Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (46 page)

After the game, creative director Ken Eklund reflected on what it had accomplished. “WWO didn’t only raise awareness about oil dependence. It roused our democratic imagination. It made the issues
real
, and this in turn led to real engagement and real change in people’s lives. Via the game, players made themselves better citizens.” This is clearly evident in what players reported afterward. One player reported:

While another wrote:

Today, the entire simulation has been preserved in a sort of online time machine at
Worldwithoutoil.org
, where you can experience the game from day one all the way through day thirty-two. Each day of gameplay is captured in time so you can see exactly how the collaboration unfolded; there are also guidelines for playing the game yourself today—on your own, with your family, with colleagues, with a classroom, or with your neighbors. In fact, the simulation has been repeated many times at a smaller scale to help individuals and communities prepare themselves, and invent their own solutions, for living in a world beyond oil.

 

 

PERHAPS YOU’RE WONDERING
—as many people have asked me since—why did the players participate?

Why would anyone want to play a serious game like World Without Oil instead of a fantasy game, an escapist game, a completely feel-good game?

I asked myself the same question—before WWO launched, while it was being played and afterward, even when we had proof that players were enjoying themselves and audiences found it compelling to watch the project unfold.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about a game like WWO. By turning a real problem into a voluntary obstacle, we activated more genuine interest, curiosity, motivation, effort, and optimism than we would have otherwise. We can change our real-life behaviors in the context of a fictional game precisely because there isn’t any negative pressure surrounding the decision to change. We are motivated purely by positive stress and by our own desire to engage with a game in more satisfying, successful, social, and meaningful ways.

I also firmly believe that many gamers want to do something that matters in the real world as much as their efforts matter in the game world. One player summed this up best:

Gamers are ready and willing to take on challenges outside of strictly virtual environments. Meanwhile, people who don’t ordinarily play games are happy to do so when it can help make a difference in the real world.

The numbers are still small. Two thousand players doesn’t begin to compare with
Spore
’s active community of more than a million. But unlike
Spore
, which represents roughly two decades of some of the smartest computer programmers, some of the most creative game designers, and some of the most brilliant artists in the world working together to advance the genre of planetary simulation and god games (
SimEarth
was released in 1990), we are essentially still in the
Pong
days of future-forecasting games. (With the operating budget of
Pong
to boot.)

We are
Pong
, competing with
Spore
. It’s not much of a matchup yet.

But as the field attracts more of the world’s best programmers, storytellers, designers, and artists, as more people are exposed to these games and learn how to play them, and as we invest millions, rather than thousands, of dollars in developing these future worlds, we will grow our future world-building skills just as we’ve grown our virtual world-building skills over the past thirty years. With enough attention and investment, we will start to create immersive future environments as engaging as our favorite virtual worlds.

 

 

WORLD WITHOUT OIL
changed the lives of many of our players—but it was also a life-changing experience for me.

It was the proof-of-concept game that convinced me we really can save the real world with the right kind of game. It’s the project that inspired me to define my biggest hope for the future: that a game developer would soon be worthy of a Nobel Prize.

I’ve since taken to advertising that goal everywhere I go, in the hopes of inspiring other game developers to join me in my mission. Of course, both inside and outside the game industry, when I suggest the idea, I’m often met with skepticism. How could a game possibly accomplish enough real-world good to warrant such a prize?

Even on the heels of a project as promising as World Without Oil, it’s true that winning a Nobel Prize is a fairly bold ambition. But consider this: Albert Einstein, who won his own Nobel Prize in physics in 1921, once famously said, “Games are the most elevated form of investigation.” This quotation appears in multiple biographies of Einstein and circulates widely in various collections of famous sayings, but, interestingly, its origins remain elusive. No one seems to have recorded the context of Einstein’s statement—when or where he said it, or what he meant by it. Why would an esteemed physicist call
games
, and not
science
, the most elevated form of investigation? It’s an unsolved mystery—one I’ve spent much of my free time puzzling over.

Although of course I can’t say for sure I’ve solved the mystery, I do have a theory. And it comes directly from working on World Without Oil.

Einstein, we know from many biographers, was a gamer—albeit a sometimes reluctant one. He had a lifelong love-hate relationship with the game of chess. He played it enthusiastically as a child, although he gave it up for much of his adult life, even once insisting to the
New York Times
, “I do not play any games. There is no time for it. When I get through work I don’t want anything which requires the working of the mind.”
¹⁸
Yet many friends and colleagues recall playing countless games of chess with Einstein, particularly later in his life.

