Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (36 page)

In the game, players manipulate proteins in a 3D virtual environment that one reviewer describes as “a twenty-first-century version of Tetris, with multicolored geometric snakes filling the screen.”
²²
The geometric snakes represent all the different building blocks of a protein, the amino acid chains that connect and fold up into incredibly complex patterns in order to perform different biological tasks in the body. In Foldit, the player’s goal is to learn what kinds of patterns are the most stable and successful for doing different jobs, by taking an unfolded protein and folding it up into the right shape. This is called a “protein puzzle.”

Players learn how to fold proteins by working on “solved” puzzles, or proteins that scientists already know how to fold. Once they’ve got the hang of it, they’re encouraged to try to predict the shape of a protein that scientists haven’t successfully folded yet, or to design a new protein shape from scratch, which researchers could then manufacture in a lab.

“Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize in biology, chemistry or medicine.” Zoran Popović, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, and one of the lead researchers on the Foldit project, declared these Nobel aspirations in his address to the Games for Health conference in the spring of 2008, just weeks before opening up the new protein-folding puzzle game to the public.
²³
Within eighteen months of its release, the game had attracted a registered community of more than 112,700 players—most of whom, according to researchers, had little to no previous experience in the field of protein folding. “We’re hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it’s done by,” Popović said.

The Foldit team is well on its way to doing just that. In the August 2010 issue of the prestigious scientific journal
Nature
, the team declared its first significant breakthrough: In a series of ten challenges, gamers beat the world’s most sophisticated protein-folding algorithms five times, and drew even three times. The authors concluded that gamer intuition can successfully compete with supercomputers—especially when the problems being solved require taking radical, creative risks.
²⁴
Most notably, the
Nature
study wasn’t just
about
the Foldit players; it was
by
the Foldit players. More than 57,000 gamers were listed as official coauthors alongside Popović and his university colleagues.
²⁵

 

 

IN THE DECADES
to come, there will be many more challenges for us to tackle together as crowds: more citizen journalism investigations, more collective intelligence projects, more humanitarian efforts, more citizen science research. There’s no shortage of world-changing collective work to be done—so we can’t allow ourselves to be limited by a shortage of incentive or compensation.

Many crowdsourcing projects today are experimenting with micropayments, or small amounts of monetary reward, in return for contributions. The Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace, which gives businesses access to a global virtual workforce, pays participants a few cents for each helpful contribution to a
human intelligence task
, or HIT—a cognitive task “that only a human, and not a computer, could do” (such as labeling images, characterizing the emotional quality of song lyrics, or describing the action in short videos). Others offer prizes for top contributions. The CrowdSPRING marketplace, for example, offers prizes starting at $5,000 to individuals who submit the most helpful ideas—for example, helping name a new product or improve an existing service.

The logic behind these practices is that if people are willing to contribute for free, they’ll be even happier to contribute when they’re compensated. But compensating people for their contributions is
not
a good way to increase global participation bandwidth, for two key reasons.

First, as numerous scientific studies have shown, compensation typically
decreases
motivation to engage in activities we would otherwise freely enjoy.
²⁶
If we are paid to do something we would otherwise have done out of interest—such as reading, drawing, participating in a survey, or solving puzzles—we are less likely to do it in the future without being paid. Compensation increases participation only among groups who would never engage otherwise—and as soon as you stop paying them, they stop participating.

Second, there are natural limits on the monetary resources we can provide a community of participants. Any given project will have only so much financial capital to give away; even a successful business will eventually hit an upper limit of what it can afford to pay for contributions. Scarce rewards like money and prizes artificially limit the amount of participation a network can inspire and support.

We need a more
sustainable engagement economy
—an economy that works by motivating and rewarding participants with intrinsic rewards, and not more lucrative compensation.

So if not money or prizes, then what will most likely emerge as the most powerful currency in the crowdsourcing economy? I believe that emotions will drive this new economy. Positive emotions are the ultimate reward for participation. And we are already hardwired to produce all the rewards we could ever want—through positive activity, positive achievements, and positive relationships. It’s an infinitely renewable source of incentive to participate in big crowd projects.

In the engagement economy, we’re not competing for “eyeballs” or “mind-share.” We’re competing for brain cycles and heartshare. That’s why success in the new engagement economy won’t come from providing better or more competitive compensation. It will come from providing better and more
competitive engagement
—the kind of engagement that increases our personal and collective participation bandwidth by motivating us to do more, for longer, toward collective ends. And no one knows how to augment our collective capacity for engagement better than game developers.

