Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 2:00PM
Abstract:
Is it a game or is it real life? When you get right down to it, is there really a difference? Learn about the growing popularity of ARGs from one of the most innovative minds in this industry. Jane McGonigal explains what it is like to be a puppet-master of this exciting new genre.Jane McGonigal - Creative Dir, Avant Game
[Her slides can be found here.] [Her blog for Avant Game.]
ARG - alternate reality game
Goal: Make the real world more like games. We need the real-world to have better design.
Game designer’s perspective on the future of happiness
Positive psychology - a look at our brains not as something that malfunctions. It looks at the well-functioning brain - what makes us happy and satisfied.
[References: Laynard and Gilbert.] What they are discovering resonates with game design.
[Reference (opposing POV): Wilson, Against Happiness.]
This is not about warm, fuzzy happy, but capturing the best human experience.
Is what we are doing as persons who work with interaction also in the happiness business? We need to start thinking that our primary goal is optimizing happiness.
Her 2013 projection:
- Quality of life becomes the primary impact for measuring services.
- Positive psychology is a principle influence in this.
- Communities form around these visions of a life worth living.
- Value will be defined aas a measuralbe increase in happiness or well-being - the new capital.
Happiness is not a warm puppy or warm fuzziness. The concept is changing and includes:
- satisfying work to do
- being good at something
- time spent with people we like
- being part of something bigger
These points match precisely with the goals of games. Multiplayer games are the “ultimate happiness engine”.
Signals of the change: “I am not good at life” is an excerpt of graffiti she sees on the way to work each day. Being good at things in life is tough for some people. In a game mileu, one can walk into a huge collaborative environment where there are supportive humans and game-based rewards.
- Games come with better instructions.
- They come with better feedback to help us grow.
- Better community - even in competition there is collaboration that comes from a mutual buy-in to the virtual ruleset.
We are seeing global mass exodus towards virtual worlds.
[Reference : Castranova] It makes sense that people spend more time in game worlds because they are given better opportunities to succeed. This makes it a rational decision. The average MMO player spends 16 hours/week in the game. Yes, this can be exploited by entrpeneurs, but we are talking about taking what the game worlds have and making it in the real world. for many gamers the perceived quality of life is better in-game - virtuality is beating reality. What would the world be like if people felt good at real life?
Bad news
Games in 2008 - it is like we invented the written word and just made books - only books - and missed all the other media.
Some cool ARG examples:
- Chore Wars - get experience for home work
- zyked - treat exercise like an MMO
- serios - Virtual currency for getting things done in a company. Reveals relationships that are usually difficult to see.
- Citizen Logistics - What if life were like a game to help others. It knows where you are via GPS.
In order to imagine the future, it is good to look back twice as far as you want to look forward.
Example: soap kills germs article from 1931 - why not “Games kill alienation/depression/boredom”
Alternate reality comes from science fiction. It is not “alternative” or an escape. It is an another way of experiencing existence.
Example game: World Without Oil (WWO)
How are ARG amplifying happiness skills? Here are some gamespeak measures of these skills:
- mobbability - collaborate and coordinate massively large
- cooperation radar - knowing people’s strengths
- influency - the ability to adapt your persuasive strategies in different environments and with different communities
- ping quotient - your ability to reach out to people on a network and you are responsive; easily engaged
- multi-capitalism - knowing what capital is important to a given culture or group; bartering skills
- protovation - rapid, fearless innovation that damns failure to being a learning moment that is fun.
- open authorship - comfort with giving content away and knowing it will be changed. making something that is enhanced by others and not broken.
- signal/noise management - ability to handle so much noise and pick the salient signal.
- longbroading - abilirty to tink at a high level see everything
- emergisight - see patterns emerging and forsee their implications
These amplify our tendency toward the optimum human experience. How can interactive systems encourage these 10 superpowers?
Fertile ARG environs:
- Twitter is a great example
- Nike iPod
- Plane communication - onboard interfaces for games and communication.
- Hightech dog collars - (conceptual idea) MMO where your avatar is your your dog
- my car is a video game - Prius owner turns saving energy into a game
- Trackstick
- Neurosky transmitter
Lost Ring:
- ARG for the 2008 Olympic Games in Bejing (http://www.thelostring.com/)
- Goal: You can discover a lost sport that has not been played for thousands of years
Takeaway:
- Soon enough, we will all be in the happiness business.
- Game designers have a huge head start. Look at games.
- ARs signal the desire, need and opportunity for all of us to redesign reality for a real quality of life.
Some of the questions:
- The military messes with this. They use gaming as a layer of abstraction that desensitizes soldiers to reality/human life.
- There is a problem in that some people opt out of reality. That is all the more reason to make reality options that emulate happiness goals found in games.
Other examples she has been involved in: