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

by Jane McGonigal

  Although TSDO can be played alone, from my observations TSDO dancing is usually at least a little bit social. Most players seem to recruit at least one partner in crime when they play, so they can film each other’s dance quests and compete in the same dance-offs. And many players create group disguises for two, three, four, or even five people who plan to complete all the quests together as a single top secret unit.

  Most important, TSDO helps players think of themselves as dancers—which seems to make them much more likely to dance together in person, when the opportunities arise. Though this isn’t a scientific survey, all of my friends who have played TSDO, myself included, have found themselves dancing more often in a traditional group venue—at parties, at Bollywood dance clubs, even street festivals—long after they finished the game.

  Like all of the best happiness hacks, you don’t have to keep playing to maintain the benefits. A good game is that powerful—it can change the way you see yourself and what you’re capable of forever.

  WHETHER WE’RE KILLING each other with kindness, turning tombstones into full houses, or dancing in disguise, there’s no way around it: sometimes we have to sneak up on our happiness.

  Two hundred years ago, the British political philosopher John Stuart Mill suggested a subversive approach to self-help. It’s an approach that has much in common with the growing community of happiness hackers. Mill argued that while happiness might be our primary goal, we can’t pursue it directly. It’s too tricky, too hard to pin down, too easy to scare off. So we have to set other, more concrete goals, and in the pursuit of those goals, we capture happiness as a kind of by-product. He called this approaching happiness “sideways, like a crab.”30 We can’t let it know we’re coming. We just kind of sneak up on it from the side.

  That’s exactly what happiness hacks are designed to help us do: approach happiness sideways, and as a group. In fact, with crowd games, it might be more accurate to say that hacks let us encircle happiness—we’re all sneaking up on it from different angles together. We play these crowd games because we enjoy them in the moment and because we crave the social connectivity of a multiplayer experience. But a few intense and memorable exposures to a happiness hack can shift our ways of thinking and acting in the long run, about things as diverse as kindness to strangers, dancing, and death. And if you get enough people to shift in one place, you really can change the larger culture.

  The best part about happiness hacks is that it doesn’t take a lot of technological know-how or sophisticated development to create one that works. It just takes a good understanding of how games motivate, reward, and connect us. With the creativity to invent some unnecessary obstacles and the courage to playtest them with as many people as possible, anyone can dream up and share new solutions to the happiness challenges of everyday life.

  Alternate reality games of all kinds are designed to make us better: happier, more creative, and more emotionally resilient. When we are better in these ways, we are able to engage with the real world more wholeheartedly—to wake up each day with a stronger sense of purpose, optimism, community, and meaning in our lives.

  But big crowd games, which are the subject of the next part of this book, can do more than make us better. They can help solve some of the most urgent challenges we face as the human species.

  It turns out that our ability to make ourselves better as individuals—to dive into more satisfying work, to foster real hopes of success, to strengthen our social connections, to become a part of something bigger—also helps us work together, longer, on more complex and pressing problems. Games aren’t just about improving our lives today—they can help us create a positive legacy for the future.

  PART THREE

  How Very Big Games Can Change the World

  You can radically alter the nature of a game by changing the number of people playing it.

  —The New Games Book1

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Engagement Economy

  On June 24, 2009, more than twenty thousand Britons joined forces online to investigate one of the biggest scandals in British parliament history—investigations that led to the resignations of dozens of parliament members and ultimately inspired sweeping political reform. How did these ordinary citizens make such a big difference? They did it by playing a game.

  When the game began, the scandal had been brewing in the newspapers for weeks. According to leaked government documents, hundreds of members of parliament, or MPs, were regularly filing illegal expense claims, charging taxpayers up to tens of thousands of pounds annually for personal expenses completely unrelated to their political service. In a particularly inflammatory exposé, the Telegraph reported that Sir Peter Viggers, an MP from the southern coast of England, claimed £32,000 for personal gardening expenses, including £1,645 for a “floating duck island.”1

  The public was outraged and demanded a full accounting of all MP expenses. In response, the government agreed to release the complete records for four years’ worth of MP claims. But in what was widely considered to be an attempt to hinder further investigation of the scandal, the government shared the data in the most unhelpful format possible: an unsorted collection of more than a million expense forms and receipts that had been scanned electronically. The files were saved as images, so that it was impossible to search or to cross-reference the claims. And much of the data had been redacted with big black blocks obscuring the detailed descriptions of items expensed. The data dump was dubbed “Blackoutgate” and called a “cover-up of massive proportions.”2

  The editors at the Guardian knew it would take too long for their own reporters to sort through the entire data dump and make sense of it. So they decided to enlist the public’s direct help in uncovering whatever it was the authorities didn’t want uncovered. In other words, they “crowdsourced” the investigation.

