, you have to follow two basic steps: first, cultivate a shared interest among strangers, and, second, give them the opportunity and means to interact with each other around that interest.
That’s exactly what a good multiplayer game does best. It focuses the attention of a group of people on a common goal, even if they think they have nothing in common with each other. And it gives them the means and motivation to pursue that goal, even if they had no intention of interacting with each other previously.
Does a game community among strangers last? Not always. Sometimes it lasts only as long as the game itself. The players might never see or talk to each other again. And that’s perfectly okay. We often tend to think of communities as best when they’re long-term and stable, and certainly the strength of a community can grow over time. But communities can also confer real benefits even when they last for mere days, hours, or even minutes.
When we have community, we feel what anthropologists call “communitas,” or spirit of community.3 Communitas is a powerful sense of togetherness, solidarity, and social connection. And it protects against loneliness and alienation.
Even a small taste of communitas can be enough to bring us back to the social world if we feel isolated from it, or to renew our commitment to participating actively and positively in the lives of people around us. Experiencing a short burst of community in a space that previously felt uninviting or simply uninteresting can also permanently change our relationship to that space. It becomes a space for us to act and to be of service, not just to pass through or observe.
Comfort of Strangers designers Evans and Johnson believe that experiencing communitas in an everyday game can spark a taste for the kinds of community action that make the world a better place. Learning to improvise with strangers toward a shared goal teaches players what they call “swarm intelligence”—intelligence that makes people better able and more likely to band together toward positive ends. “As we’re making these games, we dream of the other revolutionary things swarm intelligence might make possible. Low-carbon futures, mass creativity, living happily with less.”
It’s not such a radical idea. To see why, let’s look at two other games designed to create unexpected moments of communitas in a specific shared space: Ghosts of a Chance, a game for a national museum, and Bounce, a game for a retirement center. Both groundbreaking projects demonstrate the growing importance of having more fun with strangers and of using games to build our own capacity for community participation.
Ghosts of a Chance: A Game to Reinvent Membership
Most museums offer memberships where members pay an annual fee and can then visit the museum as often as they’d like. It’s a good way to raise money and promote visitation, but it’s not a particularly good way to experience membership. Members of the museum are, for the most part, like any other visitor: they take in the museum’s offerings, but don’t interact with other members, or even know who they are.
Recently, the Smithsonian American Art Museum set out to experiment with a new model of museum membership, a way to really belong to a museum. It’s a model that calls for members to contribute real content to the museum’s collection and to collaborate with each other online in between museum visits. To test this more participatory model of membership, the Smithsonian developed a six-week alternate reality game called Ghosts of a Chance for one of its main facilities, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art.
The Luce Foundation Center is described as a “visible storage facility” for the Smithsonian. It displays more than thirty-five hundred pieces of American art, including sculptures, paintings, craft objects, and folk works, in densely packed floor-to-ceiling glass cases. Its primary purpose is to display as much of the vast Smithsonian collection as possible, much more than can typically be included in the other galleries.
Because it’s so packed with art, visiting the Luce Foundation Center is a bit of a treasure hunt already: among all the diverse pieces, you have to seek out the special objects that speak to you most. The center has at the core of its mission teaching visitors to really hear what the art objects have to say, and its educational materials often focus on how art is a window into the lives and times of its creators. There’s a sense in the museum that history lingers in the art objects almost like a ghost, waiting to whisper its tales to visitors. Learning how to hear those tales, and how to whisper our own histories through artwork, was the inspiration for the Ghosts of a Chance game.
The game begins with what at first seems like a real press release from the museum. Members, as well as public visitors to the museum’s website, are invited to meet two new curators at the center, Daniel Libbe and Daisy For-tunis. According to the press release, they will both be writing about their work on blogs and their social network pages. Read the fine print, however, and you realize Daniel and Daisy aren’t real curators. They’re fictional characters in a new, experimental game produced by the Smithsonian. And if you want to find out more, you have to friend these fictional characters on Facebook and start following their blogs.
That’s when you discover that Daniel and Daisy are having a rather extraordinary experience: they’re communicating regularly with two ghosts haunting the Luce gallery, a man and a woman who lived a century and a half ago. Angered at being forgotten by history, the ghosts are threatening to destroy the museum’s precious artifacts—and they won’t rest until their stories are represented in the museum’s glass cases.
Frightened but resourceful, Daniel and Daisy make special arrangements for a one-day exhibit called, naturally, Ghosts of a Chance. But ethereal ghosts can’t make real art—so Daniel and Daisy need the museum members to help. It’s up to them, the players, to interpret the two ghosts’ histories—by transforming their tales into art objects that the curators promise to display in a special gallery event.
And so a gameplay mechanism is established. Each week, the ghosts reveal a new dramatic chapter in their lives to Daniel and Daisy, describing in mysterious terms the kind of art piece that they feel would best capture their secret histories. Daniel and Daisy then pass on the new information to members of the game and charge them with the important mission of making that art real, then sending it to the Smithsonian for inclusion in the exhibit.
In the first mission, for example, players learn that one of the ghosts is tortured by memories of a dear friend, a young lady from a very wealthy family:She’s a girl from another time, she blushes and rustles as she passes, taffeta skirt buoyed by crinolines. She has taught herself to fling her burnished curls with just a turn of her head; she and her sister practiced for hours in front of an oval mirror. At twenty, she is poised; she understands her value; her next great adventure awaits her. A mate. Travel. Then, domesticity—which involves a love of gardening, cleanliness and the proper care of servants.... 4
Players are then challenged to craft this girl’s most prized piece of jewelry, what the ghosts call the Necklace of the Subaltern Betrayer. Instructions for designing the necklace are spare, and poetic: “The Necklace I want should fit perfectly around her neck, but remain there only long enough
for me to steal it right off again.”
Players discussed the challenge in online forums: What does “subaltern” mean? (They learned that it is a political-science term for people who lack power or social status in a given society.) They debated: Should the necklace be old-fashioned, or a modern interpretation of the tale? They collaborated to unpack the meaning of the tale, to analyze the cultural clues embedded in it, and to strategize about how to craft a necklace that could evoke such a story and communicate such intense feelings.
As a community, the players decided the necklace should convey what it would feel like to wear the heavy and inflexible societal expectations of a woman of money and privilege. One player created a necklace titled “Someone to Watch Over Me,” comprising more than a dozen squares of fabric, each screenprinted with the image of a different staring eye. The eyes are stacked on top of each other in geometric sets of one, two, and three, and strung along a pretty pink ribbon. The aesthetic is both girly and intimidating. Another player submitted a necklace titled “Enclosure,” which appears to be constructed from barbed wire strung with rubies. Both the title and design of the work suggest that its wearer is trapped and limited by her social status, her riches preventing her from living the life she might otherwise pursue.
All of the player-created artifacts received by the museum were cataloged online and archived at the Luce Foundation Center. Players around the world could see the different interpretations of the challenge—either online or in person by visiting the objects on temporary display at the museum. In the end, more than six thousand Smithsonian members and fans participated in the online experience, while two hundred fifty attended the opening of the Ghosts of a Chance exhibit in person.5
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World Page 19