Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (34 page)

To effectively harness the wisdom of the crowds, and to successfully leverage the participation of the many, organizations will need to become effective players in an emerging
engagement economy
. In the economy of engagement, it is less and less important to compete for attention and more and more important to compete for things like brain cycles and interactive bandwidth. Crowd-dependent projects must figure out how to capture the mental energy and the active effort it takes to make individual contributions to a larger whole. For this reason, the overall crowdsourcing culture likely will not be immune from “the tragedy of the commons”—the crisis that occurs when individuals selfishly exhaust a collective resource. Collaboration projects will have to compete for crowd resources as online communities seek to grab as many mental hours as possible from their members. These gains will likely come at the expense of other projects still striving to secure their own passionate community. Collaboration may be the signature modus operandi of these projects, but the competition for participants will be fierce and not all projects will thrive.

As we consider these challenges, some of the key questions for the emerging engagement economy start to arise: Who will do all of the participating necessary to make the seemingly endless flow of participatory projects a success? Are there enough willing quality collaborators in the world to do it? How do you draw a big and passionate enough crowd to tackle extreme-scale goals? And what will motivate the crowds who do show up to stick around long enough to collectively create something of value?

We have to face facts. It’s very difficult to motivate large numbers of people to come together at the same time and to contribute any significant amount of energy—let alone their very best effort—to a collaborative project. Most big crowd projects today fail: they fail to attract a crowd, or they fail to give the crowd the right kind of work, or they fail to reward the crowd well enough to keep it participating over the long haul.

But it’s not hopeless. As both Wikipedia and Investigate Your MP’s Expenses show, there are significant crowdsourcing projects succeeding. And they all have one important thing in common: they’re structured like a good multiplayer game.

The most active contributors to Wikipedia, the world’s most successful crowdsourced project, already know this. In fact, they’ve created a special project to detail all the ways in which Wikipedia is like a game.

As more than fifty leading Wikipedia contributors have helped explain, “One theory that explains the addictive quality of Wikipedia and its tendency to produce Wikipediholics (people who are addicted to editing Wikipedia articles) is that Wikipedia is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.” And, according to the happily addicted Wikipedians, it works like a good MMORPG in three key ways.

First, Wikipedia is a
good game world
. Its extreme scale inspires our sense of awe and wonder, while its sprawling navigation encourages curiosity, exploration, and collaboration. Here’s exactly how the Wikipedians described it in one recent version of the constantly changing wiki page:

In other words, Wikipedia, like all of the most engaging multiplayer game worlds, is an
epic built environment
. It invites participants to explore, act, and spend large amounts of time there.

Second, Wikipedia has
good game mechanics
. Player action has direct and clear results: edits appear instantly on the site, giving users a powerful sense of control over the environment. This instant impact creates optimism and a strong sense of self-efficacy. It features unlimited work opportunities, of escalating difficulty. As the Wikipedians describe it, “Players can take on
quests
(WikiProjects, efforts to organize many articles into a single, larger article), fight
boss-level battles
(featured articles that are held to higher standards than ordinary articles), and enter
battle arenas
(interventions against article vandalism).” It also has a personal feedback system that helps Wikipedians feel like they are improving and making personal progress as they contribute. “Players can accumulate
experience points
(edit count), allowing them to advance to higher
levels
(lists of top-ranking Wikipedians by number of edits).”

Meanwhile, like all good games, there is significant friction to achieving the goal. It’s not just about making good edits. The game also has a clearly defined enemy to defeat: vandals who make unhelpful edits to the site. “Edit wars” are said to break out between competing contributors with different points of view, and players have developed collaboration techniques and combat tools to deal with these high-level challenges. As an edit war escalates, more and more editors are called to join the conversation and work toward a solution.

Which leads to the third key aspect of Wikipedia’s good gameness: it has
good game community
. Good game community requires two things: plenty of positive social interaction and a meaningful context for collective effort. Wikipedia has both. As Wikipedians describe it:

The talk pages encourage both sociable competition (arguing over recent edits) and collaboration (improving and organizing existing articles). This kind of persistent positive social interaction around common goals builds trust and strong bonds—which naturally extends to face-to-face relationships. Indeed, roughly a hundred Wikipedia meetups occur a year, everywhere from Reykjavik, Cape Town, Munich, and Buenos Aires to Perth, Kyoto, Jakarta, and Nashville.

