Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (42 page)

If the blindfold game really was the most important ancient Olympic event, then why had historians never heard of it before? Hunt left his viewers with the following challenge:

Within twenty-four hours, a community of online gamers and bloggers caught wind of the lost-sport mystery and immediately took Hunt up on his challenge. They didn’t necessarily believe his evidence—but they could sense that some kind of interesting game was afoot. And because Hunt subtitled his podcasts in seven different languages—English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Mandarin—these gamers were from all over the world. Using a variety of translation tools to talk to each other, the gamers created a discussion forum, set up a chat room, assembled a wiki, and started e-mailing Hunt for more information. They were determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Lost Sport of Olympia.

The gamers followed a trail of clues from Hunt’s online podcast to other blogs and websites, which created a vast web of real historical information and urban legend, and then finally to the real world, where over the span of just six short weeks they discovered twenty-seven physical artifacts: pages of a mysterious illustrated text called the Lost Ring Codex. Each page contained more information about the rules and the purpose of the lost sport. These pages, dated to 1920, were scattered across twenty-seven countries on five continents. The text was written in the universal language Esperanto and apparently had been created and hidden by an earlier generation of lost-sport investigators who had ultimately failed in their efforts to revive the ancient game.

How did they find these hidden artifacts? First they learned a real ancient Greek navigational shorthand known as “omphalos code,” the subject of Eli Hunt’s second podcast. Next, they worked together on a wiki to translate a set of twenty-seven omphalos codes into modern-day GPS coordinates. Then they called in favors from members of
their
social networks, who called in favors from members of their social networks, to find people willing to recover the pages of the codex in these far-flung real-world locations, from a bookstore in Johannesburg to a hostel in Rio de Janeiro to an art gallery in Bangalore.

As each page was recovered, players volunteered to translate them out of Esperanto into eight different languages—the game’s original seven, plus Dutch, since a sizable contingent of players had formed in the Netherlands—and the gamers were thus able to create a new and complete record of the Lost Sport of Olympia for people all over the world.

The translated codex revealed, among other things, that the ancient game was officially called The Human Labyrinth, but nicknamed The Lost Ring. Piece by piece, players learned that it was a team sport for sixteen players: one blindfolded runner and fifteen “wall members.” The wall members used their bodies to create a human-size labyrinth by standing on string laid out in the shape of an ancient Cretan maze. The runner, unable to see or feel his or her way, would try to escape from the center of the labyrinth as fast as possible, while the wall members hummed to help guide the runner. The official maze dimensions ensured that the teams never had enough members to cover the entire wall at any given time; instead, they would have to race ahead of the runner to create more wall before the runner reached that part of the labyrinth. Each labyrinth team competed against other labyrinth teams to get their runner out the fastest.

So what did the gamers do once they had solved the mystery of the ancient Olympic event? They did what any true gamers would do: they started to play it. And they committed to bringing back the lost sport in time for the real 2008 Summer Olympics. Teams formed across the world: in Singapore, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Shanghai; in London, Paris, Zurich, and Vienna; in San Francisco, Portland, New York, and Dallas; in Buenos Aires and São Paolo; in Johannesburg and in Cape Town; in Sydney, Melbourne, and Wellington.

Every weekend for several months, gamers gathered in different cities to revive the Lost Sport of Olympia and master the blindfolded labyrinth race. They uploaded hundreds of training videos to YouTube and added thousand of training photos to Flickr in order to show off how good they were getting, to teach other people how to play, and to trade strategies with other lost-sport athletes.

The teams got faster and faster as they developed better teamwork and tried out more and more complex strategies. Soon, each weekend a new world record was being set somewhere—Vienna this week, New York City another, Shanghai the next. The U.S. Olympic champion runner Edwin Moses volunteered to serve as the online virtual coach of the lost-sport athletes, sending weekly advice by e-mail and in online chats. Collectively, the lost-sport athletes worldwide egged each other on, improving their best times from an average of three minutes and thirty seconds per race when they started training to an average of fifty-nine seconds per race by summer’s end, with a world’s best of thirty-eight seconds.

On August 24, 2008, the closing day of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, six months after Eli Hunt had uploaded his first podcast, one hundred of the world’s best computer gamers put their lost-sport knowledge to the test. The six best human labyrinth teams in the world assembled in Beijing, San Francisco, Salvador da Bahia, London, Tokyo, and Wellington to compete in their own self-organized world championships. As the final medal counts were tallied for the real Olympic Games, these gamers-turned-athletes competed against each other for honorary gold (Tokyo), silver (San Francisco), and bronze (Wellington) medals in the Lost-Sport Olympics.

