This kind of job doesn’t yet exist outside of the game industry. But it should. “Player investment design lead” is a role that every single collaborative project or crowd initiative should fill in the future. When the game is intrinsically rewarding to play, you don’t have to pay people to participate—with real currency, virtual currency, or any other kind of scarce reward. Participation is its own reward, when the player is properly invested in his or her progress, in exploring the world fully, and in the community’s success.
So how exactly do you design good player investment? The Bungie job listing further details some of the core responsibilities of the position—and, in a nutshell, they give us a very good idea of four engagement principles any big crowd project should follow. As you can see, these four principles all serve the ultimate goal of building a compelling game world, satisfying game mechanics, and an inspiring game community.
The Player Investment Design Lead will design the mechanics that drive in-game player reward and incentives: • So players feel invested in the world and their character.
• So players have long-term goals.
• So players can’t grief or exploit them, or each other.
• So that content are rewards in and of themselves.
In other words, participants should be able to explore and impact a “world,” or shared social space that features both content and interactive opportunities. They should be able to create and develop a unique identity within that world. They should see the bigger picture when it comes to doing work in the world—both an opportunity to escalate challenge and to continue working over time toward bigger results. The game must be carefully designed so that the only way to be rewarded is to participate in good faith, because in any game players will do anything they get the most rewarded for doing. And the emphasis must be on making the content and experience intrinsically rewarding, rather than on providing compensation for doing something that would otherwise feel boring, trivial, or pointless.
Do these principles work as effectively for real-world problem solving as for virtual-world problem solving? Absolutely. They are clearly the shared secret of the success for projects like Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, Wikipedia, Free Rice, and Fold It!. In each case, the experience of participation is rewarding on its own merits, immersing a player inside an interactive world that motivates and rewards his or her best effort.
Gamers who have grown up being intensely engaged by well-designed virtual environments are hungry for better forms of engagement in their real lives. They’re seeking out ways to be blissfully productive while cooperating toward extreme-scale goals. They are a natural source of participation bandwidth for the kinds of citizen journalism, collective intelligence, humanitarian, and citizen science projects that we will increasingly seek to undertake.
As the examples in this chapter demonstrate, crowdsourcing games have an important role to play in how we achieve our democratic, scientific, and humanitarian goals over the next decade and beyond.
And more and more, these crowdsourcing games won’t be just about online work or computational tasks. Increasingly, they will take us out into physical environments and face-to-face social spaces. These new games will challenge crowds to mobilize for real-world social missions—and they may make it possible for gamers to change, or even save, real people’s lives as easily as they save virtual lives today.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Missions Impossible
Epic win /ˈεpIkˌ wIn/—
noun 1. an unexpected victory from an underdog
2. something fantastic that has worked out unbelievably well
3. the greatest possible way for man to succeed at anything interjection
4. an expression of happiness and/or awe at a highly favorable (and often improbable) event that has taken place: “Alright! Epic win!”
—from the Urban Dictionary1
What the world needs now are more epic wins: opportunities for ordinary people to do extraordinary things—like change or save someone’s life—every day.
“Epic win” is a gamer term. It’s used to describe a big, and usually surprising, success: a come-from-behind victory, an unorthodox strategy that works out spectacularly well, a team effort that goes much better than planned, a heroic effort from the most unlikely player.
The label “epic” makes these kinds of wins sound rare or exceptional. But in the gamer world, they’re not. Discussion forums are full of gamers sharing their most surprising and rewarding fiero moments. And they come in many different forms.
Some epic wins are about discovering we have abilities we didn’t know we had. One action-adventure gamer writes: “After over an hour of attempting the ridiculously impossible office battle scene in Indigo Prophecy, which I was sure I’d never finish, I finally passed it, exhausted and wracked with awe. I did that? Epic win.”2
Some are about upsetting other people’s expectations of what’s possible. A fantasy-football gamer writes: “I won the Champions League in Championship Manager coaching huge underdogs Malaga through a simulated season. Now that’s epic. It’s the most unlikely win ever.”
And still others are about inventing new positive outcomes we hadn’t even imagined before. A Grand Theft Auto player reports: “My epic win in GTA IV: Mountain biking to the top of the highest mountain from the city. Takes me 25 minutes real time. Just in time to see the sunrise.”
What do these three different kinds of epic wins have in common? They all help us revise our notion of what constitutes a realistic best-case-scenario outcome. Whatever we thought the best possible result could reasonably be before, after an epic win we’ve set a new precedent: We can do more. It can get better.
With each epic win, our possibility space expands—dramatically. That’s why epic wins are so crucial to creating sustainable economies of engagement. They make us curious about what more we can do—and as a result, we are more likely to take positive action again in the future. Epic wins help turn a one-off effort into passionate long-term participation.
