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

by Jane McGonigal

  Meanwhile, in collaborative creation systems, gamers get to create their own digital content, in order to build up their favorite worlds for the benefit of other players. Take Little Big Planet for example—it’s one of the most acclaimed collaborative creation games released in recent years. In the traditional “play mode” of the game, you cooperate with up to three friends to traverse the game world and collect game objects together—stickers, gadgets, toys, and craft and building materials. At any time, you can switch from play mode to “create mode”; here you find yourself in a collaborative building environment called Popit, in which you can design your own original action-adventure landscapes out of the objects and materials you’ve already collected. It’s a level-building system that you might call the game-design equivalent of Google Docs. Multiple people can view and edit the level at the same time; it can then be shared, or “published,” to the rest of the world.

  Within a year, more than 1.3 million player-created levels had been published by LBP players. Compare this epic number with the relatively small number of official LBP levels: forty-five. Collectively, the LBP player base has dramatically expanded the playable LBP universe by a factor of nearly thirty thousand. As one games journalist observed on the one-year anniversary of the game’s release, “[It] would likely take multiple lifetimes to play through every single creation out there.”6

  The ability to create your own levels and share them with other players was the signature selling feature of Little Big Planet. But increasingly, successful game series are offering similar systems as a “value-add,” in order to give players more explicit collaboration opportunities. For example, Halo 3 introduced the new Forge system, which invites players to design their own original multiplayer Halo levels, or “maps,” by customizing what weapons, vehicles, and tools are distributed where. Like LBP’s Popit system, players can upload and share their custom configurations with each other, and using the Forge tools, it’s possible to create literally billions and billions of different maps. So instead of being restricted to a finite number of play environments, the Halo community can keep the game going, increasing and diversifying the playing challenges for each other indefinitely.

  It’s not easy to design a good world, of course. So alongside the growing collection of collaborative creation systems, there are also a growing number of player-created guides to creating better levels and maps. Take, for example, the Forge Hub, a resource for becoming a better Halo 3 world builder. It offers extensive tutorials in various mapmaking skills and curates player-created maps into different collections. It’s a natural extension of the knowledge sharing and collective intelligence culture already taking place on the more than ten thousand player-created game wikis. Gamers aren’t just making each other better players; they’re making each other better designers.

  But perhaps the most unusual innovation in gamer collaboration culture in recent years is the notion of the massively single-player online game. It’s a twist on the traditional massively multiplayer online concept—and, on first impression, it sounds like an impossible paradox. How can you have a “massively” single-player experience when by definition a single-player experience occurs alone?

  The inventor of the term is Will Wright, the famed creator of SimCity and The Sims games. He coined it to describe his 2008 game Spore, a simulation of the universe that invites players to design a galaxy from scratch, starting with a single-cell creature and evolving it up into a land-dwelling species, then into tribes, complex civilizations, and ultimately a space-faring, planet-designing megacivilization.

  All Spore gameplay is single-player: an individual controls all the simulation details and conducts all the fighting, mating, crafting, and exploring alone. There are no other players in the simulated ecosystem; everything in the world is controlled by artificial intelligence. So what makes it massively single-player, as opposed to simply single-player? A very large percentage of the content in each player’s game world—the other creatures you encounter and the civilizations you visit—has been created by other players who have contributed them to the online Sporepedia, a massive database of ecosystem content. When you play Spore online, your computer checks the Sporepedia for new and interesting content and downloads it into your personal Spore ecosystem, making your game world a mix of your own original contributions and those of many, many others.

  Although there is no direct interaction with other players, you indirectly collaborate with each other to invent the Spore universe. You can randomly populate your world with other players’ creations, or you can handpick creations you like from the Sporepedia. You can even subscribe to a Sporecast, which will automatically update your game world with new content created by your friends or favorite players.

  Players use Sporepedia and the Spore forums and wikis to learn what other players are making and to improve their own creation techniques. They don’t collaborate in the real-time gameplay, but ultimately the world that players help design is a collaborative product: a unique combination of each player’s own creations mingled with content from hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other players, depending on how far they get in the game and how much content they choose to download.

  A massively single-player game like Spore suggests that epic contexts combined with collaborative production tools and sophisticated content-sharing platforms can create opportunities for what we might call lightweight, asynchronous collaboration. It’s less immediately interactive, but it can still produce extreme-scale results. So far, Spore players from more than thirty countries have created and shared more than 144 million ecosystem objects, from creatures to buildings to space-faring vehicles.

