Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (24 page)

 

 

THE EXAMPLE OF
in-flight games presents the basic case for developing games that connect with our everyday lives: these games can help people suffer less and enjoy the real world more. When an experience is difficult for us, offering challenging goals, tracking points and levels and achievements, and providing virtual rewards can make it easier to get through the experience. Ultimately, that’s the most important work that game designers can do in the future: to make things that are hard for us as rewarding—as
intrinsically
rewarding—as possible.

But what about activities that we already enjoy?

Can games motivate us to make a better effort, even when we already love what we’re doing?

Trying to improve an already enjoyable activity by adding points, levels, and achievements has its risks. Economists have demonstrated that offering people an extrinsic reward (like money or prizes) for something they’re already doing—and already enjoying—actually makes them feel
less
motivated and
less
rewarded. But game points and achievements don’t have extrinsic value yet—so as long as the main prize is glory, bragging rights, and personal fiero, the danger of devaluing a pleasurable experience with game feedback is relatively low. But it’s not nonexistent. Like money or prizes, the opportunity to earn points and level up could potentially distract us from the initial reasons we like to do an activity.

Clearly, we have to be thoughtful about where and when we apply game-like feedback systems. If
everything
in life becomes about tackling harder challenges, scoring more points, and reaching higher levels, we run the risk of becoming too focused on the gratifications of positive feedback. And the last thing we want is to lose our ability to enjoy an activity for its own sake.

So why risk it at all? Because measuring our efforts with gamelike feedback systems makes it easier for us to get better at any effort we undertake. As the great nineteenth-century mathematical physicist Lord Kelvin famously said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” We need real-time data to understand our performance: are we getting better or worse? And we can use quantitative benchmarks—specific, numerical goals we want to achieve—to focus our efforts and motivate us to try harder.

Real-time data and quantitative benchmarks are the reason why gamers get consistently better at virtually any game they play: their performance is consistently measured and reflected back to them, with advancing progress bars, points, levels, and achievements. It’s easy for players to see exactly how and when they’re making progress. This kind of instantaneous, positive feedback drives players to try harder and to succeed at more difficult challenges.

That’s why it’s worth considering making things we already love more gamelike. It can make us better at them, and help us set our sights higher.

Let’s consider the gamelike Nike+ (or “Nike plus”) running system, a motivational platform that is wildly popular among people who already love to run—especially those who want to run farther and faster.

The very first time I went running with the Nike+ system, I ran faster than I had in my entire life.

I was running my favorite route, a four-and-a-half-mile course in the Berkeley Hills. In six years, running it a couple times a week, I’d never once finished faster than 41:43. But on my first Nike+ run, I clocked in at 39:33, more than two minutes ahead of my all-time personal best. How in the world did I suddenly get so much faster? It’s no mystery: I was motivated by better, real-time feedback and by the promise of online rewards when I got home.

Running, of course, is its own reward. You feel the endorphins, you clear your mind, you build stamina, you burn calories, you get stronger. But it’s also a struggle—to find the time, to convince yourself that you have the energy when you’d rather sleep late, to go out whether it’s hot or it’s raining, and to fight off boredom doing a highly monotonous activity. Runners love running, but motivation is still an issue. So Nike+ is designed to provide an added layer of intrinsic motivation, beyond the runner’s high and the physical results.

If you’ve never seen it in action, here’s how Nike+ works. An inexpensive sensor—it costs about twenty dollars and is smaller than a poker chip—fits imperceptibly inside the sole of almost any standard Nike sneaker. It’s activated by movement (thanks to an accelerometer) and communicates with your iPod (via radio transmitter) to tell you exactly how fast you’re running and how far you’ve run. As you’re running, presumably to your favorite music, the iPod screen displays your stats in real time.

Getting feedback in real time makes a huge difference when it comes to running faster and longer. Just being able to see when you’re slowing down—something that happens unconsciously as you tire or lose focus—helps you bring your attention back to your pace. Meanwhile, pushing yourself to run faster is instantly more rewarding, because you get to see the numbers drop lower and lower the faster you go. It’s one thing to set a time goal and try to reach it; it’s another thing entirely to know every step of the way if you’re running fast enough to achieve it.

When you get home, you can plug your iPod into your computer, and the Nike+ system will upload your data and add it to your running profile. That’s where the online rewards come in. Every mile you run earns you a point; score enough points, and you level up. There are six levels currently on Nike+, which follow the same color grading as martial arts belts: yellow, orange, and green; blue, purple, and black. Like any good MMO, you advance Nike+ levels quickly at first, but over time it takes more and more effort to reach the next level. Right now, I’m a level green runner, having logged 272 miles since joining, and I have 348 more miles to run to reach the blue level. That’s an intimidating number, but I’m so motivated to level up that I bet I’ll run the next 348 miles in even
less
time than I ran the first 272.

