The Modern Journalist

SXSW: Jane McGonigal on Alternate Reality Gaming

Jane McGonigal is one of the pre-eminent alternative reality game (ARG) designers. She was the lead designer on i love bees, the first popular ARG which was the marketing tool that helped launch Halo 2.

She is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future, where she studies the science of happiness, along with her work with ARGs.

Here are notes on her talk:

• Instead of trying to make games more realistic, I’m trying to make the real world more like games.
• “The amazing parallel between what makes us happy and the core elements of game design.”
• Happiness doesn’t mean warm fuzzy feelings, it’s about trying to capture the best human experiences and using the rigors of science to understand what that means; there is an incredible explosion of people coming up with metrics to insert “happiness-making” things into your life.
• Technologiss are in the happiness business, whether they think they are or not; the idea is to make the lives of people better
• McGonigal’s prediction:
  • quality of life becomes the primary metric for evaluating the development of new tools
  • designers will use positive psychology research as they make new projects
  • communities form around visions of a real life worth living
  • value will be defined a measurable increase in real happiness; the new capital
• What makes you happy, according to research:
  • satisfying work
  • being good
  • time with people we like
  • be apart of something bigger
• Many gamers don’t feel that life is set up in a way that allows them to be good at life; World of Warcraft allows you to walk into an environment of collaborative support where you can master and manipulate the world of data.
• In comparison to life: Games come with better instructions and goals in game worlds; they have better feedback from players and the community; they have better community and collaboration
• It’s an economically rational decision for some people to spend more time in virtual worlds because those worlds are set up for them in ways the real world isn’t; this from Edward Castronova’s research.
• For many gamers, virtual reality is trumping reality when it comes to quality of life and happiness; for many people, their lives aren’t as exciting or happy as the virtual worlds and communities do.
• McGonigal takes a “moral and ethical” responsibility to make games that address that problem
• Problem with games: it’s like we invented words and then used them only for books, instead of releasing the words into the world to allow people to use them for their own purposes
• For example: Claim experience points for house chores, Chore Wars.
• Another example: Enterprise experience for business, Serious. Then it creates visualizations so you can see where the communication systems are coming.
• AND: Citizen Logistics, “we’re developing new game-like ways of working, volunteering, finding assistance, and having a good time. Anyone can play, and you get points for making other people’s dreams come true. Our software will let you find cool things to do, build teams, and connect people with jobs and resources, all via the text messaging capability of your cell phone.”
• We out to be using games like we use soap. Life is not always that engaging, why don’t we have games everywhere to kill alienation, boredom, anxiety, depression and a lack of meaning in your life.
• Whoops, just got called out that I mis-labled the genre Alternative when in fact it’s Alternate.
• “An alternate reality is another way of experiencing existence” Science Fiction Handbook, 1978
• World Without Oil: an ARG she produced about the first 32-weeks of a world without oil, which was based on people living their lives as if there were no more oil. Friggin’ awesome.
• Skills for happiness and ARGs:
  • mobbability - collaborate on large scales
  • cooperation radar - understanding who would make the perfect collaborators based on strengths and context
  • ping quotient - measure your ability to reach out to other people on the network, your ability to respond
  • influency - the ability to adapt persuasive strategies to individuals, mediums and environments
  • multi capitalism - people trade in different value systems
  • protovation - rapid, fearless innovation with the feeling that failure is fine (this is the gamer’s instinct)
  • open authorship - comfort with giving content away and knowing that it will be okay
  • signal/noise management - an ability to handle to so much noise and to know which bit of information and which data point is relevant
  • longbroading - the zoom’ed out version of a system, the long view
  • emergensight - the idea that you can spot pattern as they bubble up, even when it’s outside your expectations
• “They amplify our natural tendency towards the optimum human experience. All of these skills really speak to that.”; you spend time with people you like, looking at the long view, being involved with bigger ideas than you can have yourself.
• Trackstick: records your GPS location every 5 second, which tracks your footsteps around the world. (This would be awesome for reporters to actually record real-time data.)