  OF COURSE , collaboration skills are on the rise around the world among nongamers as well. From widespread basic Internet literacy and mobile technology smarts to rapidly expanding Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing know-how, people everywhere are becoming increasingly connected and improving their ability to cooperate, coordinate, and create together in many important ways. In this sense, gamers are just part of a larger social and technological trend toward more collaboration.

  But gamers are having so much fun developing their collaboration skills, they’re collectively spending more time than anyone else in the world honing and applying them. Every day and night, hundreds of millions of strangers from all over the world come together to prototype and playtest new ways of collaborating. The more they play together, and the closer they get to ten thousand hours of practice collaborating, the more justifiably optimistic they become about what they can accomplish together—and so they demand even more extreme collaboration challenges. And because gamers have developed such a growing appetite for collaboration at extreme scales, they’ve pushed the gaming industry to develop software and platforms that increasingly emphasize collaboration as a central gameplay mechanism.

  As a result of the industry’s relentless focus on innovating new ways to cooperate, coordinate, and cocreate, many online gamers are developing a new set of collaboration superpowers that transcend what they—and nongamers—are capable of doing in real-world, or nongame, environments. These gamers are on the front lines of testing and improving the ways we organize ourselves, amplify each other’s individual abilities, and contribute to the common good.

  Which gives us another fix for reality: FIX # 13: TEN THOUSAND HOURS COLLABORATING

  Compared with games, reality is disorganized and divided. Games help us make a more concerted effort—and over time, they give us collaboration superpowers.

  What do I mean by collaboration superpowers?

  A superpower is not just a new skill. It’s a skill that so far surpasses any previously demonstrated skill, and it effectively changes our notion of what is humanly possible.

  The term “superpower” suggests that something is happening outside the traditional model of learning and skill acquisition. Typically, we think of practice as moving us from a zero-skill level to basic competency and then, if we keep practicing, to proficie
ncy and ultimately to mastery. But mastery presumes that there is some finite end to the skill level it is possible to achieve. So why stop at mastery? The term “superpower” reminds us that we are on the threshold of a new kind of capability, one that has not yet been mastered by anyone, anywhere. There’s no telling yet how far these new capabilities will develop.

  What, exactly, do these new capabilities look like?

  In my research at the Institute for the Future, I’ve developed a model of how someone with collaboration superpowers works. It involves three key new skills and abilities.

  Extraordinary collaborators are extremely extroverted or outgoing in a network environment—even if they’re introverted or shy in face-to-face settings. They have what I call a high ping quotient, or high PQ. (In tech speak, a “ping” is a computer network tool that sends a message from one computer to another in order to check whether it is reachable and active. If it is, it will send back the message “pong,” thus establishing an active line of communication.) Extraordinary collaborators have no qualms about pinging—or reaching out via electronic means—to others to ask for their participation. They’re also highly likely to pong back when other people ping them. That’s what makes a high ping quotient a form of social capital.

  Of course, it helps to have a good sensibility about who to ping when. (Otherwise, you become a participation spammer.) That’s why extraordinary collaborators develop a kind of internal collaboration radar, or sixth sense, about who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission. This sixth sense comes from building up a very strong social network and maintaining a kind of peripheral awareness of what other people are doing, where they are, and what they’re getting good at. And it’s not just an internal system: collaboration radar is often augmented with “ambient information systems,” like Twitter lists, the Xbox 360 friends dashboard, or the Groundcrew volunteer availability system. The stronger your collaboration radar, the faster you can leverage individuals’ abilities toward the right effort.

  Finally, the most extraordinary collaborators in the world exercise a superpower I call emergensight. It’s the ability to thrive in a chaotic collaborative environment. The bigger and more distributed a collaborative effort gets, the more likely it is to become both chaotic and hard to predict. We know this from physics and systems theory: bigger isn’t more; it’s different. That’s the principle of emergence. It’s impossible to predict what will happen at scale until you get there, and it’s likely to be vastly more complex than you expected. Of course, with increased complexity comes increased potential for chaos.

  Extraordinary collaborators are adept and comfortable working within complex, chaotic systems. They don’t mind messiness or uncertainty. They immerse themselves in the flow of the work and keep a high-level perspective rather than getting lost in the weeds. They have the information stamina to filter large amounts of noise and remain focused on signals that are meaningful to their work. And they practice possibility scanning: always remaining open and alert to unplanned opportunities and surprising insights—especially at bigger scales. They are willing to bypass or throw out old goals if a more achievable or a more epic goal presents itself. And they are constantly zooming out to construct a much bigger picture: finding ways to extend collaborative efforts to new communities, over longer time cycles and toward more epic goals.

  These three ways of working make up what I consider to be the most important attributes of an extraordinary collaborator. Together, these traits enable us to discover and contribute our individual strengths and expertise to a large, open-ended effort.

