Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (25 page)

Yesterday, after my first run in a couple of weeks, my Mini danced around my iPod smiling, saying, “I can hardly contain myself! I’m a running machine !” Today, after another run, she’s leaping over hurdles and shouting, “I can do anything! I feel amazing!” I have to admit—the animations are a fairly accurate depiction of my own inner runner. It’s definitely working the way the Stanford researchers theorized it should: my Mini reminds me of why I love to run and therefore makes me more likely to get out of the house and do it.

But there’s also something else going on. I find that I want to run more in order to make the Mini happy.

Though it might seem ridiculous, this kind of emotional connection happens in games all the time—especially in tending and caretaking games, like the Xbox
Viva Piñata
series, in which players have to support an ecosystem of “living,” wild-roaming piñata animals, or the Nintendo
Pikmin
series, which puts the player in charge of an army of eager-to-please but dumb and highly vulnerable creatures. MIT researcher Judith Donath has studied the emotional attachment we form to virtual creatures. She argues that game characters programmed to appear dependent on us for their well-being provoke a hardwired human desire to nurture and care for them, and it doesn’t hurt that they are cute, helpless creatures. “Time spent playing with them feels like care-taking, an act of responsibility and altruism,” Donath explains. “We develop empathy for them and become invested in their well-being.”
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Naturally, then, the happier our virtual creatures appear to be as a direct result of our actions, the more satisfied we are as effective caretakers.

Virtual-creature happiness is not nearly as obvious a feedback system as points, levels, and achievements. But it’s part of a larger potential field of reward innovation, as we continue to learn how to better motivate ourselves by applying the best design strategies of games to our real-life activities.

 

 

THE MORE
we start to monitor and self-report our daily activity, whether through GPS, motion sensors, biometric devices (to track heart rate or blood sugar levels, for example), or even just with manually entered status updates, the more we’ll be able to chart our progress, set goals, accept challenges, and support each other in our real lives in the way we do in our best games. Given the overwhelming success of the Nike+ system, it’s not difficult to imagine adopting some of the Nike+ strategies for other activities that we want to do faster, more often, or simply at a higher level.

I for one would have loved a Writing+ system while writing this book. I’d have a “mini” writer whose mood and energy was based on my daily word count. I’d have the opportunity to earn achievements, like showing up to write ten days in a row, or to set a personal best for most words written in a day. The system could also keep track of the complexity of my writing—how many words I use per sentence, and how many sentences per paragraph, for example. I could use this data to improve the clarity of my writing and vary its structure. I could set up friendly rivalries with other authors—both friends in real life and authors that I’m a fan of. I think I would have been a lot more inspired to write if I knew I’d be able to compare my daily writing stats against the real-time stats of my favorite fiction writers—Curtis Sittenfeld, Scott Westerfeld, Cory Doctorow, and Emily Giffin.

Any project or challenging hobby that we’re working on that we want to see through to completion would benefit from more gamelike feedback and ambient support. We may be looking at a future in which everything we do can be “plus”: Cooking+, Reading+, Music+.

Maybe even . . . Social Life+?

That’s the idea behind Foursquare, a social networking application designed to motivate players to lead a more interesting social life.

The premise of Foursquare is simple: you’ll be happier if you get out of the house more and spend more time face-to-face with your friends.

Created by independent New York City-based developers Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, Foursquare takes its name from the classic red-rubber-ball playground game. To participate in Foursquare, you simply log in to the mobile phone application whenever you show up somewhere public that you deem fun, then tell the system where you are. That’s called a “check-in,” and you might find yourself checking in from a restaurant, bar, café, music venue, museum, or wherever else you like to go. Whenever you check in, Foursquare then sends real-time alerts to your friends so they can join you if they’re free and in the neighborhood. It also lets you know if any of your friends are already nearby, in case you want to meet up with them. Most importantly, Foursquare keeps track of where you’ve been, when, and who you’ve checked in with, if they’re playing Foursquare, too. By mid-2010, more than a million people were tracking and sharing data about their social lives using the Foursquare system. And more than three-quarters of those users were checking in thirty or more times each month.
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Out of all this data, Foursquare produces a series of online metrics about your social life: how often you go out, how many different places you visit, how many different people you spend time with each week, and how frequently you visit your favorite spots. On their own, these metrics aren’t that interesting. They’re just data, a way to quantify what you’re already doing. What really makes Foursquare engaging is the challenge and reward system built around the data.

The most popular Foursquare feature is a competitive challenge called The Mayor. The rules read: “If you’ve got more check-ins than anyone else at a particular place, we deem you ‘The Mayor’ of that place. But once someone else comes along who has checked in more times than you, they then steal the ‘Mayor’ title back from you.” As soon as you become mayor, Foursquare sends an announcement to your friends congratulating you. Even better, some bars and restaurants have set up special deals for whoever happens to be mayor at any given time. The Marsh Café in San Francisco, for example, lets the current mayor drink for free. Of course, this is also a smart move on the part of the café—players have extra incentive to bring their friends there nightly to try to achieve or hold on to the mayor status, boosting business throughout the week. It’s also a good example of how traditional brick-and-mortar companies might be able to augment their services by more actively taking part in this popular reality-based game. Currently, hundreds of venues—from the Sacramento Zoo to a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant in the student union at the University of North Carolina Charlotte—offer deals or freebies for Foursquare players.

Why do people love the idea of becoming the mayor? Because trying to become mayor of your favorite city spots gives you a chance to keep doing something you already love, but do it more. It gives you an excuse to spend as much time as possible at the places that make you happiest. And when you notice someone else vying for your mayor status, you get an instant friendly rival, motivating you to visit your favorite places more often, the same way a Nike+ challenger pushes you to run faster and longer.