Game designers have been honing the art of mass collaboration for years. Games inspire extreme effort. Games create communities that stick together over time, long enough to get amazing things done together. If crowdsourcing is the theory, then games are the platform.

Which brings us to our next fix for reality:

Good game developers know that the emotional experience itself is the reward. Consider the following job listing for Bungie, the company that creates the
Halo
video game series:

This kind of job doesn’t yet exist outside of the game industry. But it should. “Player investment design lead” is a role that every single collaborative project or crowd initiative should fill in the future. When the game is intrinsically rewarding to play, you don’t have to pay people to participate—with real currency, virtual currency, or any other kind of scarce reward. Participation is its own reward, when the player is properly invested in his or her progress, in exploring the world fully, and in the community’s success.

So how exactly do you design good player investment? The Bungie job listing further details some of the core responsibilities of the position—and, in a nutshell, they give us a very good idea of four engagement principles any big crowd project should follow. As you can see, these four principles all serve the ultimate goal of building a compelling game world, satisfying game mechanics, and an inspiring game community.

In other words, participants should be able to explore and impact a “world,” or shared social space that features both content and interactive opportunities. They should be able to create and develop a unique identity within that world. They should see the bigger picture when it comes to doing work in the world—both an opportunity to escalate challenge and to continue working over time toward bigger results. The game must be carefully designed so that the only way to be rewarded is to participate in good faith, because in any game players will do anything they get the most rewarded for doing. And the emphasis must be on making the content and experience intrinsically rewarding, rather than on providing compensation for doing something that would otherwise feel boring, trivial, or pointless.

Do these principles work as effectively for real-world problem solving as for virtual-world problem solving? Absolutely. They are clearly the shared secret of the success for projects like Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, Wikipedia, Free Rice, and Fold It!. In each case, the experience of participation is rewarding on its own merits, immersing a player inside an interactive world that motivates and rewards his or her best effort.

Gamers who have grown up being intensely engaged by well-designed virtual environments are hungry for better forms of engagement in their real lives. They’re seeking out ways to be blissfully productive while cooperating toward extreme-scale goals. They are a natural source of participation bandwidth for the kinds of citizen journalism, collective intelligence, humanitarian, and citizen science projects that we will increasingly seek to undertake.

As the examples in this chapter demonstrate, crowdsourcing games have an important role to play in how we achieve our democratic, scientific, and humanitarian goals over the next decade and beyond.

And more and more, these crowdsourcing games won’t be just about online work or computational tasks. Increasingly, they will take us out into physical environments and face-to-face social spaces. These new games will challenge crowds to
mobilize
for real-world social missions—and they may make it possible for gamers to change, or even save, real people’s lives as easily as they save virtual lives today.

W
hat the world needs now are more
epic wins
: opportunities for ordinary people to do extraordinary things—like change or save someone’s life—every day.

“Epic win” is a gamer term. It’s used to describe a big, and usually surprising, success: a come-from-behind victory, an unorthodox strategy that works out spectacularly well, a team effort that goes much better than planned, a heroic effort from the most unlikely player.

The label “epic” makes these kinds of wins sound rare or exceptional. But in the gamer world, they’re not. Discussion forums are full of gamers sharing their most surprising and rewarding fiero moments. And they come in many different forms.

Some epic wins are about discovering we have abilities we didn’t know we had. One action-adventure gamer writes: “After over an hour of attempting the ridiculously impossible office battle scene in
Indigo Prophecy
, which I was sure I’d never finish, I finally passed it, exhausted and wracked with awe. I did
that
? Epic win.”
²

Some are about upsetting other people’s expectations of what’s possible. A fantasy-football gamer writes: “I won the Champions League in
Championship Manager
coaching huge underdogs Malaga through a simulated season. Now that’s epic. It’s the most unlikely win ever.”

And still others are about inventing new positive outcomes we hadn’t even imagined before. A
Grand Theft Auto
player reports: “My epic win in GTA IV: Mountain biking to the top of the highest mountain from the city. Takes me 25 minutes real time. Just in time to see the sunrise.”

What do these three different kinds of epic wins have in common? They all help us revise our notion of what constitutes a realistic best-case-scenario outcome. Whatever we thought the best possible result could reasonably be before, after an epic win we’ve set a new precedent: We can do more. It can get better.

With each epic win, our possibility space expands—dramatically. That’s why epic wins are so crucial to creating sustainable economies of engagement. They make us curious about what more we can do—and as a result, we are more likely to take positive action again in the future. Epic wins help turn a one-off effort into passionate long-term participation.