Those are just some of the highlights of The Lost Ring, an alternate reality game that took a full year to develop and another six months to play, eventually creating a player community made up of citizens from more than one hundred countries on six continents: 28 percent from North America, 25 percent from Europe, 18 percent from the Asia-Pacific region, 13 percent from Latin America, 9 percent from Oceania, and smaller clusters in areas such as Dubai, Israel, and South Africa. More than a quarter of a million gamers participated, and the most active participants—the core team of puzzle solvers, translators, social engineers, researchers, and athletes—numbered above ten thousand—just as many members as the community of official 2008 Olympic athletes. Together, those alternate reality Olympians created a new history of the games for an online audience of more than 2.9 million.
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FOR MCDONALD’S
and AKQA, The Lost Ring was innovative marketing. Instead of delivering a typical television commercial about McDonald’s support for the Olympics, they would create a branded game that gave players an opportunity to become actively immersed in the Olympics. For the International Olympic Committee, it was a chance to help make a long-standing tradition more relevant to the gamer generation.

For me, it was an opportunity to create a world-class global collaboratory. That’s why every element of The Lost Ring was designed to challenge players to practice extraordinary cooperation, coordination, and cocreation.

To inspire global cooperation, we used the strategy of massively distributing game content in different languages, on localized Web communities, and across far-flung real-world geographic locations in order to make it impossible for any single country, let alone a single player, to experience the game alone. Key online game clues were hidden on regional websites and social networks—for example, the social network Hi5, which is popular in Argentina; the video-sharing site 6rooms, which is popular in China; and Skyrock, a popular blogging community in France. And, of course, physical game objects were hidden in virtually every corner of the world. None of these clues or objects was redundant; each added an important piece of information to the history of the lost sport. Players therefore needed to work together to collect everything and translate it for other players. To do so, they had to radically expand their collaboration horizons, pinging their way through multiple levels of extended social networks to find people capable of showing up at the right place and the right time, or translating one language into another, so someone else could accomplish the next step in the chain that would lead them to their goal.

We also adopted the strategy of telling what gamers call a “chaotic story.”
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Instead of presenting players with a single means of consuming the game story, we broke it into thousands of pieces like a jigsaw puzzle and then diffused it across many different media platforms: podcasts and blog posts; videos and online photographs; e-mails and Twitter posts from game characters; even live instant message conversations and face-to-face interactions with characters portrayed by “game masters.” This kind of chaotic storytelling mode forces players to actively make sense of the game content for themselves and for each other, using collective intelligence skills and collaborative authoring platforms. Until players put a chaotic story together, it doesn’t really exist—it’s just a web of evidence, the raw materials for a story. It’s up to the players to do the actual final storytelling, which typically occurs on a wiki that ultimately represents an “official” story of the game.

In the case of The Lost Ring, the players pieced together the chaotic story and worked through the translation challenges primarily on a special Find the Lost Ring wiki they created. By the end of the game, it contained a total of 730 audio, video, and image files, as well as 943 articles—all created by players. The site’s user-created pages included the Timeline, a detailed record of every major discovery and event during the six-month game; the Codex, a compilation of high-resolution scans of the twenty-seven manuscript pages found around the world, accompanied by their translation into nine additional languages; and Labyrinth Training Reports, where best times, videos, and other details of significant training events were recorded.

Of course, beyond the chaotic storytelling, the lost sport itself was designed to require intense collaboration. The rules of the game were cooperative—and they ensured that players would train locally as a team to improve their collective performance as a group, as opposed to competing locally with other athletes. For teams who became good at the game, the synchronized movement would provide a collective experience of flow similar to group dancing. And as in all of my live-action games, I snuck in some oxytocin-releasing touch—the wall members joining hands or gripping each other’s shoulders—in order to strengthen the players’ cooperative bonds. By making the human labyrinth together, they would be engaged in cocreating a peak experience.

But beyond the rules of the sport, what really required intense cooperative effort and coordination was the simple fact that no one had ever played this human labyrinth sport before. No one would know the rules and no one would be any good at it yet. Together, the participants would have to bootstrap their way to mastering the sport. They would have to work together as a global network to discover—to invent—the ins and outs of the sport for the very first time, to teach each other their best tricks, and to spread the secrets of the game online to as many people as possible. Players started scheduling their training sessions to maximize the number of time zones that could participate at the same time in normal waking hours. They spontaneously decided to stream video of their training sessions live via cell phone networks so that other cities’ teams could watch and learn. These were extraordinary acts of coordination.

Finally, mass collaboration works only when everyone in the “mass” has something useful to contribute. Everyone needs to be given an opportunity to contribute from a position of personal strength—who they are and what they do best. So as I developed The Lost Ring as a collaboratory, one of my primary goals was to pioneer a system for helping players identify their own signature strengths, in order to help guide them to the kinds of contributions they could most effectively make in the game. That’s why one of the centerpieces of the Lost Ring Codex was the legend of six ancient strengths, each named for an ancient Greek virtue, and each describing a distinctive way of contributing value to a group: