Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (43 page)

The codex included a twelve-question test to help you identify your primary and secondary signature strength. Players would choose from sets of statements the one that described them best. For example:

And:

(These choices respond to
sofia, thumos, chariton, dikaiosune,
sophrosune,
and
mythopoeia
, respectively.)

Although the game presented these six strengths as a kind of ancient lore, in fact they are drawn directly from seminal positive-psychology research. In 2004, researchers Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson published
Character Strengths and Virtues,
a manual with twenty-four such categories, divided into six groups:
wisdom and knowledge
—cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge;
courage
—emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal;
humanity
—interpersonal strengths that involve tending to and befriending others;
justice
—civic strengths that underlie healthy community life;
temperance
—strengths that protect against excess; and
transcendence
—strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning.
⁹

Together with the Values in Action (VIA) Institute on Character, Seligman and Peterson devised a 240-question inventory for measuring the positive emotional strengths that contribute to our success and well-being in life.
¹⁰
The goal of the inventory is “to help people evolve toward their highest potential,” and it’s the most scientifically validated test of personal character in the world. Yet many people have never heard of it, let alone taken it.

I wanted players to be able to find their signature strengths as members of the Lost Ring community because I believe that this positive-psychology resource can play an important role in creating ways for large numbers of people to contribute to a collaborative effort. So I modeled our ancient-strengths questionnaire on an abbreviated version of the official VIA inventory of strengths. My Olympic-themed twelve-question survey wasn’t scientifically validated—and it didn’t dive deep into the twenty-four strengths, just the six higher-order categories. But, as a first introduction to the strengths, I thought it would serve a powerful purpose: to help players start to identify their collaboration strengths and practice putting them to use in the Lost Ring mission.

Once they had completed the ancient-strengths test and had determined their primary and secondary strengths, players were invited to post strength badges on their social network pages, declaring, for example, “I am Sofia,” with a description of what that meant. These badges became a visual cue for other players to start keeping track of others’ strengths—in other words, they were building up their collaboration radar. Eli Hunt and other game characters then began giving players game missions based on their strengths: for example, the brainy
sofia
players were challenged to research little-known facts about other games that really had been banned from the ancient Olympics, while the adventurous
thumos
players were given the task of going out into the real world to hunt down the physical artifacts, and the highly social
chariton
players were encouraged to be the social engineers of the game and figure out how to extend the social network of the Lost Ring community.

Even the lost sport itself had special roles for every kind of strength to play:

For players trying to recruit more athletes to participate in the lost-sport training events, and to engage the crowds of people who showed up to play but hadn’t been following the online story, the strengths test and assignments proved an excellent resource. It helped the experienced players give prospective players a meaningful way to contribute right away. It gave them a tool for directing new players to areas in which they were likely to experience success and reap intrinsic reward—and it made sure that not one single potential contributor would find himself or herself without a satisfying task.

As Seligman and Peterson have often pointed out, we seem to be happiest when we are putting our signature strengths to good use in a group setting. The best evidence I’ve seen for this argument is when I watched Lost Ring players eagerly adopt their ancient-strength roles and perform them both online and in person as they brought the lost sport to life.

When we first launched The Lost Ring, we did not know where it would go. We gave the players the raw materials for staging their own collaborative effort—a series of online urban legends and mysterious physical documents that suggested the potential to revive a lost Olympic sport—but would they do it? And if so, how?

We were confident we could bring together a global community with our chaotic, multilingual narrative. But would the community actually bring the lost sport back to life? Would they invent their own ways to get not just good at the sport, but Olympic-athlete good at it? When planning the game, we had playtested the lost sport only a few times, mostly with the creative team for the project, and collectively we were very slow and very bad at it. We never imagined the athletic feats that our players eventually made themselves capable of—indeed, no one had ever imagined such a feat until the players undertook it. The lost sport had never really existed—and it never would have, either, if not for the concerted effort of the global gamers.

Edwin Moses, a real gold medal-winning Olympic athlete and multiple world-record setter in the 400 meter hurdles, sat down with our creative team to watch videos of the best players on each continent. He seemed genuinely impressed with the teams’ performance and crafted individual video messages of support for each team. Later he answered players’ questions in a streaming online broadcast, giving serious advice to them about how to best prepare for a gold-medal event. Eventually, he joined us at sunrise on the Great Wall of China, one of the official Olympic event sites, to coach in person the Beijing lost-sport team in our alternate reality gold-medal race. When we had first conceived of a blindfolded human labyrinth race, I never would have imagined that our players would take the game to such a level of athletic excellence, or that we would be able to genuinely engage and impress a real Olympic champion with the sport. But we did—thanks to the players’ collaborative efforts.

