It’s also creating a new way of helping to save the world: by investing our social attention in people who are doing good. As the game’s cocreator Richard Dorsey likes to say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if every time we unplugged an appliance or flipped a switch, somebody noticed?”16 By turning energy saving into a massively multiplayer experience, Lost Joules takes advantage of the network effect: it amplifies my private epic wins into spectacular social achievements.
Of course, many people won’t want their energy consumption to be scrutinized and wagered on by the playing public. But given the history of increasing public disclosure on the Internet—from blogs to videos to social network to real-time status updates—it’s a safe bet that the lure of being lauded in the public spotlight will attract plenty of players. And thanks to the game’s two-tier design, even people not ready to expose their own energy consumption can help drive energy-saving behavior just by making a virtual investment.
In this way, Lost Joules represents an important design innovation in the social participation game space. It’s creating two different kinds of equally important social participation tasks, for people with smart meters and people without smart meters.
First, and most obviously, players with smart meters can tackle the social participation task of reducing their energy consumption. This is the core “do-good” mission of the game. But there’s also the SPT of lavishing our attention on each other’s good acts. People who don’t have access to smart meters yet can still play the game, by making wagers on players who do have smart meters. And this is a real contribution to the common good, since it creates social rewards for the energy savers. Everyone likes to feel valued; Lost Joules uses virtual currency to help us show just how much we value the world-changing contributions of others.
So what’s the best-case-scenario outcome for a game like Lost Joules? Games are a major driver of technology adoption; people are often more willing to try new technologies when there’s a good game attached. And getting people to try smart-meter technology is increasingly important, as we try to become more informed, efficient consumers of energy. Smart meters have been proven remarkably effective at changing our energy consumption behaviors for the better. The more people who use them, the better.
In the bigger picture, the real potential of Lost Joules is to demonstrate how to make better use of the abundant emotional and virtual rewards that games provide to motivate change-the-world behavior. Right now, it’s easier and more fun to be a superhero in a video game than it is to help solve real global problems in everyday life. But social participation games like Lost Joules are starting to tip the balance: soon, we may find ourselves able to do both at the same time.
The three projects described in this chapter—The Extraordinaries, Groundcrew, and Lost Joules—are just starting to unfold. They are all highly speculative, still in development, with modest if any results so far. They are beyond leading edge. They’re bleeding edge: so new, there’s significant risk that they will fail.
In fact, there’s a very good chance some of them may even wind up being examples of an epic fail rather than an epic win. But, as any good gamer knows, failure can be both rewarding and empowering, if you learn from your mistakes. Testing our potential to do more than we thought possible brings us closer to achieving it someday. As the familiar saying goes, “Even if you fall flat on your face, you’re still moving forward.”
Epic wins, when connected to real-world causes, help us discover an ability to contribute to the common good that we didn’t know we had. They help us upset other people’s expectations of what is possible for ordinary people to accomplish in their spare time. And they help us set goals that would have seemed ludicrous—impossible—before we had so many volunteers so well equipped to help each other, and so effectively mobilized.
In short, social participation games are turning us into superheroes in our real lives.
And every superhero needs superpowers.
What kind of superpowers do we need most? Collaboration superpowers—the kind that enable us to combine forces, amplify each other’s strengths, and tackle problems at a planetary scale.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Collaboration Superpowers
By the age of twenty-one, the average young American has spent somewhere between two and three thousand hours reading books—and more than ten thousand hours playing computer and video games.1 With each year after 1980 you’re born, these statistics are increasingly likely to be true.
To put that number in perspective, ten thousand hours is almost exactly the same amount of time an average American student spends in the classroom from the moment they start fifth grade all the way through high school graduation—if they have perfect attendance. In other words, as much time as they spend learning reading, writing, math, science, history, government, geography, foreign languages, art, physical education, and so on over the course of their middle school and high school careers they spend teaching themselves (and each other) to play computer and video games. And unlike their formal education, which diffuses their attention across myriad different subjects and skills, every single gaming hour is concentrated on improving at just one thing: becoming a better gamer.
With ten thousand hours under their belts by age twenty-one, most of these young people will be more than just good gamers. They’ll be exceptionally good gamers.
That’s because ten thousand hours of practice before the age of twenty-one, according to at least one theory, is the number one predictor of extraordinary success later in life.
Malcolm Gladwell first proposed the ten-thousand-hour theory in his best-selling book Outliers: The Story of Success. In Outliers, Gladwell reports on the life stories of high-achieving individuals, from violin virtuosos to all-star hockey players to Bill Gates, and he finds that they all have one autobiographical fact in common. By the age of twenty, the top performers in any given field had each accumulated at least ten thousand hours of practice at the one thing that eventually made them superstars. Meanwhile, the runnersup—the second tier of successful, but not extraordinarily successful, musicians, athletes, technologists, businesspeople, and so on—had on average eight thousand or fewer practice hours each.