Epic wins abound in gamer circles, for two reasons. First, in the face of ridiculous challenges, long odds, or great uncertainty, gamers cultivate extreme optimism. They have perfect confidence that even if success isn’t probable , it’s at least possible. So gamers’ efforts to achieve an epic win never feel pointless or hopeless. Second, gamers aren’t afraid to fail. Failing in a good game is at the very least fun and interesting; it can also be instructive and even empowering.
Extreme optimism and fun failure mean that gamers are more likely to put themselves in situations where epic wins can happen—situations where we take up unlikely missions and surprise ourselves with new awe-inspiring positive outcomes.
Ideally, the real world would present us with the same kind of intensely gratifying, save-the-world work flow we get from good games. But in real life, epic wins can be few and far between. We just don’t have the same kind of carefully designed opportunities to surprise ourselves with our own superpowers.
We don’t have an endless stream of opportunities to do something that matters right now, presented with clear instructions, and finely tuned to our moment-by-moment capabilities. Without that kind of creative and logistical support, there’s no easy way to go after epic goals and successfully achieve them in our everyday lives.
Fortunately, a new genre of games called social participation games is trying to change that. They’re designed to give players real-world volunteer tasks that feel as heroic, as satisfying, and—most importantly—as readily achievable as MMORPG quests. And as a result, a growing number of gamers are getting their hands dirty doing real-world good—and improving and saving real lives.
Take my friend Tom. He’s a young math teacher who lives in Portland, Oregon. He usually gets his epic wins playing Rock Band, or, as he tells me, “any game where you get to play as Spider-Man or Batman.” But recently, he started playing a social participation game called The Extraordinaries—and it has dramatically expanded
his sense of his own potential.
THE EXTRAORDINARIES
The Extraordinaries is a Web and mobile phone application designed to help you do good in your spare time, wherever you happen to be. Created by a team of San Francisco-based designers, entrepreneurs, and activists, its primary objective is to make being heroic in the real world as easy as being heroic in a virtual world.
The game’s motto is “Got two minutes? Be extraordinary!” Players can log in to the game from wherever they are and browse a list of “microvolunteer” missions that they can start and finish in literally just a few minutes. Each mission helps a real nonprofit organization accomplish one of its goals.
By design, The Extraordinaries’ mission dashboard works almost exactly like the World of Warcraft log of available quests. You flip through available opportunities, and every mission you see comes with a story about why it will help save the world, along with a step-by-step explanation of how to get it done. There’s never a shortage of important work to be done, and everything is designed to be doable by anyone willing to make a good-faith effort.
The first time my friend Tom logged in to The Extraordinaries, he immediately found a heroic mission he felt confident he could actually do. The mission was to use his iPhone to snap a photograph of a special “secret object,” tag the photo with his current GPS location, and upload it to a database.
The secret object was a defibrillator, or AED—the device used to deliver a lifesaving shock to thousands of heart attack victims each year. The mission was designed by First Aid Corps, which is creating a map of every publicly accessible defibrillator in the world. As the organization explains in its mission’s instructions:Each year, more than 200,000 Americans go into cardiac arrest—and within five minutes, the brain dies. Unfortunately, ambulances just can’t always get there in time. Only those in the nearby vicinity can respond within that time.
Government buildings, airports, schools, and more are installing defibrillators (shock pads) so that ordinary citizens can save lives in the event of an emergency. First Aid Corps is building a map of these devices with The Extraordinaries so that 911 can give someone a location to run to in the event of an emergency.
In other words, if you can find a defibrillator that isn’t on the map yet, and if you successfully photograph and report it, you can help First Aid Corps save lives.
With good mission design—a focused task, a clearly defined context for action, a real window of opportunity—something previously impossible to achieve, like saving a life, becomes possible. That’s the power of making volunteer work more like a game: players can be empowered to do amazing things, if their volunteer work is designed like a good quest.
In the First Aid Corps mission, the task of saving a life is presented just like a World of Warcraft quest. The instructions are straightforward, the reason for the mission compelling, and the task well within your ability level. If there’s a defibrillator somewhere you plan to be today, then you can be a superhero right away. If not, you now have a secret mission everywhere you go, until you find the brokenhearted logo that is the international symbol for a defibrillator.
The defibrillator that Tom found was in an elevator bank at Portland State University, where he is completing a graduate degree in math education. “I’ve looked past it while waiting for the elevator for years,” he told me afterward. “Suddenly it was relevant, and I was glad to have this random secret info.” Of course, it wasn’t secret information at all; the defibrillator was in plain public view. But Tom’s words here reveal just how effective The Extraordinaries’ promise really is: to give you a real chance to feel like a superhero, on a secret mission to save the world.
After Tom completed his mission, the win was scored on The Extraordinaries’ activity board for every other player to see: “Tom H mapped a defibrillator and helped to save lives.”