  The term crowdsourcing, coined by technology journalist Jeff Howe in 2006, is shorthand for outsourcing a job to the crowd.3 It means inviting a large group of people, usually on the Internet, to cooperatively tackle a big project. Wikipedia, the collaboratively authored online encyclopedia created by a crowd of more than 10 million unpaid (and often anonymous) writers and editors, is a prime example. Crowdsourcing is a way to do collectively, faster, better, and more cheaply what might otherwise be impossible for a single organization to do alone.

  With a million uncataloged government documents on its hands and no way of knowing which document could prove to be the smoking gun for which MP, the Guardian knew it needed all the crowd help it could get. So it decided to tap into the wisdom of the crowds—not with a wiki, however, but with a game.

  To develop the game, they turned to a young, but accomplished, London-based software developer named Simon Willison. His task: convert and condense all the scanned forms and expenses into 458,832 online documents, and set up a website where anyone could examine the public records for incriminating details. For the price of just a week’s worth of the development team’s time and a paltry fifty pounds to rent temporary servers to host the documents, the Guardian launched Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, the world’s first massively multiplayer investigative journalism project.

  HOW TO PLAY INVESTIGATE YOUR MP’S EXPENSES

  Join us in digging through the MPs’ expenses to review each document. Your mission: Decide whether it contains interesting information, and extract the key facts.

  Some pages will be covering letters or claim forms for office stationery. These can be safely ignored.

  But somewhere in here is the receipt for a duck island. And who knows what else may turn up. If you find something which you think needs further attention, simply hit the button marked “Investigate this!” and we’ll take a closer look.

  Step 1: Find a document.

  Step 2: Decide what kind of thing it is (expenses claim, proof/ receipt, or blank)

  Step 3: Transcribe the line items

  Step 4: Make any specific observations about why a claim deserves further
scrutiny

  Examples of things to look out for: food bills, repeated claims for less than £250 (the limit for claims not backed up by a receipt), and rejected claims.

  Investigate your own MP: Enter your postal code to bring up all of your MP’s claims and receipts. Or investigate by political party.

  All the MPs’ records are on there now—so let us know what you find.

  Just three days into the game, it was clear that the crowdsourcing effort was an unprecedented success. More than 20,000 players had already analyzed more than 170,000 electronic documents. Michael Andersen, a member of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University and an expert on Internet journalism, reported at the time: “Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project—170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent—that’s breathtaking.”4

  A visitor participation rate measures the percentage of visitors who sign up and make a contribution to a network. A rate of 56 percent for any crowdsourced project was unheard of previously. (By comparison, roughly 4.6 percent of visitors to Wikipedia make a contribution to the online encyclopedia.)5 It’s especially breathtaking considering the mind-numbingly tedious nature of the actual accounting work being performed.

  So what accounted for this unprecedented participation in a citizen journalism project? According to Willison, it all boiled down to rewarding participants in the right way: with the emotional rewards of a good game.

  “The number one lesson from this project: Make it feel like a game,” Willison said in an interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab. “Any time that you’re trying to get people to give you stuff, to do stuff for you, the most important thing is that people know that what they’re doing is having an effect. If you’re not giving people the ‘I rock’ vibe, you’re not getting people to stick around.”

  The “I rock” vibe is another way of talking about classic game rewards, such as having a clear sense of purpose, making an obvious impact, making continuous progress, enjoying a good chance of success, and experiencing plenty of fiero moments. The Investigate Your MP’s Expenses project featured all of these emotional rewards, in droves.

  The game interface made it easy to take action and see your impact right away. When you examined a document, you had a panel of bright, shiny buttons to press depending on what you’d found. First, you’d decide what kind of document you were looking at: a claim form, proof (a receipt, invoice, or purchase order), a blank page, or “something we haven’t thought of.” Then you’d determine the level of interest of the document: “Interesting,” “Not interesting,” or “Investigate this! I want to know more.” When you’d made your selection, the button lit up, giving you a satisfying feeling of productivity, even if all you’d found was a blank page that wasn’t very interesting. And there was always a real hope of success: the promise of finding the next “duck pond” to keep you working quickly through the flow of documents.

  A real-time activity feed showed the names of players logged in recently and the actions they’d taken in the game. This feed made the site feel social. Even though you were not directly interacting with other players, you were copresent with them on the site and sharing the same experience. There was also a series of top contributor lists, for the previous forty-eight hours as well as for all time, to motivate both short-term and long-term participation. And to celebrate successful participation, as well as sheer volume of participation, there was also a “best individual discoveries” page that identified key findings from individual players. Some of these discoveries were over-the-top luxuries offensive to one’s sense of propriety: a £240 giraffe print or a £225 fountain pen, for example. Others were mathematical errors or inconsistencies suggesting individuals were reimbursed more than they were owed. As one player noted, “Bad math on page 29 of an invoice from MP Denis MacShane, who claimed £1,730 worth of reimbursement, when the sum of those items listed was only £1,480.”

