Source: Wired

Playing digital games is something people do for fun, right? It’s not brain surgery, and it’s certainly never going to change the world.

Except game designer Jane McGonigal thinks games can change the world and that game developers have a responsibility to make it happen. Instead of just inviting gamers to escape into a game world that is more attractive than the real world, game developers have a responsibility to steer gamers toward improving the real world.

Director of game research and development for the Institite for the Future, McGonigal says reality is broken and can only be fixed if we make the real world work like massive, multiplayer games.

Games — particularly alternate reality games — inspire large groups of people to pool their knowledge and skills to overcome obstacles, and this is precisely what’s needed to tackle global social issues, such as poverty, hunger, disease and climate change, McGonigal says.

An example of this is a popular game McGonigal developed in 2007 with Ken Eklund called World Without Oil, which asked 1,800 players in 12 countries to re-imagine their life in a world bereft of oil. The aim was to get players to adjust their thinking and actions if there weren’t enough fuel to ship foods long distances, bus their children to school or simply commute to work.

This week, McGonigal will unveil her new massive multiplayer game at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference. It’s called Evoke, and was designed for the World Bank Institute, the teaching division of the World Bank. It has participants, with the help of real-world mentors they enlist, complete 10 missions and 10 quests — one a week — with the aim of helping them develop skills and solutions to world problems. The 10-week game is free to play and begins March 3.

Wired.com spoke with McGonigal about the role games play in inducing happiness and what lawyers can teach game developers.

Wired.com: You say that reality is broken and that it’s the responsibility of game designers to fix it. What makes game designers the perfect choice to fix the world?

Jane McGonigal: The game industry has spent the last 30 years optimizing two things: how to make people happy and how to inspire collaboration on really complex challenges…. We have all the problems surrounding hunger, poverty, climate change, energy and those are all such extreme-scale problems that require so many different actors to work together, so much concerted effort and so much creative thinking that they seem to be the kinds of problems that gamers have been trained to solve.

In game worlds and in game environments we have these really sophisticated ways of working with other people and figuring out what each others’ strengths are, putting together a team where everybody has something important to contribute, coordinating globally in a virtual environment. The idea is to make games that take those sophisticated ways of collaborating and apply those to real-world problems.

Wired.com: You’ve said that game designers are in the happiness business. What do you mean by this?

McGonigal: Games support happiness … by giving us more satisfying work or concrete tasks that we can accomplish…. Studies have shown that playing a short game — having something concrete that you can accomplish — actually gives you the motivation, energy and optimism to go back and tackle real work.

There have actually been interesting studies that 62 percent of executives at work play games online and they do it to feel more productive. That’s because when you’re trying to do real-world work it’s frustrating; we don’t see the results of our actions right away. So games give us that sense of blissful productivity…. Neurochemically we’re kind of fired up … to take on challenges…. Games take us immediately out of a state of paralysis or alienation or depression and they switch on the positive ways of thinking. They trigger the brain to a state in which it’s possible to do good work. It’s possible to aspire to tough goals.

The other thing is, there have been myriad studies of the long-term effects of socializing in game environments and how they make people feel more connected to other people. It kind of reawakens our sense of extroversion. For people who are introverted, it actually changes our brain structure so that we are more rewarded when we interact with other people. The brain structure of an introvert is that we don’t get as much dopamine when we’re around other people that extroverts do. Games, when you play them with other people, … actually strengthen the reward circuitry so it actually makes people more social and more likely to collaborate because their brains are actually more responsive to people online and offline. Games are transforming the brains of people who play them in largely positive ways.

Wired.com: You talk about building games to change the world but do you have any evidence to show that what people do in games translates to the real world? When the game is over, do people sustain a momentum for change?

McGonigal: Yes. Many of the games I’ve done have triggered lasting change. With the World Without Oil project … we have followed [the players] for years now looking at what their everyday behaviors are like and overwhelmingly they report, three years later, having not only changed their own daily habits, but [they are] teaching friends, coworkers, family members, neighbors to adopt these habits as well. So at a micro level we can change people’s behavior and show them it’s possible to contribute to a better way of living on the planet and empower them to share that with other people.

Wired.com: What is the aim of your new game Evoke?

McGonigal: It’s oriented toward young people in Africa primarily and more broadly to anyone in the world who wants to help solve problems in the developing areas. It’s a crash course in how to start a venture, a business, that can tackle these problems [of poverty, disease, hunger] at a local level…. By the end of the game you have developed a real-world pitch for a venture [and] have acquired mentors to help you make it real. If you play the game you’re connected to somebody in the real world who has entrepreneurial experience to mentor you; you’ve also developed skills to make you a better problem solver.

Wired.com: Aren’t there some people who are more likely to participate in these kinds of games who are already pre-wired for social activism? How do you get the average person to participate and be inspired to make a difference?

McGonigal: I believe that we can use the same emotional strategies, the same storytelling strategies, the same techniques that blockbuster games use to attract a larger audience. The response to [Evoke] is that this is the kind of game that has crossover potential. It feels like a blockbuster, not a niche project.

Three years ago, the World Bank Institute tried an online project that would teach social innovation to university students, and it was not overwhelmingly well-received. The students were not engaged. They didn’t believe that they could be the kind of person to do that work.

So we’ve been doing a roadshow around different parts of Africa … to see do students respond to this better and … the people at the universities are saying that the difference is overwhelming compared to three years ago. That this kind of a game makes it seem real and possible and exciting. So it does seem to me that we can use games to engage people who otherwise wouldn’t be engaged. It’s not an easy obstacle to overcome. There will always be more who are ready to participate because they already care. But it’s not just about caring. It’s about convincing people that they can make a difference. It’s about giving them concrete ways to contribute.

Wired.com: It’s great to bring people together for a fun game but can you actually get them into the long-term commitment that real-world change requires?

McGonigal: Well, we know that contributing to world change does not require a long time commitment, necessarily. We’re inventing all the time new ways to make a difference at a micro scale. When you add up [small] contributions, they make something bigger, like Wikipedia, like micro-financing. These are scalable actions that when you add them all up they do make something bigger.

I don’t want a gamer to feel like they have to commit their whole life to changing the world…. If you’re a mentor [in the Evoke game], you’re contributing maybe 20 minutes of time once a week. But if you have changed someone’s life who is actually on the ground trying to solve a problem in a village in Africa, your 20 minutes has actually been amplified to do something more.

Wired.com: How will games change in the future? And how will game developers need to change to create that future?

McGonigal: [One thing we'll need] is that the mainstream game industry keeps doing what it’s doing, which is trying to create bigger collaborative work environments. There’s a new game MAG that will for the first time have 250 people collaborating simultaneously on a playing field. And the structure for collaborating in that environment is very sophisticated.

Game developers know that people have more fun when they’re in large groups. They feel more fired up when the challenges are more epic. So game developers should figure out to keep innovating in that direction…. And that’s really important because they’re showing “serious game” developers what the right design strategies are for taking these techniques for happiness and collaboration and applying them to real problems. I’d like to see crossover, though. I’d like to see Blizzard take on a serious game. I’d like it to not to just be two separate tracks of game development. I think … the way the legal system has pro bono allocations for lawyers I think game developers should have some kind of pro bono allocation for games for good.

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