Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (26 page)

According to Evans and Johnson, the game is designed to evoke the feelings of loneliness and anonymity that are a mainstay of urban life—as well as to provide opportunities for strangers to mean something to each other, if only briefly. As they explain, “The game immerses players in the crowd, exposing them to the ambivalent feelings aroused by city life, the freedom of anonymity and its loneliness. Out of the drive to stay in the game, players create ad hoc, or improvised, social groups.”
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They have to develop their intuition about how to tell who else is playing, and therefore who represents a part of the game community. They learn to see strangers for the potential relationships they represent, not just as obstacles to avoid as they pass by.

The emotional impact of the Comfort of Strangers is intense. It not only heightens your awareness of the potential for strangers to play a role in your life, it also provokes a real curiosity about others, and a longing to connect. When you start the game, you feel like you might be the only one playing. Each time you encounter another player, it’s reassuring—even if they’re on the other team. When I asked Simon Johnson about the social goals of the game, he told me this was intentional:

The Comfort of Strangers can be a short game or a long game, depending on how willing players are to overcome their hesitations about reaching out to strangers, and depending on how tightly they can learn to stick together in the crowd.

In theory, if such a game became immensely popular, you could play it all the time, as part of your regular routine—you’d simply turn the game on whenever you walked outside and always keep open the possibility of running across another player as you went about your ordinary business. But in practice, while games like this are still relatively new, there isn’t a critical mass of players to accommodate continuous play. Instead, players organize games online and set precise windows of time and playing fields: for example, in a certain neighborhood, during a certain hour, on a particular date. This kind of advanced schedule keeps players anonymous, but ensures there will be enough density of play for players to have a good chance of encountering each other.

Because a critical mass is so important to games like the Comfort of Strangers, in 2008 Evans and Johnson cofounded an annual Bristol-based festival called Interesting Games, or Igfest, for innovative outdoor games. The festival is meant to provide support for and exposure to other game developers who are working to make cities more interesting and friendlier spaces. And it’s one of an increasing number of urban game festivals worldwide—from the annual Come Out & Play festival in New York City, founded in 2006, and the Hide & Seek Weekender festival in London, founded in 2007, to the Urban Play festival in Seoul, South Korea, founded in 2005—that are designed to test the power of games to improve the feeling of community in real-world spaces.

These outdoor game festivals gather critical masses of players together for an entire week or weekend of games with the aim of helping to introduce these games to the public at large. They also embody our ninth fix for reality in action:

What does it mean to create a community from scratch?

It’s hard to pin down the difference between a community and a crowd, but we know it when we feel it. Community feels
good
. It feels like belonging, fitting in, and actively caring about something together. Community typically arises when a group of people who have a common interest start to interact with each other in order to further that interest. It requires
positive participation
from everyone in the group.

In order to turn a group of strangers into a community, you have to follow two basic steps: first, cultivate a shared interest among strangers, and, second, give them the opportunity and means to interact with each other around that interest.

That’s exactly what a good multiplayer game does best. It focuses the attention of a group of people on a common goal, even if they think they have nothing in common with each other. And it gives them the means and motivation to pursue that goal, even if they had no intention of interacting with each other previously.

Does a game community among strangers last? Not always. Sometimes it lasts only as long as the game itself. The players might never see or talk to each other again. And that’s perfectly okay. We often tend to think of communities as best when they’re long-term and stable, and certainly the strength of a community can grow over time. But communities can also confer real benefits even when they last for mere days, hours, or even minutes.

When we have community, we feel what anthropologists call “communitas,” or spirit of community.
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Communitas is a powerful sense of togetherness, solidarity, and social connection. And it protects against loneliness and alienation.

Even a small taste of communitas can be enough to bring us back to the social world if we feel isolated from it, or to renew our commitment to participating actively and positively in the lives of people around us. Experiencing a short burst of community in a space that previously felt uninviting or simply uninteresting can also permanently change our relationship to that space. It becomes a space for us to act and to be of service, not just to pass through or observe.

Comfort of Strangers designers Evans and Johnson believe that experiencing communitas in an everyday game can spark a taste for the kinds of community action that make the world a better place. Learning to improvise with strangers toward a shared goal teaches players what they call “swarm intelligence”—intelligence that makes people better able and more likely to band together toward positive ends. “As we’re making these games, we dream of the other revolutionary things swarm intelligence might make possible. Low-carbon futures, mass creativity, living happily with less.”

It’s not such a radical idea. To see why, let’s look at two other games designed to create unexpected moments of communitas in a specific shared space: Ghosts of a Chance, a game for a national museum, and Bounce, a game for a retirement center. Both groundbreaking projects demonstrate the growing importance of having more fun with strangers and of using games to build our own capacity for community participation.

Most museums offer memberships where members pay an annual fee and can then visit the museum as often as they’d like. It’s a good way to raise money and promote visitation, but it’s not a particularly good way to experience membership. Members of the museum are, for the most part, like any other visitor: they take in the museum’s offerings, but don’t interact with other members, or even know who they are.