In the end, our players produced two extraordinary collaborative results: a complete, extensive history of the ancient lost sport and its modern day revival on the Find the Lost Ring wiki—a 943-page multimedia document coauthored by more than a thousand of the game’s leading players—and a community of athletes that made and raced labyrinths as if they had spent their entire lives (and not just six months) training for it. This was an act of true
emergensight
on the part of the players. From the complex, chaotic environment of Eli Hunt’s legends and the scattered mysteries of the codex, they saw the opportunity to forge a clear, collaborative path together: to create an epic work of alternate reality history, and to stage this awe-inspiring six-continent spectacle. As a result, I count the lead players of The Lost Ring—particularly the thousand most active players who took ownership of the wiki and coordinated the months-long training in the lost sport—among the true collaboration virtuosos of their generation.

We are all born with the potential to develop collaboration superpowers. Scientific research shows that we have both the ability and the desire from early childhood to cooperate, to coordinate activity, and to strengthen group bonds—in other words, to make a good game together. But this potential can be lost if we don’t expend enough effort practicing collaboration.

Fortunately, we have many collaboratories for doing so already. In addition to global alternate reality games like The Lost Ring, any good online game with co-op mode, collaborative production opportunities, and a thriving Wikia culture, for example, provides the perfect opportunity to practice collaboration superpowers. And thanks to the increasing availability of good games worldwide, we will have more and more opportunities than ever before to develop these superpowers.

This is increasingly true even in developing countries, which traditionally have had limited access to leading-edge online games and game platforms. Today, game developers are creating online game platforms specifically for the technology constraints of emerging technology markets like India, Brazil, and China. For example, the lower-priced game console Zeebo, which describes itself as “the video game console for the next billion,” connects low-energy-demand gamer consoles via mobile phone networks rather than broadband Internet. Meanwhile, networked games are being developed for the mobile phones that are ubiquitous even in the most isolated villages across Africa.

As the game industry continues to emphasize co-op, collective intelligence, and collaborative production modes of play, collaboration superpowers will spread more widely throughout gamer culture. And as more and more people start to think of themselves as gamers—perhaps in no small part because they want to develop their own collaboration superpowers—these extraordinary new skills and abilities will become ordinary—the norm rather than the exception.

So what can we do with the collaboration superpowers we develop over the next decade and beyond? One of the first epic goals for gamers worldwide may be simply to survive the twenty-first century.

In their 2006 book
Wikinomics
, the breakthrough manual for extreme-scale collaboration in the real world, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams famously implored: “We must collaborate or perish—across borders, cultures, disciplines, and firms, and increasingly with masses of people at one time.”
¹¹

“Collaborate or perish” is perhaps the single most urgent rallying cry for our times. The ability to collaborate at extreme scales isn’t just a competitive advantage in business or in life anymore. Increasingly, it’s a survival imperative for the human race. As the
Wikinomics
authors suggested several years later in an updated preface to the book, “The killer application for mass collaboration may be saving the planet, literally.”
¹²

A killer application is a program so valuable, it proves the core value of the larger system and drives massive amounts of people to adopt it; e-mail, for instance, was considered the killer app for home Internet access. I believe wholeheartedly that the core value of developing our collaboration superpowers will be proven by games that help gamers save the real world—by changing how we consume energy, how we feed ourselves, how we create better health, how we govern ourselves, how we conceive of new businesses, and how we take care of each other and the environment.

But these fundamental changes don’t happen overnight—surviving the twenty-first century together will require us to adopt longer horizons of thinking, acting, and collaborating. We need to play games that stretch our collective commitment months, years, or even decades ahead.

We need to start playing with the future.

W
e are living in a geological era that scientists dub the “anthropocene epoch,” from the Greek
anthropo
-, for “human,” and
-cene,
for “new” or “recent.” It’s the age of human impact on the earth.

Our impact is measurable in myriad ways: increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, deforestation and continental erosion, a rising sea level. We may not have set out to remake the planet in any of these ways—but we have nonetheless. And now we must learn better ways of remaking it, this time with intention, discipline, and purpose.

As Steward Brand, author of
Whole Earth Discipline
, puts it, “Humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role.... We are as gods and
have
to get good at it.”
¹

Brand is perhaps best known as the founder of the
Whole Earth Catalog
, a countercultural catalog of “tools and ideas to shape the environment” published from 1968 to 1972. (When he launched that catalog, he wrote, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”)
²
In 1996 he cofounded the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based foundation dedicated to long-term thinking and responsibility—for the earth, and for the survival of the human species—over the next ten thousand years and beyond. If we want to stay on this planet for anywhere near that long, Brand says, we have to become better at strategically affecting our ecosystem. “We are forced to learn planet craft—in both senses of the word. Craft as skill and craft as cunning.” We not only have to master the ability to change how our ecosystem works, we also have to figure out the right ways to change it. And that won’t be easy.