Natural talent matters, of course, but not as much as practice and preparation. And, according to Gladwell, ten thousand hours of practice and preparation appears to be the crucial threshold, marking the difference between simply being good at something and becoming extraordinary at it.
This means that we are well on our way to creating an entire generation of virtuoso gamers. Every young person who achieves ten thousand hours of gaming practice will be capable of extraordinary success in gaming environments later in life.
It’s potentially an unprecedented human resource: hundreds of millions of people worldwide who are going to be exceptionally good at the same thing—whatever it is games make us good at.
Which brings us to the million-dollar question for the future: What, exactly, are gamers getting good at?
I’ve been researching that question for nearly a decade, first as a PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley and later as the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future. Over the years, it has become increasingly clear to me that gamers—especially online gamers—are exceptionally skilled at one important thing: collaboration. In fact, I believe online gamers are among the most collaborative people on earth.
Collaboration is a special way of working together. It requires three distinct kinds of concerted effort: cooperating (acting purposefully toward a common goal), coordinating (synchronizing efforts and sharing resources), and cocreating (producing a novel outcome together). This third element, cocreation, is what sets collaboration apart from other collective efforts: it is a fundamentally generative act. Collaboration isn’t just about achieving a goal or joining forces; it’s about creating something together that it would be impossible to create alone.
You can collaborate to create j
ust about anything: a group experience, a knowledge resource, a work of art. Increasingly, gamers are collaborating to create all of these outcomes. In fact, they’re collaborating even when they’re competing against each other to win. More and more, gamers are collaborating even when they’re playing alone.
It seems counterintuitive: how can you collaborate with someone when you’re actively opposing them? Or even harder to imagine: how on earth can you collaborate all by yourself? But in fact, online gamers are increasingly doing both, thanks to two factors: the fundamentally collaborative aspects of playing any good game, and new game technologies and design patterns that support entirely new ways of working together.
The Evolution of Games as a Collaboration Platform
Since ancient times, gaming with others has always required making a concerted effort to collaborate. This is true of dice games, card games, chess, sports, and any other kind of multiplayer game you can think of.
Every multiplayer game begins with a cooperative agreement. Gamers agree to play by the same rules and to value the same goal. This establishes a common ground for working together.
Games also require us to coordinate attention and participation resources. Gamers must show up at the same time, in the same mind-set, to play together. They actively focus their attention on the game, and they agree to ignore everything else for as long as they’re playing. They practice shared concentration and synchronized engagement.
Gamers depend on each other to play as hard as they can, because it’s no fun winning without a challenge. In this way, gamers foster mutual regard. Out of respect for each other, they put in their best effort, and they fully expect to encounter a worthy partner or adversary.
Gamers rely on each other at all times to keep the game going, even if it’s not working out in their favor. Whenever they see a game through to completion, gamers are honing their ability to honor a collective commitment.
Perhaps most importantly, gamers actively work together to make believe that the game truly matters. They conspire to give the game real meaning, to help each other get emotionally caught up in the act of playing, and to reap the positive rewards of playing a good game. Whether they win or lose, they’re creating reciprocal rewards.
In short, good games don’t just happen. Gamers work to make them happen. Any time you play a game with someone else, unless you’re just trying to spoil the experience, you are actively engaged in highly coordinated, prosocial behavior. No one forces gamers to play by the rules, to concentrate deeply, to try their best, to stay in the game, or to act as if they care about the outcome. They do it voluntarily, for the mutual benefit of everyone playing, because it makes a better game.
This is true even in games that involve fierce competition. Consider the origins of the English word “compete”: it comes from the Latin verb competere, which means “to come together, to strive together” (from com-, or “with,” and -petere, meaning “to strive, seek”). To compete against someone still requires coming together with them: to strive toward the same goal, to push each other to do better, and to participate wholeheartedly in seeing the competition through to completion.
That’s why today competitive online gamers—even after they’ve been virtually beaten, bloodied, or blasted by each other—thank each other afterward by typing or saying “GG,” short for “good game.” It’s a grateful acknowledgment that, regardless of who wins or loses, everyone in a good game has tried hard, played fair, and worked together. That’s the fundamental act of collaboration at the heart of every good multiplayer game: the active and concerted creation of a positive experience. Gamers don’t just play a good game. They make a good game.
In fact, the ability to make a good game together has recently been identified by researchers as a distinctive human capability—indeed, perhaps the distinctive human capability. The developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, author of Why We Cooperate and codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has spent his career devising experiments to investigate what kinds of behaviors and skills set humans apart from other species. His research suggests that the ability to play complex games together, and to help others learn the rules of a game, represents the essence of what makes us human—something he calls “shared intentionality.”2
Shared intentionality, according to Tomasello, is defined as “the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions.” 3 When we have shared intentionality, we actively identify as part of a group, we deliberately and explicitly agree on a goal, and we can understand what others expect us to do in order to work toward the goal. Tomasello’s research reveals that, in comparison with humans, other intelligent social species like chimpanzees simply do not appear to have shared intentionality. They don’t have the natural instinct and ability to focus their attention on the same object, coordinate group activity, assess and reinforce each other’s commitment to the activity, and work toward a common goal.
