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

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Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World Page 41

by Jane McGonigal


  9 “Nike Plus Is a Statwhore Online Game That You Play by Running.” Ilxor.com, July 13, 2009. http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=67&threadid=73699.

  10 Fox, Jesse, and Jeremy N. Bailenson. “Virtual Self-Modeling: The Effects of Vicarious Reinforcement and Identification on Exercise Behaviors.” Media Psychology, 2009, 12: 1-25. DOI: 10.1080/15213260802669474.

  11 Donath, Judith. “Artificial Pets: Simple Behaviors Elicit Complex Attachments.” In Marc Bekoff, ed., The Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2004).

  12 “How Often Do Foursquare Users Actually Check In?” Business Insider, May 7, 2010. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-often-do-foursquare-user-actually-check-in-2010-5.

  13 “Left the House.” Product page on Split Reason. http://www.splitreason.com/product/622.

  CHAPTER 9

  1 Evans, Simon, and Simon Johnson. “The Comfort of Strangers.” Swarm Toolkit. http://swarmtoolkit.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=49.

  2 E-mail interview with Simon Johnson, May 3, 2009.

  3 Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 45.

  4 “Necklace of the Subaltern Betrayer.” Ghosts of a Chance, September 15, 2008. http://ghostsofachance.com/main_site/index.php?p=object&id=1.

  5 Bath, Georgina. “Ghosts of a Chance Alternate Reality Game Report.” Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., November 6, 2008. http://ghostsofachance.com/GhostsofaChance_Report2.pdf.

  6 Simon, Nina K. “An ARG at the Smithsonian: Games, Collections, and Ghosts.” Museum 2.0, September 8, 2008. http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2008/09/arg-at-smithsonian-games-collections.html.

  7 Increased age is associated with negative qualities, such as decreases in stature, power, and cognitive ability, according to Mahzarin Banaji, who led the ageism studies at Harvard University. Published findings include Cunningham, W. A., M. K. Johnson, J. C. Gatenby, J. C. Gore, and M. R. Banaji. “Neural Components of Social Evaluation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, 85: 639-49.

  CHAPTER 10

  1 Saba, Moussavi, Somnath Chatterji, et al. “Depression, Chronic Diseases, and Decrements in Health: Results from the World Health Surveys.” The Lancet, September 8, 2007, 370(9590): 851-58. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61415-9.

  2 Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness, 14.

  3 Ibid., 7.

  4 Ibid., 72.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Seligman, Authentic Happiness, xii.

  7 Weiner, The Geography of Bliss, 310.

  8 Ben-Shahar, Happier, 165-66.

  9 Williams, Sam. “Hack, Hackers and Hacking.” In Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2002). Also available online at http://oreilly.com/open-book/freedom/appb.html.

  10 Caplan, Jeremy. “Hacking Toward Happiness.” Time, June 21, 2007. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1635844,00.html.

  11 I coined the term in 2007, but I’d already been doing it for years by then. I just needed a way to describe it to other technologists so they could start doing it, too. I introduced the term in a keynote at the Emerging Technology Conference (ETech) in San Diego, March 26-29, 2007, and again in a keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, April 18, 2007.

  12 Morrill, et al., Together Alone, 231.

  13 This claim is based on my review of the findings of positive-psychology research trials on acts of kindness, in which participants typically don’t know each other before being put in the cooperative test setting. It’s a perfect example of transitory sociality.

  14 Keltner, Born to Be Good, 3.

  15 Ibid., 7-8.

  16 These rules were coauthored with Sean Stewart, the award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, during the Last Call Poker project.

  17 Tad Friend, “The Shroud of Marin.” The New Yorker, August 29, 2005.

  18 Davidson, Amy. “California Dying: Q&A with Tad Friend.” The New Yorker online, August 29, 2005. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829on_onlineonly01?currentPage=all.

  19 Pujol, Rolando. “NYC Cemeteries Dying from Neglect.” AM New York, May 29, 2009. http://amny.com/urbanite-1.812039/nyc-cemeteries-dying-from-neglect-1.1286733.

  20 Weiner, The Geography of Bliss, 73.

  21 Hecht, Jennifer Michael. The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn’t Working Today (New York: Harper One, 2008), 57.