  But perhaps most importantly, the website also featured a section labeled “Data: What we’ve learned from your work so far.” This page put the individual players’ efforts into a much bigger context—and guaranteed that contributors would see the real results of their efforts. Some of the key results of the game included these findings:• On average, each MP expensed twice his or her annual salary, or more than £140,000 in expenses on top of a £60,675 salary.

  • The total cost to taxpayers of personal items expensed by MPs is £88 million annually.

  And the game detailed:• The number of receipts and papers filed by each MP, ranging between 40 and 2,000

  • The total expense spending by party and by category (kitchen, garden, TV, food, etc.)

  • Online maps comparing travel expenses filed with actual distance from the House of Commons in London to the MPs’ home districts, making it easy to spot MPs grossly overcharging for travel (for example, MPs from nearby districts who filed £21,534 versus £4,418, or £10,105 versus £1,680)

  Bringing these numbers to light helped clarify the true extent of the crisis: a far more pervasive culture of extravagant personal reimbursement than originally suspected.

  So what did the players accomplish? Real political results. At least twenty-eight MPs resigned or declared their intention to do so at the end of their term, and by early 2010 criminal proceedings against four MPs investigated by the players were under way. New expense codes are being written, and old codes are being enforced more vigorously. Most concretely, hundreds of MPs were ordered to repay a total of £1.12 million.6

  It’s not all the doing of the Guardian’s gamers, of course. But without a doubt, the game played a crucial role. The citizen journalists helped put significant political pressure on the British government by keeping the scandal in the news. The longer the game continued, the more public momentum built to force major policy reform.

  Investigate Your MP’s Expenses enabled tens of thousands of citizens to participate directly in a new kind of political reform movement. Instead of just clamoring for change, they put their time and effort into creating evidence that change was needed. Crucially, the crowd of gamers did all of this important work faster than any individual organization could have, and they did it for free—lowering the costs of investigative journalism and speeding up the democratic reform process.

  Not all crowdsourcing projects are so successful. Working together on extreme scales is easier said than done. You can’t crowdsource without a crowd—and it turns out that actively engaged crowds can be hard to come by.

  In 2008, New York University professor and Internet researcher Clay Shirky sat down with IBM researcher Martin Wattenberg and tried to work out exactly how much human effort has gone into making Wikipedia. They looked at the total number of articles and edits, as well as the average article length and average time per edit. They factored in all of the reading time required to find knowledge gaps and spot errors, and all of the hours of programming and ongoing community management required to make those edits hang together coherently. After a lot of clever math, they worked out the following estimate:If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the accumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.... It’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.7

  On one hand, that’s no trivial effort. It’s the equivalent of rounding up a million people and convincing them to spend a hundred hours each contributing to Wikipedia, for free. Put another way: it’s like persuading ten thousand people to dedicate five full-time work years to the Wikipedia project. That’s a lot of effort to ask a lot of people to make, for no extrinsic reward, on behalf of someone else’s vision.

  On the other hand, given that there are 1.7 billion Internet users on the planet and twenty-four hours in a day, it really shoul
dn’t be that hard to successfully pull off lots of projects on the scale of Wikipedia.8 Hypothetically, if we could provide the right motivation, we should be able to complete one hundred Wikipedia-size projects every single day—if we could convince all 1.7 billion Internet users to spend most of their free time voluntarily contributing to crowdsourced projects.

  Maybe that’s unrealistic. More reasonably, if we could convince every Internet user to volunteer just one single hour a week, we could accomplish a great deal. Collectively, we would be able to complete nearly twenty Wikipedia-size projects every single week.

  Which really makes you wonder: with so much potential, why aren’t there even more Wikipedia-scale projects out there?

  The truth is, the Internet is littered with underperforming, barely populated, or completely abandoned collaboration spaces: wikis that have no contributors, discussion forums with no comments, open-source projects with no active users, social networks with barely a few members, and Facebook groups with plenty of members but few who ever do anything after joining. According to Shirky, more than half of all collaborative projects online fail to achieve the minimum number of participants necessary to even begin working on their goal, let alone achieve it.

  It’s not for a lack of time spent on the Internet. It’s just incredibly difficult to achieve the necessary critical mass of participation on any given serious project.

  For one thing, some participatory networks are more rewarding than others—and the most readily rewarding networks aren’t, as a rule, the ones doing serious work. Online games and “fun” social networks like Facebook provide the steadiest stream of intrinsic rewards. They’re autotelic spaces—spaces we visit for the pure enjoyment of it. Their primary purpose is to be rewarding, not to solve a problem or get work done. Unlike serious projects, they are engineered first and foremost to engage and satisfy our emotional cravings. And as a result, they are the projects that are absorbing the vast majority of our online participation bandwidth—our individual and collective capacity to contribute to one or more participatory networks.