Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (32 page)

The heart of the TSDO experience is the never-ending list of potential dance quests, each of which adds a unique, unnecessary obstacle to dancing. By putting an obstacle in your way, TSDO makes it much harder to be self-conscious about dancing: you’re focused on completing the challenge, not necessarily on how you look. It also gives you permission to dance badly, by restricting “normal” ways of dancing. The first dance quest—to dance without moving your feet—is a perfect example of this design strategy in action: it automatically rules out pretty much any kind of traditional or obvious dancing. Excelling at stationary dancing requires silliness, creativity, or just plain enthusiasm—not necessarily grace, sexiness, strength, or whatever else we might associate with natural dance talent.

Other dance quests include missions like “Dance upside down,” “Dance in a crosswalk,” “Dance with a tree,” and “Dance to whatever was your favorite song exactly seven years ago.” In each case, successful dancing means creatively dealing with absurd limitations—including time limits, which are designed to make the quests easy to fit into your day. It’s meant to be like brushing your teeth—a little dancing every day goes a long way.

Meanwhile, the dance-offs—in which players form teams and earn points for every team member who submits a dance—require players to synchronize their efforts, even if they are dancing alone. In one of the most popular dance-offs, for example, called “Steal my bad move,” players invent a signature dance move and upload a video demonstrating it. Their team gets points for every player who successfully learns and repeats the same move in their own dance-off video.

What else makes the game work? Some of the supporting design choices I made for Top Secret Dance-Off were simply twists on very traditional strategies for getting people to dance. Masks, for example, have always been an important part of persuading people to let down their guard, and play and perform. They free us from the constraints of who we think we’re supposed to be and how we’re supposed to behave. For people who don’t see themselves as natural dancers, their TSDO disguise is meant to free them from that limiting self-identity.

A Top Secret Dance-Off player completes Dance Quest #1, dancing in disguise.

But the “top secret” theme isn’t just about practical considerations like obscuring player identity. It was also a lightweight way to create a kind of superhero mythology around dancing together. Dancing in front of others, after all, is an act of courage. And it’s a proven powerful force for good when you inspire others to dance. Treating players like top secret superheroes just for dancing is one way to playfully recognize the meaning that dancing holds for us, and the real individual strength required to do it.

Finally, perhaps one of the most effective design elements of Top Secret Dance-Off’s design isn’t even about dancing specifically—it’s actually an adaption of Keltner’s jen ratio to the online environment. I knew that in order for TSDO to work, players would need to feel comfortable posting potentially embarrassing videos of themselves. But on most video-sharing sites, the comments section is not exactly the kindest or friendliest place on earth. Criticism, rather than support, is the general method of feedback there, and it’s often personal, ugly, and mean-spirited. So I designed the comments feature of TSDO specifically to inspire players to leave positive feedback, or none at all.

Whenever you watch another player’s dance video, you have the option to reward them with a plus-one of any choreopower you want. Some choreopowers are traditional dance qualities, such as beauty, coordination, and style. Others are less traditional: humor, sneakiness, imagination, and courage. The range of choreopowers allows players to develop a unique profile of dance ability and strengths, regardless of their “natural” dance talent (or lack thereof). Perhaps my favorite choreopower is exuberance, which can be awarded to anyone who is obviously joyous and carefree.

As a result, TSDO is an environment with an off-the-charts high jen ratio. It’s a place where anyone can feel safe dancing together. Indeed, more than one player has professed in the TSDO chat room that their dance quest videos were the first time anyone has seen them dance publicly in years.

Top Secret Dance-Off is a more formal hack than Cruel 2 B Kind or Tombstone Hold ’Em. There’s a single, central game site, and everyone plays as part of the same online community, leveling up in the same database. But it’s still an incredibly lightweight solution, from a development perspective—I launched the game within a few days of starting to design it. It’s built on top of the inexpensive service Ning, which lets anyone start their own social network, much the way YouTube enabled anyone to share videos online and Blogger enabled anyone to start their own blog. There aren’t fancy graphics or Flash sequences, just good mission design and community support.

I created TSDO as a happiness hack for my own life, and I hoped to play it with a few dozen friends and family members. It wound up attracting a much larger group than I’d expected. The extended social network grew to include coworkers and colleagues, acquaintances and friends of friends—all in all, about five hundred of us in total played the game together for eight weeks during its initial trial run in early 2009. (And based on its early success, a commercial version of TSDO is now in the works.)

Although TSDO can be played alone, from my observations TSDO dancing is usually at least a little bit social. Most players seem to recruit at least one partner in crime when they play, so they can film each other’s dance quests and compete in the same dance-offs. And many players create group disguises for two, three, four, or even five people who plan to complete all the quests together as a single top secret unit.

Most important, TSDO helps players think of themselves as dancers—which seems to make them much more likely to dance together
in person
, when the opportunities arise. Though this isn’t a scientific survey, all of my friends who have played TSDO, myself included, have found themselves dancing more often in a traditional group venue—at parties, at Bollywood dance clubs, even street festivals—long after they finished the game.