Based on the data the Nike+ sensor collects, you can also earn personal online trophies for best times and longest runs, as well as achievements for meeting training goals, like working your way up to a 10K distance or running a hundred miles in a hundred days. And when you’ve had a particularly good run, a famous athlete like Lance Armstrong will cheer you on before you even catch your breath, with a congratulatory audio message like this: “Congratulations! You’ve just recorded a personal best for the mile” or “Way to go! That was your longest run yet.”

You can keep your running profile private and your accomplishments to yourself—if you want. Or you can push your stats and achievements out to your Nike+ friends online, to everyone you know on Facebook, or even to the whole world on Twitter. Perhaps my favorite Nike+ motivational feature is the “power song.” It’s the musical equivalent of a health pack or a power-up in a video game. Whenever you need a boost of energy or extra motivation to keep running or pick up speed, you simply hold down the center button on your iPod. That quick gesture automatically triggers your favorite, preset running song. For me, pressing the center button during a hard run feels like I’m unlocking some secret super-running power that I didn’t even know I had. The faster pace, the pounding beat, the lyrics ringing in my ears like a personal mantra—it’s the one time in the real world I feel like I have the ability to summon the kind of magical powers that I’m used to deploying in virtual worlds.

Add all that up—real-time stats, a leveling system, personal achievements, and your own personal power-up song—and Nike+ makes for a very good running game, one that uses better feedback and reward to help you put in a better effort and aspire to more than you would otherwise. But why play alone when you can play with others? It’s the online community built around the Nike+ system that turns it into something really spectacular: not just a running game, but a massively multiplayer running game.

The Nike+ online community has more than 2 million active members, all of whom are collecting and sharing data about their runs in order to compete in challenges and contribute to team missions.

Anyone can design their own challenge and invite whomever they want to play with them. It can be competitive—everyone tries to get the best score—or collaborative—you try to get all of the participants to successfully finish the challenge before time runs out. Challenges can be as small as a two-player rivalry—husband versus wife or brother versus brother, for example: Who can log the most miles in a week? Or they can be set up as a team event for a group of friends or coworkers, with a dozen, or twenty, or fifty runners, or more—one neighborhood races another, for example, or every department for itself: how many teams can collectively log a thousand kilometers before time runs out?

The challenges can also be public free-for-alls, with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of competitors. As I’m writing this, there are more than seven thousand user-created public challenges to participate in, including the collaborative individual challenge of “running around the earth,” in which each participant runs 24,902 miles—the challenge expires in the year 2027, making this ambitious goal seem a bit more reasonable—and a competitive team challenge for runners who go out with their dogs. (In this public challenge, players can join a team based on breed; out of fifty different teams, currently Labradors and beagles are leading the total mile count, followed closely by the mutts, but the Australian shepherds have the fastest pace.)

The challenge puts the runner’s personal goals into a larger social context, which gives each jog more meaning. Every run is adding up to something—and depending on what motivates me most, I can join challenges that stoke my competitive spirit or call on my sense of responsibility to my teammates.

Of course, no good MMO would be complete without an avatar. Nike+ is no exception. When you join the Nike+ community, you get to create a “Mini,” officially described as your “tiny running partner,” whom you can customize to look just like you. Your avatar’s energy level and animations are based on your run activity: how far and how often you run. If you’ve put in a few good days in a row, your Mini is ecstatic and bouncing off the walls. If you’ve slacked off for a week or two, your Mini pouts and mopes and gently teases you for being such a slacker. Just a few days ago, my Mini was making faces at me and saying, “If only I practiced running like I practice paddleball.”

Your Mini greets you whenever you log in to Nike+, you can embed it into your Facebook profile or blog (so others can see your avatar), and you can even download a screen saver starring your Mini at play (so you have to come face-to-face with your avatar even when you’re not thinking about running).

Recent research suggests that this kind of ambient avatar feedback is remarkably effective. In a widely cited experiment conducted at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), researchers demonstrated that watching customized, look-alike avatars lose or gain weight as we do exercise makes us work out longer and harder.
¹⁰
Participants who received “vicarious reinforcement” from their avatars volunteered to do on average eight times more exercise repetitions than participants without avatar feedback. That bodes well for the potential use of Mini-like avatars at home or at gyms, where people are more likely to work out in front of screens. (And, in fact, many home fitness games, including
Wii Fit
and
EA Sports Active
, use avatar feedback to engage players in harder workouts.)

But there’s no reason that people working out need to be stuck in front of a screen to get the benefit of avatar feedback. In another experiment, Stanford VHIL researchers discovered that simply showing subjects a short animation of their look-alike avatar running in the laboratory inspired subjects to spend on average an hour more running in the first twenty-four hours after they left the laboratory. (There was no motivation effect watching a random avatar; it worked only when the avatar was highly customized to look like the subject.)

The researchers theorized that seeing virtual versions of themselves doing a positive activity stimulated memories of the subjects’ own real-life positive experiences, making them more likely to reengage in the activity. They were careful to note in their findings that participants in the study, all college-age students in northern California, were generally healthy and fit. There was no evidence to suggest that someone who hates running would be likely to run for an hour after seeing their avatar do it. The avatar reinforced positive feelings about running, rather than creating them from scratch.