Without the distinctly human capacity for shared intentionality, we couldn’t collaborate; we would have no idea how to build common ground, set group goals, or take collective action. According to Tomasello, children are capable of shared intentionality at a very early age. His evidence: their natural ability to play a game with others, and their ability to recognize when someone isn’t playing the game in a way that favors the group.
In one of Tomasello’s key experiments at the Max Planck Institute, children between the ages of two and three are taught to play a new game together—either a dice game for the two-year-olds or a building-block game for the three-year-olds. 4 Then a puppet controlled by another experimenter joins the game and plays it incorrectly, according to its own made-up rules. Tomasello and his colleagues report that children immediately and universally object to this bad game behavior and attempt to correct the puppet, in order to keep the game successfully going—even though they haven’t been instructed to do so. This behavior was more “vociferous” among the three-year-olds, according to the published findings, but clearly widespread among the two-year-olds as well. We are able to make a good game together—and we are inclined to do so from nearly the moment we are born. We have a hardwired desire and capacity to cooperate and coordinate our actions with others, to effectively immerse ourselves in groups, and to actively cocreate positive shared experiences.
And yet this desire can be diminished and our natural abilities weakened or eventually lost, Michael Tomasello argues, if we grow up in a culture without sufficient opportunities to nurture and develop it.
If we are to achieve our human potential to be extraordinary collaborators, he urges, we must immerse ourselves in high-collaboration environments—and we must encourage young people to spend as much time as possible participating in groups that encourage and value cooperation. Fortunately, as online and multiplayer games become more and more central to global popular culture, we have all the encouragement we need to practice our natural collaboration abilities. Multiplayer and online games strengthen our capacity to build and exercise shared intentionality.
Every time we agree to play a game together, we are practicing one of the talents that makes us fundamentally human.
THIS IS NOT to suggest that online gaming today is one giant cooperative utopia. The kill-or-be-killed adrenaline rush of player vs. player environments can easily overshadow the very real undertones of cooperation and collaboration that otherwise exist. Graphic violent content, combined with the anonymity of the Internet, doesn’t necessarily inspire camaraderie among strangers. That’s why toxic social interactions can and do erupt in hard-core, or especially competitive, communities, as normally playful gamer behaviors like taunting and trash-talking get out of hand.
Even in friendlier matches, many gamers care very deeply about whether or not they win. They’re seeking that fiero moment and wind up feeling disappointed or angry if they lose. In that case, even the fundamentally collaborative spirit of making a goo
d game together can’t completely alleviate the sting of loss.
Yet despite all these potentially mitigating factors, gamer culture is moving insistently in the direction of more shared intentionality, not less. For the past few years, cooperative, or co-op, play and collaborative creation systems have consistently remained the most celebrated trends in gaming.
In co-op mode, gamers work together to defeat an AI opponent and to increase each other’s scores, rather than competing against each other. Classic examples of co-op play include Rock Band and the first-person shooter series Left 4 Dead. Although there are competitive elements to both games, the primary focus is on working together to achieve a goal.
Even in game series that have previously specialized in single-player and player vs. player experiences, co-op mode is becoming more and more central. The counterterrorist-themed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the fastest-selling entertainment product in world history—it grossed $550 million in five days, more than any book, movie, album, or other game ever produced—has been particularly praised for its new Spec Ops mode, a series of twenty-three extremely challenging missions designed to be played cooperatively with a friend.
The industry’s increased attention to co-op mode represents an extremely significant development in gaming culture. It’s a recognition that many gamers are happier tackling challenges together than taking on each other as opponents. Co-op games deliver all the emotional rewards of a good game, while helping gamers avoid activating the negative emotions that can come with highly competitive play: feelings of aggression, anger, disappointment, or humiliation. That’s why it’s not surprising that surveys and polls repeatedly have shown that, on average, three out of four gamers prefer co-op mode to competitive multiplayer.5
Game developers aren’t just designing more co-op play; they’re also creating new real-time coordination tools to help us find the right people at the right time to cooperate with. The Xbox Live platform, for example, enables players to monitor who else in their social network is logged in to the game console, what they’re playing at the moment, and what other games they have in their library to play with you. You can browse your friends’ records of game achievements and compare them against your own—which helps you figure out who would make a good partner on a given mission or in a particular game. You can also receive alerts on your mobile phone or your computer whenever, for example, a friend logs in to Xbox Live to play a game or he or she unlocks an achievement. As a result, Xbox gamers have an unusually high level of awareness of what potential coplayers are doing at any given time, what they’re good at, and what resources they have to play with. The ambient awareness dramatically amplifies their ability to coordinate good gameplay.
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World Page 29