  22 Ibid., 58.

  23 Ben-Shahar, Happier, 147-48.

  24 Hecht, The Happiness Myth, 59.

  25 Keltner, Born to Be Good, 195.

  26 Quoted in Keltner, Born to Be Good, 186.

  27 Hecht, The Happiness Myth, 298.

  28 Csíkszentmihályi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, 102-21.

  29 Keltner, Born to Be Good, 220.

  30 Weiner, The Geography of Bliss, quoting John Stuart Mill, 74.

  PART III

  1 Flugelman, Andrew. “The Player Referee’s Non-Rulebook.” In The New Games Book, 86.

  CHAPTER 11

  Portions of this chapter are drawn from “Engagement Economy: The Future of Massively Scaled Participation and Collaboration,” a Technology Horizons special report I created for the Institute for the Future in September 2008. The full original report, published by IFTF, is available at http://iftf.org/node/2306.

  1 “How the Telegraph Investigation Exposed the MPs’ Expenses Scandal Day by Day.” Telegraph, May 15, 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5324582/How-the-Telegraph-investigation-exposed-the-MPs-expenses-scandal-day-by-day.html.

  2 Wintour, Patrick, and Nicholas Watt. “MPs’ Expenses: Critics Attack Censorship as Redactions Black Out Documents.” Guardian, June 19, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/18/mps-expenses-censorship-black-out.

  3 Jeff Howe. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business (New York: Crown Business, 2008), 4-17.

  4 Andersen, Michael. “Four Crowdsourcing Lessons from the Guardian’s (Spectacular) Expenses-Scandal Experiment.” Nieman Journalism Lab, June 23, 2009. http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/four-crowdsourcing-lessons-from-the-guardians-spectacular-expenses-scandal-experiment/.

  5 “Participation on Web 2.0 Websites Remains Weak.” Reuters, April 18, 2007. http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN1743638820070418.

  6 Wright, Steven, and Jason Groves. “Shameless MPs Try to Dodge Trial Using 1689 Law Which Protects Them from Prosecution.” Daily Mail, February 8, 2010. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1248688/MPs-expenses-Three-Labour-MPs-Tory-peer-charged-false-accounting.html#ixzz0ikXMZse6.

  7 Shirky, Clay. “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” Personal blog, April 26, 2008. http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html.

  8 Internet World Stats—Usage and Population Statistics, accessed December 31, 2009. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

  9 “Wikipedia Is an MMORPG.” Wikipedia project, accessed May 1, 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMORPG.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Puente, Maria. “Learn, Fight Hunger, Kill Time All at Once at Freerice.com.” USA Today, January 23, 2008. http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2008-01-23-freerice_N.htm.

  12 The answer is “growing from the tip of a stem.”

  13 “Frequently Asked Questions.” Free Rice. http://www.freerice.com/faq.html.

  14 Anderson, Frank. “Can Videogames Make the World a Better Place?” BitMob, August 25, 2009. http://bitmob.com/index.php/mobfeed/foldinghome-distributed-computing.html.

  15 Pietzsch, Joachim. “The Importance of Protein Folding.” Horizon Symposia: Connecting Science to Life, online project of the journal Nature. http://www.nature.com/horizon/proteinfolding/background/importance.html.

  16 McElroy, Griffin. “Joystiq Set to Overtake G4 in Folding@home Leaderboards Tonight.” Joystiq, Feb
ruary 8, 2010. http://playstation.joystiq.com/tag/folding@home; and Stella, Shiva. “Sony Updates Folding@home for PS3 Folks Trying to Save the World.” Game Bump, December 19, 2007. http://www.gamebump.com/go/sony_updates_folding_home_for_ps3_folks_trying_to_save_the_world.

  17 Stasick, Ed. “Leave Your PS3 on for a Good Cause This Sunday Night!” Joystiq, March 21, 2007. http://playstation.joystiq.com/2007/03/21/leave-your-ps3-on-for-a-good-cause-this-sunday-night/.

  18 Rimon, Noah. “Folding@home Petaflop Barrier Crossed.” PlayStation blog, September 19, 2007. http://blog.us.playstation.com/2007/09/foldinghome-petaflop-barrier-crossed/.

  19 Khan, Shaan. “Turning In-Game Achievements into Real-World Action.” Thinkers & Doers, July 30, 2009. http://blogs.waggeneredstrom.com/thinkers-and-doers/2009/07/turning-in-game-achievements-in-real-world-action/.

  20 Dumitrescu, Andrei. “PlayStation 3 Will Catch Up to the Xbox 360 in 2011.” Softpedia, August 5, 2009. http://news.softpedia.com/news/PlayStation-3-Will-Catch-Up-to-the-Xbox-360-in-2011-118402.shtml.