Foursquare is also a personal achievement system, consisting of virtual trophies and badges. Trophies automatically unlock in your profile when you celebrate checking in to your tenth, twenty-fifth, fiftieth, and hundredth different venues in a single city. In order to earn these trophies, you can’t just be content with being the mayor at one place. You have to venture outside your usual spots and expand your social horizons. You can also earn badges like the Foodie badge, earned by checking in to Zagat-rated restaurants in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and other major cities, or the Entourage badge for checking in at the same time and place as ten or more of your Foursquare friends.

In the end, what makes a Foursquare social life better than your regular social life is the simple fact that to do well in Foursquare, you have to enjoy yourself more. You have to frequent your favorite places more often, try things you’ve never tried before, go places you’ve never been, and meet up more often with friends whom you might not ordinarily make time to see in person. In other words, it’s not a game that rewards you for what you’re already doing. It’s a game that rewards you for doing new things, and making a better effort to be social.

There’s one more significant benefit to adding compelling stats to your social life. Because players want their statistics to be as accurate (and impressive) as possible, they’re more likely to remember to check in and send status updates about where they are. That makes it easier for their friends to find them, and therefore more likely to make plans to see them.

Ultimately, the real reward of seeing friends more often and breaking outside your routine has nothing to do with virtual badges or social life points or online bragging rights. The real rewards are all the positive emotions you are feeling, like discovery and adventure; the new experiences you’re having, like hearing more live music and tasting more interesting food; and the social connections you’re strengthening by being around people you like more often. Foursquare doesn’t replace these rewards. Instead, it draws your attention to them.

Some people, of course, are natural social butterflies or nightlife adventurers. For others—workaholics, homebodies, introverts—getting out and doing something new is no small feat, especially when there are so many compelling reasons to stay in our own living rooms.

There’s a popular gamer T-shirt that shows an Xbox Live-style badge of a door ajar with these words alongside: “Achievement unlocked: Left the house.”
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It’s a joke, but it also speaks to the real challenges of trying to lead a meaningful, balanced life in the nonvirtual world. As we struggle to find the right balance between virtual and real-life adventures, a game like Foursquare can nudge us in the right direction and help us put our best efforts where we can reap the most satisfying rewards: back in the real world, with the help of a good game.

HOW ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES CAN CREATE NEW REAL-WORLD COMMUNITIES

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
t’s a cold and dreary afternoon, and you’re walking down a busy street. You’re lost in your thoughts when suddenly a woman’s voice whispers in your ear, “There’s a lover nearby. . .” You look around, but everyone seems as lost in their own world as you were just a few seconds ago. If there’s a lover nearby, you have no idea who it is.

Then you hear the voice again, this time updating you on your game statistics : “Your life is now at level six.” That’s one level higher than it was before the lover passed by.

Some stranger on the street just gave you a life.

But who was it? Is it that kid sitting on the steps now a few buildings behind you, with his earbuds tucked in? He looks like he’s listening to music—but is he listening for lovers, too? Or is the lover that man in the suit with his Bluetooth earpiece, pacing back and forth? He looks like he’s on a business call—but could he be your secret benefactor?

Or has the lover moved on? Perhaps you are on your own again.

You haven’t gone another half block when the voice interrupts, this time more insistently, “There’s a dancer nearby.” Then, right away: “There’s
another
dancer nearby. Your life is now at level four.” Damn! Who just stole two lives from you?

It must be a couple, playing together, because you’ve lost two lives in such rapid succession. You spin around and notice a couple holding hands walking in the opposite direction. They might be wearing headphones under their hoods. You didn’t notice them before, but they must be the dancers. You hurry down the block before they circle back and take another life from you.

Clearly, you need to find some other lovers as quickly as possible, team up, and restore each other’s life levels. If your life falls to zero, you’re out of the game. But how do you discover the other players hidden in the crowd? As the game instructions suggest, “You could find a stranger and ask them, ‘Are you a Lover or a Dancer?’” But that feels too forward, too abrasive. You feel more comfortable scanning the crowd, looking for people who seem to be looking for others. That way, you can gravitate toward the most promising strangers, stand near them, and wait to see if your life level goes up or down.

If nothing happens, you know they’re not playing the game and you don’t have to bother them. But if your life level goes up, you can try to smile and make eye contact. You can try to show the stranger that you can be trusted....

Learning how to offer comfort to strangers, and how to receive it, is the primary challenge of a game called, naturally, the Comfort of Strangers. It’s a game for outdoor city spaces, designed by British developers Simon Evans and Simon Johnson. It’s played on PDAs and phones with Bluetooth detection that alert you via your headphones or earpiece whenever other players are within a few yards’ distance. The PDAs automatically detect other players within a few yards and register a gain or loss of life whenever you cross paths. Half the players are “lovers”; they form one team. The other half are “dancers,” and they form the opposing team. If you encounter a player on your team, you gain a life; if you encounter a player on the opposing team, you lose one.

The Comfort of Strangers is played anonymously; you can download and start the application and wander out into the city streets without any idea of who else is playing or how many players there are. There’s no visual or screen element to the game, so you can play it quite discreetly, with your PDA tucked into a pocket. The only clue that you’re playing is that you’re wearing headphones—but it’s easy to blend in with the increasing number of people who wear earbuds or earpieces while out in public spaces.

At the start of the game, you don’t know what side you’re on. You have to learn whether you’re a lover or a dancer by listening to the voice that whispers in your ear and keeping track of whether your life is going up or down. Everyone starts the game with ten lives, and when only one team remains alive, the game ends.