• Chariton: You are the best coaches. Cheer on your team and trash-talk others.
• Dikaiosune: You make the best captains. Keep your team strong and focused on getting faster. Keep your wall coordinated and working together!
• Sophrosune: You make the best referees. Make sure everyone follows the rules. Keep time of the best scores.
• Mythopoeia: You tell the best stories. Take film and video of the game! And spread news of the best times from other cities—help your local team keep up-to-date on how the rest of the world is training.
For players trying to recruit more athletes to participate in the lost-sport training events, and to engage the crowds of people who showed up to play but hadn’t been following the online story, the strengths test and assignments proved an excellent resource. It helped the experienced players give prospective players a meaningful way to contribute right away. It gave them a tool for directing new players to areas in which they were likely to experience success and reap intrinsic reward—and it made sure that not one single potential contributor would find himself or herself without a satisfying task.
As Seligman and Peterson have often pointed out, we seem to be happiest when we are putting our signature strengths to good use in a group setting. The best evidence I’ve seen for this argument is when I watched Lost Ring players eagerly adopt their ancient-strength roles and perform them both online and in person as they brought the lost sport to life.
When we first launched The Lost Ring, we did not know where it would go. We gave the players the raw materials for staging their own collaborative effort—a series of online urban legends and mysterious physical documents that suggested the potential to revive a lost Olympic sport—but would they do it? And if so, how?
We were confident we could bring together a global community with our chaotic, multilingual narrative. But would the community actually bring the lost sport back to life? Would they invent their own ways to get not just good at the sport, but Olympic-athlete good at it? When planning the game, we had playtested the lost sport only a few times, mostly with the creative team for the project, and collectively we were very slow and very bad at it. We never imagined the athletic feats that our players eventually made themselves capable of—indeed, no one had ever imagined such a feat until the players undertook it. The lost sport had never really existed—and it never would have, either, if not for the concerted effort of the global gamers.
Edwin Moses, a real gold medal-winning Olympic athlete and multiple world-record setter in the 400 meter hurdles, sat down with our creative team to watch videos of the best players on each continent. He seemed genuinely impressed with the teams’ performance and crafted individual video messages of support for each team. Later he answered players’ questions in a streaming online broadcast, giving serious advice to them about how to best prepare for a gold-medal event. Eventually, he joined us at sunrise on the Great Wall of China, one of the official Olympic event sites, to coach in person the Beijing lost-sport team in our alternate reality gold-medal race. When we had first conceived of a blindfolded human labyrinth race, I never would have imagined that our players would take the game to such a level of athletic excellence, or that we would be able to genuinely engage and impress a real Olympic champion with the sport. But we did—thanks to the players’ collaborative efforts.
In the end, our players produced two extraordinary collaborative results: a complete, extensive history of the ancient lost sport and its modern day revival on the Find the Lost Ring wiki—a 943-page multimedia document coauthored by more than a thousand of the game’s leading players—and a community of athletes that made and raced labyrinths as if they had spent their entire lives (and not just six months) training for it. This was an act of true emergensight on the part of the players. From the complex, chaotic environment of Eli Hunt’s legends and the scattered mysteries of the codex, they saw the opportunity to forge a clear, collaborative path together: to create an epic work of alternate reality history, and to stage this awe-inspiring six-continent spectacle. As a result, I count the lead players of The Lost Ring—particularly the thousand most active players who took ownership of the wiki and coordinated the months-long training in the lost sport—among the true collaboration virtuosos of their generation.
We are all born with the potential to develop collaboration superpowers. Scientific research shows that we have both the ability and the desire from early childhood to cooperate, to coordinate activity, and to strengthen group bonds—in other words, to make a good game together. But this potential can be lost if we don’t expend enough effort practicing collaboration.
Fortunately, we have many collaboratories for doing so already. In addition to global alternate reality games like The Lost Ring, any good online game with co-op mode, collaborative production opportunities, and a thriving Wikia culture, for example, provides the perfect opportunity to practice collaboration superpowers. And thanks to the increasing availability of good games worldwide, we will have more and more opportunities than ever before to develop these superpowers.
This is increasingly true even in developing countries, which traditionally have had limited access to leading-edge online games and game platforms. Today, game developers are creating online game platforms specifically for the technology constraints of emerging technology markets like India, Brazil, and China. For example, the lower-priced game console Zeebo, which describes itself as “the video game console for the next billion,” connects low-energy-demand gamer consoles via mobile phone networks rather than broadband Internet. Meanwhile, networked games are being developed for the mobile phones that are ubiquitous even in the most isolated villages across Africa.
As the game industry continues to emphasize co-op, collective intelligence, and collaborative production modes of play, collaboration superpowers will spread more widely throughout gamer culture. And as more and more people start to think of themselves as gamers—perhaps in no small part because they want to develop their own collaboration superpowers—these extraordinary new skills and abilities will become ordinary—the norm rather than the exception.
