Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (38 page)

The best way to explain the wish-granting Groundcrew project, developed by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based social entrepreneur Joe Edelman, is by looking first at the project’s inspiration, one of the best-selling computer games of all time: the life-simulation game
The Sims.

When you play
The Sims
, your job is to keep your simulated people healthy and happy. You keep them healthy by tending to their physical needs: feeding them, putting them to sleep, making sure they shower and use the bathroom regularly. You keep them happy by fulfilling “wishes.”

As
The Sims 3
guide explains, “Sims come up with small wishes each day that they would love for you to help them fulfill. Fulfilled wishes boost your Sim’s mood and award Lifetime Happiness points.”
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Sims express their wishes to you via the “wish panel,” a kind of head’s-up display that shows you exactly where each Sim character is, what they want, and how you can get it for them. For example: “The night sky is beautiful and mysterious. Your Sim wants to explore the logical patterns of the stars. Use a telescope: Worth +150 happiness points.” The wish panel gave Edelman his breakthrough idea. “Real people have wishes just like the Sims,” Edelman says. “The problem is, we just don’t know what those wishes are, or how we can help. What if we could receive real-time alerts about how to make real people happy?”
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So Edelman started a software company called Citizen Logistics to build a wish panel for real people. His vision: to make it as easy to satisfy the everyday wishes of other human beings as it is to improve the lifetime happiness score of our favorite Sims.

The logistics part would be key, Edelman realized. Right now, it’s not easy to find out what we can do, in the moment and where we happen to be, to make someone else’s day. So he set out to create a new system that would map real-time wishes onto our local environment. The concept has three key features.

First, a player should be able to log in to the system and see everyone within walking, public transportation, or driving distance who has a wish at that very moment. Meanwhile, players with wishes of their own should be able to see a map of all available “agents” in the area who are up for a quick wish adventure, and they should be able to push their wish at available players directly, via text messaging. Finally, the first player to successfully fulfill someone else’s wish in time should earn reputation points to indicate that they are a trusted wish fulfiller. This would allow them access to fulfill more challenging wishes over time. Even better, they could later spend their earned reputation points to mobilize and reward other players for fulfilling their own wishes.

Edelman wasn’t sure the idea would work, but he believed it was worth trying—and so he built a test platform and invited friends and colleagues in the Cambridge area to use it for anything they wanted. To his delight, the idea did work, and right away. On the first day the system was live, what Edelman calls Wish #1 was granted. As he tells the story:

Okay, so getting someone a latte isn’t exactly the most world-changing effort you could make.

Or is it?

Edelman likes to tell the latte story, even if it seems like a trivial wish, because for him it perfectly represents the new kind of epic win that is possible in a world where more and more people are willing to use their mobile phones to broadcast where they are and what they need. The win is nothing less than an augmented human capacity to do good and feel good every single day, by making better use of each other’s spare time. As Edelman puts it, “We can love a lot more people when we can make their wishes come true in seconds.... We can love people when we know what they need.”
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This isn’t just a warm, fuzzy fantasy. Edelman is talking about reinventing our idea of everyday economic systems of give-and-take. “The normal way of getting a latte is a cold, economic exchange,” he says. “We walk into a café alone every day, and we give up our hard-earned cash to get it. But this latte was different. This latte was love. This is about inventing a different way, a better way, of getting what we need, every day.”
¹¹

Imagine for a moment what kinds of needs you might express in the course of your everyday life: I’m bored. I’m lost. I’m hungry. I’m lonely. I’m nervous. What could you wish for to fill those daily needs?

I can think of lots of small wishes I would make:

I’m stressed at work and want to play fetch with a dog to help me relax. Please walk your dog here, now!

I’m flying out of SFO in the morning and I want to read your old copy of the new Dan Brown book. If you are going to be in Terminal 1 between seven and eight a.m., please bring it to me!

I’m giving a public talk at the university tomorrow; please come and try to spark a standing ovation at the end of it, because my parents will be in the audience and I want them to be proud.

None of these wishes would change my life. But they would completely change my notion of how to get what I want from life—and more importantly, how to share what I have with others.

Indeed, Groundcrew represents the potential for an entirely new kind of economy, built around the exchange of three intrinsic rewards: the happiness that comes from doing good, the thrill that comes from accomplishing a challenging mission, and the satisfaction of accumulating points that signify something real and wonderful—your ability to make other people’s wishes come true, and your future chances at having your own wishes fulfilled.

There’s no inherent limit to this new engagement economy: all three of these rewards are infinitely renewable resources. And Groundcrew’s original virtual currency, the PosX (short for “positive experience”) reputation system, makes it possible, for the first time, to accumulate, quantify, and exchange these intrinsic rewards.