  21 Jacques, Robert. “Folding@home Clocks Up a Million PS3 Users.” V3, February 6, 2008. http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/news/2208966/folding-home-clocks-million-ps3.

  22 “Computer Game’s High Score Could Earn Nobel in Medicine.” RichardDawkins.net forum, May 11, 2008. http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=44321.

  23 The game was developed by doctoral student Seth Cooper and postdoctoral researcher Adrien Treuille, both in computer science and engineering, working with Zoran Popović, a University of Washington professor of computer science and engineering; David Baker, a UW professor of biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; and David Salesin, a UW professor of computer science and engineering. Professional game designers provided advice during the game’s creation.

  24 Fahey, Mike. “Humans Triumph Over Machines in Protein Folding Game Foldit.” Kotaku. August 6, 2010. http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/08/humans-triumph-over-machines-in-protein-folding-game-foldit/.

  25 Cooper, Seth, Firas Khatib, et al., and Foldit players. “Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game.” Nature. August 2010. 466, 756-60. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7307/full/nature09304.html.

  26 Deci, Edward L., Richard Koestner, and Richard M. Ryan. “A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation.” Psychological Bulletin, November 1999, 125(6): 627-68. DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627.

  27 “Job Listings.” Bungie.net, accessed May 1, 2010. http://www.bungie.net/Inside/jobs.aspx.

  CHAPTER 12

  1 “Epic Win.” Urban Dictionary entry. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=epic%20win.

  2 Twitter replies to @avantgame from @tobybarnes, @changeist, and @incobalt, on November 4, 2009.

  3 Many of The Extraordinaries’ microvolunteer missions are more like Amazon Mechanical Turk-style human intelligence tasks—labeling, tagging, and sorting digital objects for museums, scientists, and government agencies, for example. This is important, but it doesn’t represent the epic win. In phone conversations with the founders of the project in early 2010, I learned that the company aims to focus on developing more real-world, mobile missions and rely less on online human intelligence tasks.

  4 “Chat with an Extraordinary: Nathan Hand of Christel House.” The Extraordinaries blog, November 17, 2009. http://www.theextraordinaries.org/2009/11/chat-with-an-extraordinary-nathan-hand-of-christel-house.html.

  5 Wenner, Melissa. “Smile! It Could Make You Happier.” Scientific American, September 2009. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smile-it-could-make-you-happier.

  6 “Chat with an Extraordinary,” The Extraordinaries blog.

  7 Official Game Guide for The Sims 3. Prima Official Game Guides, June 2, 2009, 42. http://www.primagames.com/features/sims3/.

  8 Edelman, Joe. “Make a Wish.” Live talk, Ignite Amherst, September 22, 2009. http://igniteshow.com/amherst.

  9 Personal interview with Joe Edelman, July 12, 2008.

  10 Edelman, “Make a Wish.”

  11 Ibid.

  12 Edelman, Joe. “Your Life: The Groundcrew Mission.” Groundcrew. http://groundcrew.us/papers/your-life.

  13 Edelman, Joe. “The Mobile Manifesto: How Mobile Phones Can Replace a Broken Economy.” Joe Edelman blog, January 2009. http://nxhx.org/thoughts/manifesto.html.

  14 Edelman, Joe. “Volunteering with Groundcrew.” Groundcrew. http://groundcrew.us/papers/volunteering.

  15 Jeyes, Dave. “Google Wants to Smarten Up Your Home with PowerMeter.” Tech.Blorge, February 10, 2009. http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2009/02/10/google-wants-to-smarten-up-your-home-with-powermeter-2/.

  16 Kho, Jennifer. “Adaptive Meter: Playing the Energy Conservation Game.” Earth2Tech, March 29, 2009. http://earth2tech.com/2009/03/29/playing-the-energy-conservation-game/.

  CHAPTER 13

  1 Richards, C. “Teach the World to Twitch: An Interview with Marc Prensky.” Futurelab, December 2003. www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications_reports_articles/web_articles/Web_Article578; and “Designing Games with a Purpose.” Communications of the ACM, August 2008, 51(8): 58-67. DOI: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1378704.1378719.

  2 Tomasello, Michael. Why We Cooperate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).

  3 Tomasello, Michael, and Malinda Carpenter. “Shared Intentionality.” Developmental Science, December 2006, 10(1): 121-125.

