Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (29 page)

It would work just like the popular college campus game Assassins, in which players are assigned targets via e-mail, and then proceed to stalk each other across campus for days or even weeks to eliminate their targets with water guns and other toy weapons. But in our version, the game would be shorter (an hour or two) and confined to a much smaller space (a few city blocks, a park, or a large public plaza). And players wouldn’t kill each other with toy weapons—they’d kill each other with kindness. Most importantly, they wouldn’t be given specific targets, so anyone nearby was fair game for a thank-you or a compliment. And instead of being eliminated from the game when “killed,” players would join forces and cooperate with each other to keep performing bigger and more spectacular acts of kindness.

We called it Cruel 2 B Kind, or C2BK for short, after the famous line from Shakespeare’s tragedy
Hamlet
. We debuted it in 2006 in San Francisco and New York City; it’s since been played everywhere from Detroit, Michigan, and Johannesburg, South Africa, to Stockholm, Sweden, and Sydney, Australia. Here’s how it works:

In addition to this basic rule set, we created a database of possible weapons, and invited players to suggest their own. For example:

Besides swapping kind gestures for toy weapons, the two most important design decisions that we made were to shrink the window of play and to obscure the number and identity of players. In a regular game of Assassins, the game is too spread out physically and time-wise to have a significant impact on the local environment. By reducing the field and length of play, we “concentrated” the game to increase its impact and intensity. And in a traditional game of Assassins, players know exactly who they’re targeting. Bystanders
do
occasionally get caught up in the cross fire, but it’s always an accident, and it’s usually not fun for the victim. (No one wants to be unexpectedly splattered by a water gun if they’re not participating in a game!) In C2BK, however, we wanted bystanders to get hit—every positive microinteraction would increase the jen ratio, regardless of whether it improved the player’s score. In fact, the higher percentage of “misfires” (i.e. toward nonplayers), the better.

To be fair, being accidentally “attacked” by a player is somewhat startling—but also potentially enjoyable. In a best-case scenario, the “victims” of play feel genuinely welcome or complimented or appreciated. At the start of the game, when players are timid and groups are small, this tends to be the case. Later, as the players get bolder and teams get larger, strangers are more likely to be clued in to the unusual nature of the activity and provoked to wonder why everyone is making such showy efforts of gratitude and kindness. This is one of the intended effects of the game—to reveal if friendly gestures are considered out of place, and to provoke people to wonder why exactly that is. Of course, by the end of a game, being complimented by a horde of twenty or more adrenaline-pumping players is clearly no everyday act of transitory public sociality. No one is likely to mistake
that
for an ordinary act of kindness. But the spectacle works toward a different positive end: it adds a spark of novelty and curiosity to the environment. It’s bracing, but benevolent—and our goal in including this level of spectacle was to jolt people out of their social bubbles.

Years of low jen ratios may make some bystanders more cynical and jaded than others—and for them, getting welcomed, serenaded, thanked, or complimented by a single stranger or a crowd of strangers might not initially be a positive experience. That’s why we were careful to playtest the various “weapons,” to whittle the list down to the most consistently positive-reaction-provoking gestures. I’ve also observed—and filmed—many C2BK games in action, specifically looking for signs that the majority of bystanders benefit, in addition to the players. To date, my studies have shown that the visible positive reactions—smiles, wide-eyed curiosity and amazement, cheerful replies—far outnumber the blank stares or negative reactions.

Ultimately, though, it’s the players who benefit most from the game. That’s because when you play C2BK, the basic happiness activities of expressing gratitude and practicing random acts of kindness are made more engaging.

First of all, the C2BK game makes the kindness activities more interesting. There are two obstacles in the way of your performing them: you don’t know who to attack, and you’re trying to sneak past and avoid other players. Much of the game is spent scouring the environment for targets while trying to keep a low profile. You can’t help but wonder about everyone you see: Are they playing the game, too? Strangers become potential targets and allies, and the only way to find out if they share your secret is to interact positively with them.

C2BK also produces adrenaline. Paying a compliment becomes an act of courage: you have to work up your nerve to overcome the social norms of ignoring strangers, and you have to do it as quickly as possible, because every second that passes is a second that another player could be targeting you. C2BK also has more pronounced fiero moments. Players and teams let out big hollers and cheers when they’ve made a successful kill, and the fiero moment is intensified by the number of misfires you’ve made on the way. My rough estimate from observing several games is that C2BK participants attack on average five times as many nonplayers as players.