Recently, the Smithsonian American Art Museum set out to experiment with a new model of museum membership, a way to
really
belong to a museum. It’s a model that calls for members to contribute real content to the museum’s collection and to collaborate with each other online in between museum visits. To test this more participatory model of membership, the Smithsonian developed a six-week alternate reality game called Ghosts of a Chance for one of its main facilities, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art.

The Luce Foundation Center is described as a “visible storage facility” for the Smithsonian. It displays more than thirty-five hundred pieces of American art, including sculptures, paintings, craft objects, and folk works, in densely packed floor-to-ceiling glass cases. Its primary purpose is to display as much of the vast Smithsonian collection as possible, much more than can typically be included in the other galleries.

Because it’s so packed with art, visiting the Luce Foundation Center is a bit of a treasure hunt already: among all the diverse pieces, you have to seek out the special objects that speak to you most. The center has at the core of its mission teaching visitors to really hear what the art objects have to say, and its educational materials often focus on how art is a window into the lives and times of its creators. There’s a sense in the museum that history lingers in the art objects almost like a ghost, waiting to whisper its tales to visitors. Learning how to hear those tales, and how to whisper our own histories through artwork, was the inspiration for the Ghosts of a Chance game.

The game begins with what at first seems like a real press release from the museum. Members, as well as public visitors to the museum’s website, are invited to meet two new curators at the center, Daniel Libbe and Daisy For-tunis. According to the press release, they will both be writing about their work on blogs and their social network pages. Read the fine print, however, and you realize Daniel and Daisy aren’t real curators. They’re fictional characters in a new, experimental game produced by the Smithsonian. And if you want to find out more, you have to friend these fictional characters on Facebook and start following their blogs.

That’s when you discover that Daniel and Daisy are having a rather extraordinary experience: they’re communicating regularly with two ghosts haunting the Luce gallery, a man and a woman who lived a century and a half ago. Angered at being forgotten by history, the ghosts are threatening to destroy the museum’s precious artifacts—and they won’t rest until
their
stories are represented in the museum’s glass cases.

Frightened but resourceful, Daniel and Daisy make special arrangements for a one-day exhibit called, naturally, Ghosts of a Chance. But ethereal ghosts can’t make real art—so Daniel and Daisy need the museum members to help. It’s up to them, the players, to interpret the two ghosts’ histories—by transforming their tales into art objects that the curators promise to display in a special gallery event.

And so a gameplay mechanism is established. Each week, the ghosts reveal a new dramatic chapter in their lives to Daniel and Daisy, describing in mysterious terms the kind of art piece that they feel would best capture their secret histories. Daniel and Daisy then pass on the new information to members of the game and charge them with the important mission of making that art real, then sending it to the Smithsonian for inclusion in the exhibit.

In the first mission, for example, players learn that one of the ghosts is tortured by memories of a dear friend, a young lady from a very wealthy family:

Players are then challenged to craft this girl’s most prized piece of jewelry, what the ghosts call the Necklace of the Subaltern Betrayer. Instructions for designing the necklace are spare, and poetic: “The Necklace I want should fit perfectly around her neck, but remain there only long enough for me to steal it right off again.”

Players discussed the challenge in online forums: What does “subaltern” mean? (They learned that it is a political-science term for people who lack power or social status in a given society.) They debated: Should the necklace be old-fashioned, or a modern interpretation of the tale? They collaborated to unpack the meaning of the tale, to analyze the cultural clues embedded in it, and to strategize about how to craft a necklace that could evoke such a story and communicate such intense feelings.

As a community, the players decided the necklace should convey what it would feel like to wear the heavy and inflexible societal expectations of a woman of money and privilege. One player created a necklace titled “Someone to Watch Over Me,” comprising more than a dozen squares of fabric, each screenprinted with the image of a different staring eye. The eyes are stacked on top of each other in geometric sets of one, two, and three, and strung along a pretty pink ribbon. The aesthetic is both girly and intimidating. Another player submitted a necklace titled “Enclosure,” which appears to be constructed from barbed wire strung with rubies. Both the title and design of the work suggest that its wearer is trapped and limited by her social status, her riches preventing her from living the life she might otherwise pursue.

All of the player-created artifacts received by the museum were cataloged online and archived at the Luce Foundation Center. Players around the world could see the different interpretations of the challenge—either online or in person by visiting the objects on temporary display at the museum. In the end, more than six thousand Smithsonian members and fans participated in the online experience, while two hundred fifty attended the opening of the Ghosts of a Chance exhibit in person.
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Why design a game, instead of issuing an open invitation to design for the museum? There are two good reasons. Because it was a “game” and not a serious art competition, people who wouldn’t normally feel capable of contributing artwork were free to try without risking embarrassment. The game structure, with its clues and narratives, also gave a larger and more atypical museum membership—in this case, mostly students and teenagers—an opportunity to participate in the making of the exhibit, through online discussion and analysis of the artworks, even if the members didn’t contribute art themselves. These players helped serve as virtual “curators” for the Ghosts of a Chance exhibit.