  4 Rakoczy, Hannes, Felix Warneken, and Michael Tomasello. “The Sources of Normativity: Young Children’s Awareness of the Normative Structure of Games.” Journal of Developmental Psychology, May 2008, 44(3): 875-81.

  5 “Which Do You Prefer: Competitive or Cooperative Multiplayer?” Escapist, October 24, 2009. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.151529.

  6 Contreras, Paul Michael. “LittleBigPlanet Sets Another Milestone for Number of Levels.” PlayStation Lifestyle, November 20, 2009. http://playstationlifestyle.net/2009/11/20/littlebigplanet-sets-another-milestone-for-number-of-levels/.

  7 Brunelli, Richard. “Grand Prize Winner: McDonald’s Brave New World.” AdWeek, December 1, 2008. http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/custom-reports/buzzawards/e3i9417c5a4a703467d97b51be9e35149f8.

  8 The term was coined by Sean Stacey, who runs Unfiction (www.unfiction.com), the leading community forum since 2003 for chaotic fiction and cross-media alternate reality games.

  9 Peterson, Christopher, and Martin Seligman. Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (New York: Oxford, 2004).

  10 “The VIA Classification of Character Strengths.” The Values in Action (VIA) Institute, October 23, 2008. http://www.viacharacter.org/Classification/tabid/56/Default.aspx.

  11 Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio, 2008), 33.

  12 Ibid., x.

  CHAPTER 14

  1 Brand, Stewart. Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (New York: Viking, 2009), 275, 298.

  2 Brand, Stewart. “The Purpose of the Whole Earth Catalog.” Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968. Electronic version available at http://wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/195/we.are.as.gods.

  3 Brand, Whole Earth Discipline, 276.

  4 Ibid., 298.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid., 276.

  7 “Jill Tarter and Will Wright in Conversation.” Seed, September 2, 2008. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/seed_salon_jill_tarter_will_wright/.

  8 “Spore.” Wikipedia entry, accessed May 1, 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore.

  9 For a history of the term “massively multiplayer forecasting games” and their development at the Institute for the Future, see: “Institute for the Future Announces First Massively Multiplayer Forecasting Platform.” Institute for the Future. Palo Alto: September 22, 2008. http://iftf.org/node/2319; “Massively Multiplayer Forecasting Games: Making the Future Real.” Institute for the Future. Palo Alto: September 7, 2008.
http://iftf.org/node/2302.

  10 Simon, Nina. “The Aftermath of the ARG World Without Oil.” Museum 2.0, July 27, 2007. http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2007/07/game-friday-aftermath-of-arg-world.html.

  11 Cerulo, Karen. Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  12 Gravois, John. “Think Negative!” Slate, May 16, 2007. http://www.slate.com/id/2166211.

  13 “A to Z: A World Beyond Oil.” World Without Oil, May 31, 2007. http://community.livejournal.com/worldwithoutoil/20306.html.

  14 Guité, François. Quoted on “Buzz: World Without Oil,” World Without Oil. http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/metabuzz.htm.

  15 “Everything Falls Apart—the End (Semi-OOG).” WWO player blog post, May 31, 2007. http://fallingintosin.livejournal.com/12325.html.

  16 “Fond and Sad Goodbye.” World Without Oil—The Texts, June 1, 2007. http://wwotext.blogspot.com/2007/06/fond-and-sad-goodbye.html.

  17 “Ending Thoughts (OOG).” WWO player blog post, May 31, 2007. http://monkeywithoutoil.blogspot.com/2007/05/ending-thoughts-oog.html.

  18 “New Chess Theory Not for Einstein: Scientist Denies Ever Playing ‘Three-Dimensional’ Game, Even for Relaxation.” New York Times, March 28, 1936.

  19 Ibid.

  20 Reid, Raymond. “Chesmayne: History of Chess.” 1994. Accessible at http://www.chess-poster.com/english/chesmayne/chesmayne.htm.

  21 Cascio, Jamais. “Super-Empowered Hopeful Individual.” Open the Future, March 2008. http://openthefuture.com/2008/03/superempowered_hopeful_individ.html.

  22 Friedman, Thomas. The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 381.

  23 Ibid.

  24 This particular saying is taken from “The Fifty-Year View,” Jamais Cascio’s April 2009 Ten-Year Forecast presentation for the Institute for the Future. http://iftf.org/files/deliverables/50YearScenarios.ppt.

  25 “Superstruct FAQ.” Institute for the Future, September 22, 2008. http://www.iftf.org/node/2096.

 

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