Historians have suggested that Einstein avoided chess during the height of his scientific career precisely because he loved it so much and found it so distracting. “Chess holds its master in its own bonds,” he once said, “shackling the mind and brain.”
¹⁹
In other words, when he started thinking about chess, he found himself unable to stop. Why? Most likely because, as so many chess masters have noted, the game is an incredibly compelling problem that becomes more compelling the longer you think about it.

The central problem of chess is perfectly constructed, clear, and constrained : how do you manipulate a set of sixteen resources of different abilities in order to capture your opponent’s most valuable asset, while simultaneously protecting your own? But it can be approached with endlessly many different strategies, each strategic effort changing the future possibilities in the problem space. As one famous chess saying goes, “Chess is infinite.”

The possibility space of chess is so massive and complex, one individual has no hope of understanding or exploring it fully—even if one spends a lifetime, as many chess players do, investigating it.

Fortunately, while chess is a two-player game, it is also a massively multiplayer project. The global community of chess players has collaborated for centuries to explore and document its problem space as thoroughly and imaginatively as possible. Indeed, for as long as modern players have played chess, they have recorded their games, shared strategies, formalized successful approaches, and published them for others’ benefit. Even after centuries of collective play, the chess community continues to seek a better understanding of the problem, to invent more surprising and successful approaches, and to hold the massively many possibilities of the game in their head as they drive the sum human understanding of the game forward, one move at a time.

To play chess as a more than casual player is to become a part of this problem-solving network. It means joining a massively collaborative effort to become intimately familiar with an otherwise unfathomably complex possibility space. And that’s what I believe Einstein meant when he described games as an elevated form of investigation. When enough people play a game, it becomes a massively collaborative study of a problem, an extreme-scale test of potential action in a specific possibility space.

I believe that’s the direction we’re heading with forecasting games. These games help us identify a real-world problem and study it from massively multiple points of view. They present the problem in a compelling way, and they help us compile a record of massively multiple strategies for addressing it. They give us a safe space to play out the possible consequences of each and every possible move we could make. And they help us anticipate the massively multiple moves that others could conceivably take.

That’s actually what we tried to do with World Without Oil. We defined a problem: an oil shortage, with no available means of increasing supply. There was a clear goal: to resolve the imbalance between supply and demand. The possible strategies were infinite. We asked players to craft their own strategies, based on their own unique points of view: a combination of location, age, life experience, and personal values. We asked them to test, on a local scale, different actions, and to report their findings. Taken together, all the players’ stories and solutions represent massively multiple perspectives on the same problem. It was a truly elevated investigation.

And in a world of changing climate, geopolitical tensions, and economic instabilities, there are plenty more problems to be tackled with our collective imagination.

If we can develop the same kind of intelligence about the real problems we face as players do about their favorite games, then we
will
be able to practice better planet craft. We’ll elevate our collective understanding of the challenges we face. And we’ll build a global community of individuals ready to play a role in discerning the right moves to make in the future.

At the end of World Without Oil, I was struck by how optimistic players were. Despite having spent nearly a month imagining incredibly dark forecasts, our players wound up feeling better—not worse—about the future and their ability to impact it. They experienced a sense of improved capability, greater resilience, and realistic hope.

In other words, they became what futurist Jamais Cascio calls “super-empowered hopeful individuals,” or SEHIs.
²¹

A
SEHI
(pronounced
SEH-hee
) is someone who feels not just optimistic about the future, but also
personally capable
of changing the world for the better. According to Cascio, SEHIs get their confidence from network technologies that amplify and aggregate individual ability to impact the common good.

Cascio coined the term “SEHI” in contrast to another term, “super-empowered angry men,” which
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman used in his writing about terrorism in a globally networked age. Osama bin Laden, Friedman wrote, seeks to create super-empowered angry men who feel capable of leaving their mark on the world, in terrible ways.
²²
In response, Cascio explains:

SEHIs don’t wait around for the world to save itself. They invent and spread their own humanitarian missions. More importantly, they are “able to do so with smaller numbers, greater speed, and a far larger impact” than a slow-moving, risk-averse organization. Of course, in an ideal world, SEHIs would be able to band together and scale up their efforts—to avoid making redundant efforts, to learn from each other’s mistakes, to amplify each other’s abilities to make a difference. Disorganized SEHIs would have a hard time making significant strides. But organized SEHIs—well, they could change everything.

So a year after the World Without Oil experiment, Cascio and I teamed up at the Institute for the Future to find as many of those millions of SEHIs as possible—to give them a platform for organizing, and a new game to play.