So what can we do with the collaboration superpowers we develop over the next decade and beyond? One of the first epic goals for gamers worldwide may be simply to survive the twenty-first century.
In their 2006 book Wikinomics, the breakthrough manual for extreme-scale collaboration in the real world, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams famously implored: “We must collaborate or perish—across borders, cultures, disciplines, and firms, and increasingly with masses of people at one time.”11
“Collaborate or perish” is perhaps the single most urgent rallying cry for our times. The ability to collaborate at extreme scales isn’t just a competitive advantage in business or in life anymore. Increasingly, it’s a survival imperative for the human race. As the Wikinomics authors suggested several years later in an updated preface to the book, “The killer application for mass collaboration may be saving the planet, literally.”12
A killer application is a program so valuable, it proves the core value of the larger system and drives massive amounts of people to adopt it; e-mail, for instance, was considered the killer app for home Internet access. I believe wholeheartedly that the core value of developing our collaboration superpowers will be proven by games that help gamers save the real world—by changing how we consume energy, how we feed ourselves, how we create better health, how we govern ourselves, how we conceive of new businesses, and how we take care of each other and the environment.
But these fundamental changes don’t happen overnight—surviving the twenty-first century together will require us to adopt longer horizons of thinking, acting, and collaborating. We need to play games that stretch our collective commitment months, years, or even decades ahead.
We need to start playing with the future.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Saving the Real World Together
We are living in a geological era that scientists
dub the “anthropocene epoch,” from the Greek anthropo-, for “human,” and -cene, for “new” or “recent.” It’s the age of human impact on the earth.
Our impact is measurable in myriad ways: increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, deforestation and continental erosion, a rising sea level. We may not have set out to remake the planet in any of these ways—but we have nonetheless. And now we must learn better ways of remaking it, this time with intention, discipline, and purpose.
As Steward Brand, author of Whole Earth Discipline, puts it, “Humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role.... We are as gods and have to get good at it.”1
Brand is perhaps best known as the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural catalog of “tools and ideas to shape the environment” published from 1968 to 1972. (When he launched that catalog, he wrote, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”)2 In 1996 he cofounded the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based foundation dedicated to long-term thinking and responsibility—for the earth, and for the survival of the human species—over the next ten thousand years and beyond. If we want to stay on this planet for anywhere near that long, Brand says, we have to become better at strategically affecting our ecosystem. “We are forced to learn planet craft—in both senses of the word. Craft as skill and craft as cunning.” We not only have to master the ability to change how our ecosystem works, we also have to figure out the right ways to change it. And that won’t be easy.
“The forces in play in the Earth system are astronomically massive and unimaginably complex,” Brand writes.3 “We’re facing multidecade, multigeneration problems and solutions. Accomplishing what is needed will take diligence and patience—a sustained bearing down, over human lifetimes, to bridge the long lag times and lead times in climate, biological, and social dynamics.”4
Fortunately for all of us, gamers actually have a head start on this mission.
Gamers have been mastering the art of planet craft for years. There’s actually a genre of computer games known as “god games”—world- and population-management simulations that give a single player the ability to shape the course of events on earth in dramatic ways, over lifetimes or longer.
As we’ve seen, Will Wright’s The Sims gives players godlike powers over the daily lives of individual people. Sid Meier’s Civilization challenges players to guide a civilization (such as the Aztecs, the Romans, the Americans, the Zulus) from the start of the Bronze Age, six thousand years ago, through the Space Age, or AD 2100. And Peter Molyneux’s Black & White invites players to govern the entire biome of a remote island, inspiring either joyful worship or terrified obedience in the island’s tribal population by performing a combination of benevolent and evil divine ecological interventions.
What all of these god games have in common is that they encourage players to practice the three skills that are critical for real planet craft: taking a long view, ecosystems thinking, and pilot experimentation.
Taking a long view means working at scales far larger than we would ordinarily encounter in our day-to-day lives. Players of god games have to consider their moment-by-moment actions in the context of a very long future: an entire simulated human life, a single civilization’s rise and fall, or even the entire course of human history.
Ecosystems thinking is a way of looking at the world as a complex web of interconnected, interdependent parts. A good ecosystems thinker will study and learn how to anticipate the ways in which changes to one part of an ecosystem will impact other parts—often in surprising and far-reaching ways.
Pilot experimentation is the process of designing and running many small tests of different strategies and solutions in order to discover the best course of action to take. When you’ve successfully tested a strategy, you can scale up your efforts to make a bigger impact. Since god gamers want to maximize their success, they don’t just come up with one plan and stick to it. Instead, they carefully feel their way around the system, poking and prodding until they find the strategies that seem to reliably maximize success.
