Bolded important parts if you don't want to read the whole text:
Saving the world, one hit point at a time
- 25 May 2010 by Samantha Murphy
- Magazine issue 2761. Subscribe and save
Editorial: Slaying stereotypes about video games
NEXT time you fancy spreading a bit of digital carnage, try doing it with a virus. Not a worm or a trojan horse, but an influenza virus, mutating and spreading across the virtual globe. See how many people you can infect in 180 days, but be warned, if you don't get your strategy right your virulence will diminish and your would-be pandemic will fizzle out.
Welcome to Killer Flu, a video game in which you play the role of H1N1. Pushing yourself to pandemic proportions is much harder than you might think, which is precisely the point. Killer Flu is a "serious game" - an increasingly popular genre of online games designed to deal with real-world issues. If that sounds preachy and dull, think again. Killer Flu is fun.
This growing trend isn't just about raising awareness. It also aims to tap into the problem-solving skills of gamers to tackle real challenges, from who should do the dishes to battling global warming. As Jane McGonigal, one of the leading designers of serious games, likes to phrase it: "Reality is broken. Game designers can fix it."
McGonigal is director of games research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California. She also runs Avant Game, which is not your average game-design company. While others are trying to make games more like reality, Avant Game is trying to make reality seem more like a game.
McGonigal says she first realised that gamers' skills could be applied to real-world challenges in 2001, in the days following the 9/11 attacks on the US. She had been part of an online discussion group about an alternate reality game (ARG) called The Beast, which was designed as a promotion for the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence. ARGs invite players to solve fictitious mysteries using real-world tools, such as websites, email and phones. Players often interact in online forums to share their insights.
Though the game had finished, in the wake of 9/11 many of the players returned to the forum to discuss whether they could apply the strategies they had used in the game to help in any way. They set out to get information to the friends and relatives of missing people, spread information about how to help rescue workers, and pieced together the events that had led up to the attacks.
"They had a debate about whether this was appropriate," McGonigal says. "They thought, 'this is reality, not a game, yet we have these skills that seem so useful'. That was the big 'aha' moment for me."
Video games already serve a multitude of serious purposes, such as training and education. The US military famously uses simulations to train soldiers; some have been turned into a series of commercial shoot-'em-ups such as America's Army.
Now, though, serious games are being targeted at everyday, recreational gamers (see "Playing for real"). Most are educational - the gaming equivalent of a TV documentary. But others are setting their sights higher, aiming to solve some of the world's problems.
"There are 500 million gamers globally who spend more than an hour a day playing games," says McGonigal. "That is an extraordinary concentration of time, attention and emotional engagement." Committed gamers log an average of 25 hours a week. "Game developers are just waking up to the fact that they hold an enormous amount of power over people's attention and engagement," McGonigal says.
Consider World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game in which players explore a virtual world called Azeroth, completing quests, fighting monsters and interacting with other players. WoW is the world's most popular game of its kind, with more than 10 million subscribers at the last count. The average WoW player spends 12.5 hours a week in Azeroth.
Virtual farming
Another popular online game is Farmville, a Facebook application with more than 80 million players. Participants manage a virtual farm, cultivating crops and livestock and selling them for "farm coins" which can be invested back in the farm.
Edward Castronova, an economist at Indiana University Bloomington, explores why people play such games. There are several powerful motivators, he says, including immediate positive feedback from completing missions, a sense of empowerment and significance, adventure, the connection to others - and the taste of victory.
"For a lot of people, contemporary reality sucks. And everybody wants to be a hero," he says. "But where are they going to go to be heroic? Maybe you wouldn't sacrifice your life for a fantasy life, but what about the person who poured your coffee this morning? That person is looking at this choice: I could either work in a coffee-shop or be a starship captain."
To many people, gaming for 25 hours a week looks like a terrible waste of time. McGonigal begs to differ. She argues that games like WoW bring out admirable qualities in people. To achieve "epic wins" - those fleeting moments of glory that come from completing a mission - requires focus and collaboration. Players also display "urgent optimism", which McGonigal describes as "the desire to immediately tackle an obstacle, combined with a belief that you have a reasonable hope of success".
Bringing these qualities to bear in Azeroth clearly won't make the world a better place, but McGonigal believes game designers could tap into them to achieve epic wins in the real world.
Douglas Thomas of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, San Diego, says gamers tend to have other positive attributes: they relish intellectual challenges, they are independent, they know how to gather resources and information, and they can solve problems. With John Seely Brown of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, he has argued that gamers carry these attributes beyond the confines of the game into the real world (Harvard Business Review, 14 February 2008).