Like all of the best happiness hacks, you don’t have to keep playing to maintain the benefits. A good game is
that
powerful—it can change the way you see yourself and what you’re capable of forever.

 

 

WHETHER WE’RE KILLING
each other with kindness, turning tombstones into full houses, or dancing in disguise, there’s no way around it: sometimes we have to
sneak up
on our happiness.

Two hundred years ago, the British political philosopher John Stuart Mill suggested a subversive approach to self-help. It’s an approach that has much in common with the growing community of happiness hackers. Mill argued that while happiness might be our primary goal, we can’t pursue it directly. It’s too tricky, too hard to pin down, too easy to scare off. So we have to set other, more concrete goals, and in the pursuit of those goals, we capture happiness as a kind of by-product. He called this approaching happiness “sideways, like a crab.”
³⁰
We can’t let it know we’re coming. We just kind of sneak up on it from the side.

That’s exactly what happiness hacks are designed to help us do: approach happiness sideways, and as a group. In fact, with crowd games, it might be more accurate to say that hacks let us
encircle
happiness—we’re all sneaking up on it from different angles together. We play these crowd games because we enjoy them in the moment and because we crave the social connectivity of a multiplayer experience. But a few intense and memorable exposures to a happiness hack can shift our ways of thinking and acting in the long run, about things as diverse as kindness to strangers, dancing, and death. And if you get enough people to shift in one place, you really can change the larger culture.

The best part about happiness hacks is that it doesn’t take a lot of technological know-how or sophisticated development to create one that works. It just takes a good understanding of how games motivate, reward, and connect us. With the creativity to invent some unnecessary obstacles and the courage to playtest them with as many people as possible, anyone can dream up and share new solutions to the happiness challenges of everyday life.

Alternate reality games of all kinds are designed to make us better: happier, more creative, and more emotionally resilient. When we are better in these ways, we are able to engage with the real world more wholeheartedly—to wake up each day with a stronger sense of purpose, optimism, community, and meaning in our lives.

But big crowd games, which are the subject of the next part of this book, can do more than make us better. They can help solve some of the most urgent challenges we face as the human species.

It turns out that our ability to make ourselves better as individuals—to dive into more satisfying work, to foster real hopes of success, to strengthen our social connections, to become a part of something bigger—also helps us work together, longer, on more complex and pressing problems. Games aren’t just about improving our lives today—they can help us create a positive legacy for the future.

O
n June 24, 2009, more than twenty thousand Britons joined forces online to investigate one of the biggest scandals in British parliament history—investigations that led to the resignations of dozens of parliament members and ultimately inspired sweeping political reform. How did these ordinary citizens make such a big difference? They did it by playing a game.

When the game began, the scandal had been brewing in the newspapers for weeks. According to leaked government documents, hundreds of members of parliament, or MPs, were regularly filing illegal expense claims, charging taxpayers up to tens of thousands of pounds annually for personal expenses completely unrelated to their political service. In a particularly inflammatory exposé, the
Telegraph
reported that Sir Peter Viggers, an MP from the southern coast of England, claimed £32,000 for personal gardening expenses, including £1,645 for a “floating duck island.”
¹

The public was outraged and demanded a full accounting of all MP expenses. In response, the government agreed to release the complete records for four years’ worth of MP claims. But in what was widely considered to be an attempt to hinder further investigation of the scandal, the government shared the data in the most unhelpful format possible: an unsorted collection of more than a million expense forms and receipts that had been scanned electronically. The files were saved as images, so that it was impossible to search or to cross-reference the claims. And much of the data had been redacted with big black blocks obscuring the detailed descriptions of items expensed. The data dump was dubbed “Blackoutgate” and called a “cover-up of massive proportions.”
²

The editors at the
Guardian
knew it would take too long for their own reporters to sort through the entire data dump and make sense of it. So they decided to enlist the public’s direct help in uncovering whatever it was the authorities didn’t want uncovered. In other words, they “crowdsourced” the investigation.

The term
crowdsourcing
, coined by technology journalist Jeff Howe in 2006, is shorthand for outsourcing a job to the crowd.
³
It means inviting a large group of people, usually on the Internet, to cooperatively tackle a big project. Wikipedia, the collaboratively authored online encyclopedia created by a crowd of more than 10 million unpaid (and often anonymous) writers and editors, is a prime example. Crowdsourcing is a way to do collectively, faster, better, and more cheaply what might otherwise be impossible for a single organization to do alone.

With a million uncataloged government documents on its hands and no way of knowing which document could prove to be the smoking gun for which MP, the
Guardian
knew it needed all the crowd help it could get. So it decided to tap into the wisdom of the crowds—not with a wiki, however, but with a game.

To develop the game, they turned to a young, but accomplished, London-based software developer named Simon Willison. His task: convert and condense all the scanned forms and expenses into 458,832 online documents, and set up a website where anyone could examine the public records for incriminating details. For the price of just a week’s worth of the development team’s time and a paltry fifty pounds to rent temporary servers to host the documents, the
Guardian
launched Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, the world’s first massively multiplayer investigative journalism project.