The game also has more novelty than ordinary acts of kindness. It encourages you to think about being nice to strangers in different environments— and the possibilities are endless. It’s most frequently played in downtown settings, but Cruel 2 B Kind isn’t just a game for sidewalks and parks—any public or shared space could benefit from having its jen ratio raised. I’ve received reports of C2BK games played in settings as diverse as high-rise office buildings, arts festivals, libraries, shopping malls, convention centers, apartment complexes, college dorms, public train systems, and even the beach.

Finally, C2BK gives you collaborators in your happiness activity. You can gather up your friends to be on a team with you, and as you start getting folded into larger and larger groups—the biggest C2BK game I’ve participated in had more than two hundred players in a three-by-three city-block radius—you build up a sense of being on a collective mission to kill with kindness. It’s the kind of emotionally charged experience that can forever change how you see your own kindness capabilities. Even if you play C2BK formally only once or twice, you may find yourself continuing to think of friendly gestures as secret weapons you can deploy anytime, anywhere. (This is exactly what players report to me weeks and months after their first time playing the game.) The game gives you a different view into two happiness activities, charging them with more excitement, fiero, and social energy.

 

 

CRUEL 2 B KIND,
like many happiness hacks, isn’t a product. There’s no software to download, no license to buy, no fee to pay. It’s meant to be a solution to a problem—the problem of how to increase the jen ratio of a shared space—and it can be adopted and adapted by anyone, anywhere. It was cheap to invent—Ian Bogost and I worked for free, and the whole project probably cost us less than five hundred dollars in expenses to playtest and launch.

The game can be played using any kind of mobile communications technology: text messaging, mobile e-mail, and Twitter are the most popular platforms for C2BK.

To help spread the hack, the Cruel 2 B Kind website includes a few essential tools. There’s a six-minute video showing the highlights of a game from start to finish, to help potential players get up to speed quickly. There’s also a one-page “cheat sheet” with rules and frequently asked questions that players can print out and bring to the game.

It’s hard to keep track of all the C2BK games that happen—game organizers don’t have to get our permission to run a game, so I rely on voluntary reports. Three years after launching the game, I still hear from new game organizers roughly every month. At the very least, C2BK has been played in more than fifty different cities, in ten countries, on four continents.

Recently, I received news of perhaps the most interesting C2BK setting yet: Summer Darkness, one of the biggest gothic festivals in Europe. The three game organizers wrote me an e-mail from the festival’s home city, Utrecht, in the Netherlands, explaining, “Ultimate goal: get the Goths (coming from all over Europe), and ‘civilians’ (non-Goths) to play together in the streets.”

Now, if any group would find straightforward happiness activities hokey, I’m pretty sure it would be goths. The gothic subculture, of course, is known for embracing dark, mysterious, and morbid imagery. There’s a kind of loneliness and alienation deeply entrenched in gothic stories, music, and style. And Summer Darkness is officially billed as a “dark underground lifestyle” festival, so it might be the last place you’d expect to see people throwing themselves into extroverted interaction with strangers, let alone cheerful expressions of gratitude and random acts of kindness.

For Cruel 2 B Kind to be an appealing activity to this community stands as excellent proof, I think, that even the most unabashedly do-good activity can be transformed into mischievous fun. It’s proof that happiness hacking works. You really can turn positive-psychology advice about what’s “good for you” into something that you really
want
to do.

Tombstone Hold ’Em is a variation of Texas Hold ’Em poker designed to be played in cemeteries. It is also, without a doubt, the most controversial game I’ve ever designed.

To say that some people find the idea of playing games in a real-world cemetery inappropriate would be putting it mildly. In the United States in particular, we have a culture of grieving as quietly, as privately, and as solemnly as possible. Cemeteries—despite having been popular as public parks and recreation spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—today are largely single-use memorial spaces. They’re meant to be briefly occupied by mourners first and foremost. Some older or more scenic cemeteries may draw other visitors, but they generally move through them as inconspicuously as possible.