Gamers are also experts at collaboration. WoW involves raids in which a group of players aim to defeat a monster. "It can take 25 players working in coordination 6 to 8 hours to get things done," says Thomas. "No individual is a hero, so you do get this notion of a joint action that may be very powerful for activism."
If the idea of gamers turning their back on Azeroth to tackle the real world seems far-fetched, consider that today's gamer is a far cry from the stereotypical slacker living in his parents' basement. Thomas's colleague Dmitri Williams studies gamers and their behaviour. He reports that the average age is 35 with a gender breakdown of 60/40 male to female. Around 40 per cent of American adults are regular gamers (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol 13, p 993).
"Society often thinks of gamers as dropouts and burnouts who are not interested in doing anything important," says McGonigal. "But it's not that they don't care. They're just not seeing the opportunity to make a difference in reality. We have to provide those opportunities."McGonigal and other designers are now trying to do exactly that.
It won't be easy. After all, games like WoW are a deliberate refuge from reality. Unlike the real world, they are designed to be solved. In contrast, real life is complicated, messy, and constrained by physical reality.
The answer, says McGonigal, is to make real problems more game-like by providing typical gaming motivators, such as unlockable missions and the promise of power or status in return for success, or "levelling up" in gamer parlance.
This approach has already been successfully applied to some real-world problems. The rules of frequent-flyer programmes, for example, are complex, reward-driven and immediately gratifying. Members are motivated not only by the promise of free flights, but also by achieving higher status, a real-world form of levelling up. The website Chore Wars, meanwhile, turns household tasks into a competition, awarding players points and status for completed chores using Dungeons and Dragons as inspiration.
The latest of McGonigal's attempts to make reality more like a game is called Evoke. It is an ARG that blends gaming with real-world actions. Every Wednesday at midnight, Evoke players, called agents, are given a new mission that challenges them to work together to solve a problem such as water safety, food security or sustainable energy. First they are told about the problem via a graphic-novel-style introduction. It is then up to them to do more research and come up with solutions.
For instance, when challenged to change the global economy, some agents set up an exchange system offering services in return for a currency they could in turn use to buy services from other agents.
Agents blog about their ideas or actions. Fellow agents then collectively allocate points based on the blog posts, which push agents higher up the rankings. Inspiring ideas earn "spark" points, for example, while an informative blog will get you "knowledge share" points. Evoke began on 3 March and attracted over 19,000 players from all over the world.
The game also has a concealed purpose. Taken together, its 10 missions add up to a bigger task - the creation of a business plan for a social enterprise. The game concluded on 12 May and the best ideas it produced are now being compiled. A few will be put into practice with funding from the World Bank Institute.
McGonigal argues that Evoke achieves its aim of making reality more like a game. She points out that you don't get positive feedback and points for good ideas in the real world, and no one is breaking down your goals into neat little steps. "It's never going to be more fun than World of Warcraft," she says, "but it's more fun than trying to save the world without it."
Untapped skills
Evoke's designers say they are pleased at how the game went. "There are a lot of really good ideas," says Robert Hawkins, the World Bank's senior education specialist and executive producer of the game.
So what do gamers think? Joanne Pinner is an avid WoW player. She agrees that gamers possess an enormous amount of untapped skill. "Many of the innovations and strategies they take the time to construct show degrees of potential that could truly change the world."
But Ian Bogost at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who designed Killer Flu, has reservations about games like Evoke. "I'm not sure that collective intelligence and collective action necessarily produce reliable answers," he says.
Liam Burke, a 26-year-old web designer from London who plays video games for 35 hours or so per week is not impressed either. "Most of the 'missions' look suspiciously like homework," he says. Williams agrees: "If you say 'hey kids, let's learn,' it's game over."
Despite these reservations, the serious games movement is attracting the attention of powerful people. First lady Michelle Obama has called on game developers to help fight childhood obesity. Next week's Games for Change Festival in New York City will bring together game designers, academics, NGOs and journalists to explore the potential of serious gaming. White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra will make the opening address.
McGonigal thinks it is time for the movement as a whole to level up: she has challenged game designers to create something worthy of a Nobel peace prize. Now that really would be an epic win.
I had no idea of any of the games they're talking about, but they sound a bit like the game in the first episode of Stargate Universe which Eli solves to break the puzzle of the 9th Chevron.