Later, Tom e-mailed me the news. “It was like a lifesaving scavenger hunt,” he told me. “Inherently awesome. Massive epic win.” The defibrillator mission was an epic win because, until that morning, Tom had no idea he had knowledge that could help save a life. He had a secret power he didn’t know about—and he was given a real opportunity to put that power to use.
What happens next? If Tom’s defibrillator does help save a life, he’ll know. The First Aid Corps updates its global map with links to news stories about each defibrillator’s usage. If “Live Saved” pops up next to your AED location, then you know that the AED you found really has helped save the day. Right now, it’s up to players to proactively check the status of their AEDs. But it’s easy to imagine a platform like The Extraordinaries evolving to push updates directly to players via text message or social network update whenever their small act of good helps accomplish something bigger. In that case, the small yet epic win of discovering and sharing a defibrillator’s location could lead to an even bigger epic win down the road.
The call to action of The Extraordinaries—“Be extraordinary!”—is really just another way of saying: Surprise yourself with how much good you can do. Redefine what your best possible outcome for the day could be. It’s not that we don’t have the ability to do good for others. It’s just that no one has shown us how fast, easy, and addictive it can be to tackle what feel like missions impossible.
By the fall of 2009, within just a few months of its launch, The Extraordinaries had become a small but growing social network, with more than thirty-three hundred members who had collectively completed more than twenty-two thousand missions on behalf of more than twenty nonprofit organizations. That’s an average of seven epic wins per member. Judging from just that statistic alone, the app clearly isn’t the most addictive experience in the world yet. But it’s doing extremely important work: it’s showcasing the potential for more epic wins, every day, for everyone.
Which brings us to our next fix for reality:FIX # 12 : MORE EPIC WINS
Compared with games, reality is unambitious. Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together.
Why do we need more epic wins in our everyday lives? Right now, as a planet, we are collectively facing some of the most incredible odds in our history: climate change, global economic crises, food insecurity, geopolitical instability, and rising rates of depression worldwide. Emphatically, these are problems that cannot be solved online. They require real-world action, not just online interaction.
The exciting promise of a project like The Extraordinaries is that we can do more than pick the brains of gamers.3 We can harness the social participation of the masses.
Social participation means using more than our minds: it requires throwing our hearts and our bodies into action. So the challenge that lies ahead is to design social participation tasks (SPTs) to stand alongside the growing number of human intelligence tasks (HITs) that currently make up the majority of online crowdsourcing projects: transcribing and subtitling videos on DotSUB, for example, analyzing an MP’s receipts in Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, or even simply evaluating an idea for a new product name as “good” or “bad.” What these efforts all have in common is that they appeal primarily to our cognitive, rather than our emotional and social, capabilities.
HITs are, without a doubt, important work, but we are more than just thinking machines. We are human beings capable of reaching out to others, feeling empathy, recognizing need, showing up, and making a difference in someone else’s life. We have social powers, and we can mobilize them for good—in real-world spaces, not just online spaces. All we need is the right kind of mission support.
Consider one more mission from The Extraordinaries game—it’s my personal favorite, the one that made me feel the biggest epic win. This one is a social participation task for Christel House, an organization dedicated to helping children living in poverty get the education, nutrition, health care, and mentorship they need to become self-sufficient, contributing members of society. And it’s a perfect example of a mission that takes advantage of some o
f our key social powers: the ability to empathize, advise, and provide positive emotional support.
The mission is simple: Write a short text message of good luck to a child about to take a potentially life-changing standardized test. You can choose whether to send your message to a child in the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, South Africa, or India. Christel House will ensure your online message gets into the hands of a real student, in a physical classroom, moments before he or she takes the test. Nathan Hand, the development associate for Christel House who helped design this social participation task for The Extraordinaries, explains it this way:All these kids around the world have at some point, in every country, some sort of standardized test that they need to pass. Sometimes it makes or breaks graduation, sometimes it makes or breaks them getting into the next grade level—it depends on the country—but no matter where the child is, it’s a lot of pressure, and they spend their whole life preparing for it. What we’re trying to do is basically crowdsource the pat on the back.4
I chose to write my good-luck message to a student in India. I shared my favorite trick: “Before you start the test, smile as wide as you can! If you get stuck on a hard question, stop, and smile!” I knew from scientific research that smiling even when you don’t feel like it can actually trigger real feelings of confidence and optimism.5
As I clicked send, I pictured a young student in India taking my advice. In that moment, I felt meaningfully connected to another human being I had hardly any hope of meeting or speaking to otherwise. I had real hope that I was able to reach out to another person in a time of difficulty and give them support that mattered. In other words, I had exactly the experience Hand describes as the goal of the Christel House Extraordinaries mission: “People literally, in a matter of seconds, can have a meaningful engagement with a kid in need through us. They have the warm glow, then they remember us, and they remember those kids, and that’s what it’s about.”6
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World Page 27