“The availability of cheap, networked, programmable devices is as big a deal for human economics as the invention of paper money and coins were,” Edelman explains. “It gives us, for the first time, the opportunity to
change the rules of the game
, to
tune the incentives
, and to create much more flexible
access to resources
—including other people—all without creating the huge bureaucracies and informational inefficiencies associated with previous attempts.

“While we continue to argue about capitalism and socialism, for the first time a third option is really possible. Right now, we have an opportunity to make things more equitable, more sustainable, more intimate, and also more beautiful and fun. When incentives match up better with our deep human desires, life becomes more enjoyable, adventurous, and fulfilling.”
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The more missions you participate in, the more PosX you receive. But that’s just the start of the economy. Someone who enjoys completing your mission can also give
you
PosX for giving them the chance to do something that feels good. It’s an incredibly smart, radical idea, and it’s derived directly from the economic model of the game industry. People are happy to pay money—buying and subscribing to games—for the opportunity to do hard work that is intensely rewarding. And a truly sustainable economy of real-world engagement should strive to harness this market for better, more rewarding work.

In Groundcrew, you can be paid in virtual currency for doing good work—but you can also pay others in that same virtual currency for giving you good work to do. This will create a market for satisfying social participation tasks. It will mean many more people trying to design real-world missions that you can achieve right away, giving you real hope of success, increasing your social connectivity, and giving meaning to an otherwise boring day. This is pivotal: we can’t have more epic wins in daily life unless smart people are contributing good SPTs to our collective save-the-world work flow.

Of course, some wishes are more urgent than others. Groundcrew is currently working with AARP, the nonprofit organization for Americans over the age of fifty, to empower agents to “make a difference in the lives of elders near you.” Groundcrew agents receive SMS and e-mail alerts with special elder-focused SPTs: help with transportation, grocery shopping, light housekeeping, or just companionship. Because these missions involve intimate interaction with a potentially vulnerable population, not just any agent can undertake these missions—only the most trusted agents (who have racked up enough PosX and also submit to criminal background checks) are eligible for these “high-trust” SPTs.

I have to admit—I’m partial to the kinds of intimate exchanges first imagined by Edelman when he invented his real-world wish panel. I think that improving each other’s daily lives by making small, one-to-one efforts in our spare time could dramatically improve global quality of life and make more sustainable, efficient use of our material resources. But Groundcrew is also a scalable project, capable of harnessing huge crowds for a single wish.

Indeed, since Edelman started developing the Groundcrew platform, he has evolved his vision, so that players can help fulfill not only individual wishes, but also organizational goals. Like The Extraordinaries, Groundcrew has started to partner with existing institutions to find volunteers for a variety of nonprofit, activist, and political organizing efforts.

Groundcrew’s first crowd mobilization efforts was for Youth Venture, an organization that encourages young people to take social action and start “businesses for good” in their local communities. One signature Youth Venture initiative, Garden Angels, coordinates efforts to create community gardens, with the goal of distributing the fruits and vegetables grown in them to people who need it most. Many people know about and support this effort, but they don’t have an easy way to help. That’s where Groundcrew comes in—to create an epic win work flow for community gardens.

Garden Angels is using Groundcrew to organize large-crowd events in local gardens, like soil turning and gleaning, as well as to find volunteers for small, everyday activities: weeding, watering, and checking on the security of the gardens. Instead of planning an event and hoping volunteers show up, Youth Venture can wait for a critical mass of Groundcrew players to signal their availability for a mission, then throw an impromptu event strategically timed to harness as much participation as possible. Meanwhile, players don’t have to schedule their volunteer efforts in advance; they can sign up to receive text messages when a small task needs to get done in a garden that happens to be nearby. (Whenever players check in to report their location, the system searches for nearby tasks.) In testing Groundcrew with projects like Garden Angels, Edelman reports, they’ve already seen on average “a hundred times increase in the availability of volunteers for projects.”
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That’s how to increase our collective social participation bandwidth: by empowering one hundred times as many people to make heroic efforts in their spare time.

 

 

WHETHER WE’RE HELPING
individuals or helping big organizations, our notion of how much social engagement we can expect from an ordinary person increases dramatically when gameful thinking meets smart technology. That’s why many social participation games are taking advantage not just of good game design, but also of leading-edge technologies that make it easier to plug individual action into epic contexts. So far, mobile phones have been at the forefront of this effort—but they’re not the only way to add epic wins to our daily lives.

Consider Lost Joules, which promises to be the world’s greenest computer game. It helps us get epic wins in our own homes by turning our electricity meters into game controllers.

Imagine it’s Friday afternoon, and I have an important favor to ask of you. For the good of the planet, you need to try to conserve as much energy as possible at home this weekend. Turn off your lights earlier, charge your electronics less frequently, unplug your toaster, hang your clothes on a clothesline instead of using the dryer. How hard would you try to do me that favor?