Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (17 page)

Crucially, the Gobekli Tepe wasn’t an isolated example. As researchers have discovered since, epic stone cathedrals were common across the Neolithic landscape. Most recently, in August 2009, archaeologists working in northern Scotland unearthed the ruins of a 5,330-square-foot stone structure with twenty-foot ceilings and sixteen-foot-thick walls, also of a labyrinthine design, and also dating back to the New Stone Age.
²⁴
“A building of this scale and complexity was here to amaze, to create a sense of awe in the people who saw this place,” Nick Card, director of the archaeological dig, said to reporters when the ancient cathedral was first unearthed.

In the wake of unearthing these types of structures all over the planet, archaeologists have recently proposed a startling theory: that these stone cathedrals served an important purpose in the evolution of human civilization. They actually inspired and enabled human society to become dramatically more cooperative, completely reinventing civilization as it once existed. In an in-depth report in
Smithsonian
magazine on these Neolithic cathedrals, Andrew Curry wrote:

In fact, as Curry quotes one scientist in his article, “You can make a good case these constructs are the real origin of complex Neolithic societies.”
²⁶

No wonder epic environments inspire gamers today to collective efforts. They have been inspiring humans to work together to do amazing things for eleven thousand years and counting.

 

 

SO VIDEO GAMES
didn’t invent epic environment design. They inherited the tradition from some of our earliest ancestors. But they
are
making epic environments remarkably more accessible, to vastly more people, on a daily basis.

Archaeologists say that worshippers would have traveled more than a hundred miles by foot to visit the Gobekli Tepe, and they may have visited it just once in a lifetime. Today, however, it’s easy to immerse ourselves in epic environments whenever we want. Instead of traveling great distances for a single encounter with a physical cathedral, we can instantly transport ourselves there from anywhere in the world, simply by loading up a blockbuster video game.

Our experience of these epic game environments isn’t physical, but it is real in one crucial sense. The engineering of the virtual environment represents, today, a collaborative feat on an extreme scale. It takes an extraordinary collective and coordinated effort to create these virtual worlds—years of full-time, painstaking work by hundreds of artists and programmers—and the first time a gamer enters one of these massive environments, they are experiencing real awe at the ability of ordinary people, when they band together, to create extraordinary spaces.

Meanwhile, video game developers have evolved the art of epic built environments in another key way: they have added a layer of awe-inspiring sound.

The sound track isn’t just part of the background of playing; it’s a major component of the gaming experience—particularly in the case of
Halo
and its famously spine-tingling score. Tracks on the
Halo 3
sound track have names like “Honorable Intentions,” “This Is the Hour,” and “Never Forget.” Perhaps my favorite track is called simply “Ambient Wonder,” a name that perfectly sums up the purpose of an epic environment: to create a space that completely absorbs and envelops the player in a sense of awe and wonder.

Halo
’s audio director, Martin O’Donnell, describes his goal in creating the score: “The music should give a feeling of importance, weight, and sense of the ‘ancient’ to the visuals of
Halo
.” The score includes Gregorian chanting, a string orchestra, percussion, and Qawwali vocals, a Sufi devotional style of music intended to produce an ecstatic state in the listener.
²⁷
These are timeless musical techniques for provoking our bodies’ epic emotions—and video games increasingly make use of them. As one
Halo
player explains, “A great video game will make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Goose pimples will erupt. That tingly sensation overtakes your gut. It happens to me whenever I hear the
Halo
sound track.”
²⁸

 

 

SO WHAT DO
all of these extreme visual and audio environments add up to? Epic projects: collaborative efforts to tell stories and accomplish missions at extreme scales.

Epic environments inspire us to undertake epic projects, because they are a tangible demonstration of what is humanly possible when we all work together. Indeed, they
expand
our notion of what is humanly possible. And that’s why exploring an epic environment like
Halo 3
inspires the kind of emotions that lead to large-scale cooperation, an epic achievement in and of itself.

Games journalist Margaret Robertson reflects, “
Halo
has always been a place where I feel good. I don’t mean that in a James Brown sense. I mean it’s a place where I feel virtuous.... [It] engenders a sense of honour and duty which actually make you feel like a better person.... What’s the point of going to a better place if you aren’t going to be a better person?”
²⁹

While reaching the 10 billion kill milestone was a significant community achievement,
Halo
players have actually spent more time working on two other epic projects—both collaborative knowledge projects. The first epic project involves documenting the
Halo
world on wikis and discussion forums. The other is a project to build up each other’s collective ability to fight the Covenant and play a better game with each other. Both projects take place largely on discussion forums and wikis.

To give you an indication of the scale of the collective effort to document the
Halo
world and improve player ability within it, players have written more than 21 million discussion forum posts on the official Bungie
Halo
forums alone. Meanwhile, the largest
Halo
wiki has just under six thousand different articles, created and edited by 1.5 million registered users.