Taken together, these three ways of thinking and acting are exactly the kinds of effort Brand recommends in Whole Earth Discipline. Instead of seizing the day, he says, “Seize the century.”5
He advises, “Participation has to be subtle and tentative, and then cumulating in the right direction. If we make the right moves at the right time, all may yet be well.”6
OF COURSE, we can’t actually use existing commercial computer games as test environments to solve the real problems we face. They radically simplify the forces at play in the complex ecosystems we live in. But as we try to develop systems for engaging massively many people in world-changing efforts, we can take an important cue from the most successful god games. Specifically, we can learn from their ability to change the way players think about the world, and their own powers within it.
Take, for example, the most epic god game yet designed—the universe simulation Spore, developed by Will Wright and produced by Maxis Software. Of all the god games to date, Spore is the most explicitly linked to the notion of planet craft—and the most intentionally focused on getting players to think of themselves as capable of changing the real world.
In Spore, players control the development of a unique species through five stages of evolution: from single-cell origins (stage one) into social, land-dwelling creatures (stage two), who form tribes (stage three), build technologically sophisticated civilizations (stage four), and ultimately venture off into intergalactic space exploration (stage five). Each stage zooms out to give the player control over a more complex system. Players advance from manipulating cellular DNA to increasing their creature’s intelligent behaviors; from organizing a division of labor in their tribe to growing a global economy; from advancing national interests through trade, military action, or spiritual outreach to colonizing other planets and transforming them into inhabitable ecosystems. They can spend as much time as they want in any stage, piloting different strategies for improving their species and transforming the environment.
The game is fun and rewarding to play, but it’s meant to accomplish more than just relieving boredom or making us happy. As Wright has said on numerous occasions, the game is meant to spark a sense of creative capability among players, and to inspire them to adopt the kind of long-term, planetary outlook that can save the real world.
Consider this exchange, which occurred shortly after the 2008 release of Spore, when the popular science magazine Seed hosted a public salon between Wright and Jill Tarter, a noted astrobiologist. The topic of the salon: how games like Spore are preparing young people to take a more active role in reimagining the real world.
TARTER: I keep thinking about the generation that’s getting exposed to all this wonderful, rich opportunity of game playing as education, and that they expect to be able to manipulate the real world the way they do the game world. How do we bridge that? How do we turn them into socially functioning members of humanity on one planet? [. . .]
I’m eager to understand how learning to be good at a game makes you good at life, makes you good at changing the world, and gives you skills that are going to allow you to reinvent your environment.
WRIGHT: Well . . . if there’s one aspect of humanity that I want to augment, it’s the imagination, which is probably our most powerful cognitive tool. I think of games as being an amplifier for the imagination of the players, in the same way that a car amplifies our legs or a house amplifies our skin. [. . .]
The human imagination is this amazing thing. We’re able to build models of the world around us, test out hypothetical scenarios, and, in some sense, simulate the world. I think this ability is probably one of the most important characteristics of humanity.7
Why does Wright believe that augmenting our natural capacity for imagination is so important at this precise moment in human history? It’s a matter of survival, pure and simple.
The name Spore is itself an important clue: the definition of a spor
e, in biology, is “a reproductive structure that is adapted for dispersal and surviving for extended periods of time in unfavorable conditions.”8 It’s a perfect metaphor for the present circumstances of the human race.
We have collectively entered into what is all but certain to be a time of increasingly unfavorable planetary conditions, largely of our own making—an unstable climate, extreme weather, and an increasingly depleted environment. We need to adapt for survival. We need to imagine planetary-scale solutions and disperse them as far and wide as possible.
We need to become like spores ourselves.
And there’s an explicit call to action to do so, for players who complete all five stages of the game successfully. Spore has what game developers call a “primary win condition”: a supergoal that represents the ultimate achievement in the game. The primary win condition in Spore is to develop your single-cell creature into such a successful intergalactic space-faring civilization that it eventually reaches one galactic destination in particular: a super-massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.
Players who reach the black hole receive a “staff of life,” which allows them to transform any planet in the Spore galaxy into a vibrant, diverse ecosystem: teeming with plants and creatures of all kinds, with breathable atmosphere, sustainable food webs, and plentiful water supply. (No wonder players also refer to it as the “Genesis device.”)
The staff of life is a shortcut to making an otherwise uninhabitable planet inhabitable. Along with the staff of life, players receive a special message and mission:You have traveled very far and overcome many obstacles. Your creative efforts have not gone unnoticed. Your heroic efforts have proven you deserving, worthy of advancement to the next level of your existence. You are now to be given the power. Yes, that’s right, THE POWER. The power to create and spread life, intelligence and understanding throughout the cosmos. Use this power wisely. There is a wonderful opportunity to start on one particular planet: Look for the third rock from Sol.
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World Page 32