  These collaboration superpowers aren’t widely distributed yet. They’re concentrated among gamers who, for the past decade, have consistently played the games that have been on the leading edge of co-op, collective intelligence, and collaborative production. But, obviously, these collaboration superpowers would be extremely useful outside of game settings. They could be applied to tremendous effect across many different real-world domains: data collection and analysis, social action, risk assessment, scientific research, innovation of new products and services, and government, to name just a few.

  Indeed, if these collaboration superpowers become sufficiently widespread, it’s easy to imagine a future in which there is significantly more collective effort harnessed toward solving extreme-scale problems, like ending poverty, preventing catastrophic climate change, reducing terrorist activity, and improving global health. But before we can use these superpowers to solve real-world problems, we need to distribute them more broadly throughout society. Collaboration is most effective when there are diverse actors. We need to put these collaboration superpowers in the hands of as many people as possible—especially young people, who represent the next generation of social actors and problem solvers.

  That’s why, in my commercial game-design work, I am always drawn to projects that can serve as learning environments for collaboration superpowers. I think of these projects as global collaboration laboratories, or collaboratories : online spaces for young people from around the world to come together and test and develop their ability to cooperate, coordinate, and cocreate at epic scales.

  The best way to understand the modus operandi of extraordinary collaborators is in the context of a real working collaboratory. So let’s take a look at The Lost Ring, an alternate reality game that I designed for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

  THE LOST RING—A COLLABORATORY FOR PRACTICING NEW SUPERPOWERS

  The Olympic Games are broken. That’s what I thought to myself in the summer of 2007 when I was first invited to direct an alternate reality game for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

  For 99.99 percent of the world, I thought to myself, the Olympics are all spectacle, a vicarious thrill at best. There’s no real participation. No active engagement. We watch the games, but we don’t actually get to play.

  It wasn’t supposed to be that way. The Olympic mission, after all, is to bring the world together through play. The Olympics are also meant to create global community. But even the biggest Olympic fans have virtually no interaction with other people from around the world during the games. We’re not physically at the Olympic Village, where the many elite athletes congregate. Instead, we’re at home watching the games on television. How can we expect to bring the world together through the Olympic Games if 99.99 percent of the world doesn’t get to actually play?

  This wouldn’t have bothered me that much if I didn’t actually believe in the Olympic mission. The modern Olympics are the best-known and longest-lasting effort to use games as a platform for establishing common ground, focusing global attention, fostering mutual regard, and creating global community. I couldn’t imagine a better context than the Olympics for trying to build a global collaboratory.

  That’s when it occurred to me: could the Olympic tradition of bringing the world together for an intense period of play be extended from athletes to gamers?

  If so, it would represent an ideal opportunity to give the growing generation of virtuoso gamers a chance to demonstrate their extraordinary talents to the world. Just like the world’s greatest athletes, our best global gamers could show us collaborative feats previously unthinkable. They could inspire us all to push the limits of our own collaboration powers.

  So, as early anticipation for the Olympics mounted a year in advance of the 2008 Beijing games, I accepted an invitation from McDonald’s, a global Olympic sponsor, and the International Olympic Committee to join the efforts of a leading digital creative agency in San Francisco, AKQA. Our shared objective was to create an online game that would give young adults around the world an opportunity to collaborate at a scale as awe-inspiring as the modern Olympic Games themselves. Together, we spent an entire year working with a creative development team of more than fifty people to help computer and video gamers turn the 2008 Summer Olympics into a game that they could play, a collaborative effort that they could undertake.

  This is the st
ory of The Lost Ring and how it reinvented the reality of the Olympic Games.

  Most of you listening to this podcast will not believe the story I am about to tell you. How is it possible, you will ask, that the greatest sport of all time has been forgotten for almost 2,000 years? I’m Eli Hunt, and this is the legend of the Lost Sport of Olympia.

  —from the Secrets of the Ancient Games podcast series, posted online February 24, 2008

  The Ancient Greeks banned it, but we’re playing it anyway!

  —from an invitation to a Lost Sport of Olympia training event held in San Francisco, April 15, 2008

  On February 24, 2008, a fictional character by the name of Eli Hunt launched a real podcast series called Secrets of the Ancient Games. The series was promoted by the International Olympic Committee on the home page of its highly trafficked website with the tag line “Investigate Olympic mysteries and learn about the history of the earliest games!” Visitors to Hunt’s site discovered that the podcast series focused on the so-called Lost Sport of Olympia—a blindfold game that Hunt, an amateur archaeologist, believed the ancient Greeks had mysteriously banned from their Olympics before attempting to destroy all evidence that the game had ever existed.