Halo
players are also sharing knowledge to make each other better gamers. While the Halopedia wiki helps players construct the epic saga of the
Halo
series, the Halowiki (which describes itself as a “sister site” to Halopedia) focuses exclusively on multiplayer strategy and techniques. Its “values” statement sets the tone for epic knowledge sharing:

The scope of Halowiki is as staggering as its sister site. Under the tips section alone, there is an A to Z catalog of more than 150 different categories of tips, from “Bad habits to avoid in team games” and “Communication tips,” to “How to use vehicles effectively” and “Last-resort tips when all else fails.” Each individual category of tips contains hundreds of specific pieces of advice, contributed by different gamers.

The strategy section, on the other hand, contains more complex advice, sorted into roughly one hundred different categories, from “Close-range weapon mastery” and “Using ancient practices—advice from Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
,” to one of my personal favorites: “Retraining your brain to not be afraid to die in the game.”

In total, there are more than one thousand different sections on Halowiki that compile players’ firsthand knowledge playing the game into a collective intelligence resource. Ultimately, for members of the
Halo
community, this resource serves a greater purpose than just creating better
Halo
players. Adding a bit of knowledge to the wiki validates that you know at least one thing that matters to millions of other people. It might be just a bit of
Halo
trivia—but there’s nothing trivial about the positive feeling you get when you make a contribution that millions of other people can value and appreciate.

 

 

HALO
HAS CONSISTENTLY
pushed the limits of epic game design for a decade now—the first game in the series was released in 2001. But plenty of other online games are doing their part to invent new ways for gamers to become a part of something bigger. One of the most interesting recent experiments in epic game design is a project called Season Showdown, developed by EA Sports for its best-selling college football series
NCAA Football
. Season Showdown is the first significant effort in the sports video game genre—a highly successful genre, representing more than 15 percent of all game sales—to create the same kinds of epic emotional rewards more traditionally associated with save-the-world games like
Halo
.

“Every Game Counts” is the tagline for
NCAA Football 10.
Of course, this begs the question: counts toward what? The short answer is: every game played counts toward a national championship. It’s not the real national championship, but not an entirely virtual one, either.

When you sign up to play
NCAA Football 10
online, the first thing you do is declare a team allegiance. You can pick any one of the 120 real-world college teams represented in the game, from Ohio State, Notre Dame, or Stanford to Florida State, Army, or USC. (I picked my alma mater, California.) For the rest of the online football season, every online point you score in the video game gets added to your team’s score. The team scores are tallied weekly, in order to determine the winner in a series of school vs. school matchups.

These matchups perfectly mirror the real-world NCAA schedule. So, for example, the week that Oregon State faces Stanford in the real world, the two teams’ fans will compete online in five head-to-head video game challenges. The team that carries three of the five challenges is crowned the week’s online winner, regardless of who wins in the real world. That means plenty of online upsets, as fans of struggling teams rally to offset real losses with virtual victories.

At the end of the year, the best-performing online teams compete in their own conference championships. The ultimate payoff is an
NCAA Football 10
National Championship video game played out the same week as the real-world National Championship game. In the words of EA Sports, “The national champion will be composed of the most dedicated fans playing
NCAA 10
.”

And that’s what makes every
NCAA Football 10
game more meaningful than other sports video games. You’re not just playing for yourself and for your own enjoyment. You’re publicly playing to show support for your real favorite team, as part of a collective, fan-wide effort.

What’s so innovative about
NCAA Football 10
is the fact that the game is using reality itself as the larger context for individual player actions. It’s a fantasy league, but it’s a fantasy league wrapped in reality. It doesn’t have to invent a context from scratch to connect players to an epic story. Instead, it taps into existing college football narratives and traditions. It leverages existing communities, or fan bases, to provide meaningful social context. It feels epic because it’s directly connecting fans to a much bigger organization they care deeply about, but can’t ordinarily participate in directly.

As much fun as it is to cheer on our favorite teams, it’s more meaningful to do something that pushes us to the edge of our own ability—and that counts, measurably. In
NCAA Football 10
, you’re not just playing
as
your favorite college team, you’re playing
in service of
your favorite college team. You’re actively contributing to their reputation in a way that is quantified and amplified by EA Sports. As one blogger puts it, “Every game you play will help your school’s cause.”
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It’s all about being of service to a larger cause—one you already care about.

JOHAN HUIZINGA,
the great twentieth-century Dutch philosopher of human play, once said, “All play
means
something.”
³²
Today, thanks to the increased scale of game worlds and advances in collective game design, gameplay often means something
more
. Game developers today are honing their ability to create awe-inspiring contexts for collective effort and heroic service. As a result, game communities are more committed than ever to setting extreme-scale goals and generating epic meaning.