Also crucial to good community is the sense of meaning created by belonging and contributing to such an epic project. Wikipedia members are always working toward extreme-scale goals—aiming first for 100,000 articles, then 1 million, then 2 million, and then 3 million—as well as celebrating traffic milestones—the date Wikipedia first broke into the top 500 websites, the top 100, the top 20, and, most recently, the top 10. And they are constantly immersed in awe-inspiring project statistics, greeted on the site’s home page with a list of the more than 270 different language versions of Wikipedia and growing.

Wikipedians explicitly credit the good gameness of the system—its compelling game world, satisfying game mechanics, and inspiring game community—for their dedicated long-term participation. To conclude their analysis of Wikipedia as an MMORPG: “People tend to play a given MMORPG for six to eighteen months at a high level of involvement; a similar pattern (of “Wikibreaking,” or separating from the site to attend to other projects) has been noted in hard-core Wikipedia players.”
¹⁰
In other words, most games eventually get boring—we exhaust their challenges and creative possibilities—and Wikipedia is no different. While there are some perpetual Wikipedians, most members are of service to the site for a limited period of time, after which they’re likely to move on to a new system that offers new content and fresher challenges.

The “Wikipedia is an MMORPG” project is particularly compelling precisely because so much valuable participation effort is being spent in MMORPG environments.

Take
World of Warcraft
, for example—the most successful MMORPG ever. Currently, with more than 11.5 million subscribers, each averaging between sixteen and twenty-two hours a week playing the game, that’s 210 million participation hours spent weekly on just a single MMORPG. And the number of
WoW
subscribers is almost exactly the same as the number of registered contributors to Wikipedia.

Based on Clay Shirky’s estimate that all of Wikipedia took 100 million hours to create, the
WoW
community alone could conceivably create a new Wikipedia every three and a half days.

But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that most people who play
WoW
wouldn’t be even remotely interested in any kind of collective intelligence project. There are still more than 65,000
WoW
players who are registered contributors to WoWWiki, currently the world’s second largest wiki after Wikipedia. Even if you managed to successfully engage only that group, it would still take them only
two months
of channeling their usual
WoW
playing time to a crowdsourcing project to collectively create a resource on the scale of Wikipedia. By comparison, Wikipedia took
eight years
to collect 100 million hours of cognitive effort.

When I first started looking at these numbers, I had two insights.

First, gamers are an extremely valuable—and largely untapped—source of participation bandwidth. Whoever figures out how to effectively engage them first for real work is going to reap enormous benefits. (And clearly, the Guardian’s Investigate Your MP’s Expenses represents one of the first organizations to do just that.)

Second, crowdsourcing projects—if they have any hope of capturing enough participation bandwidth to achieve truly ambitious goals—must be intentionally designed to offer the same kinds of intrinsic rewards we get from good games. Increasingly, I’m convinced that this is the only way to dramatically increase our total available participation bandwidth. If everyone spent as much time actively engaged in good, hard work as gamers do, we wouldn’t be competing for scarce crowd resources. We’d have massively more mental hours to pour into important collective efforts.

My experience and research suggests that gamers are more likely than anyone on the planet to contribute to an online crowdsourcing project. They already have the time and the desire to tackle voluntary obstacles. They’re playing games precisely because they hunger for more and better engagement. They also have proven computer skills and an ability to learn new interactive interfaces quickly. And if they’re playing games online, they already have the necessary network access to join any online project and start participating immediately.

Given the highly social nature of today’s best games, gamers are also very likely to have a large network of friends and family they already bring from one game to the next. This is exactly the kind of social infrastructure necessary to help grow any participation base.

On the whole, gamers already spend more time compiling collective intelligence—and making effective use of it—than anyone else. They’re the most prolific users of wikis in the world. On Wikia, for example, the most popular wiki-hosting service, gamers are by far the leading creators of content and the most active users. With more than a million articles on ten thousand distinct wikis—each wiki for a different game—they represent the lion’s share of active content across the entire Wikia network. And as Artur Bergman, vice president of engineering and operations at Wikia, has told me many times, they are by far the most organized and ambitious wiki users on the network. “The gamers are amazing,” he said this fall, after watching multiple game walk-throughs go up overnight for newly released games. “The minute the game comes out, they start making round-the-clock edits. Within twenty-four hours, they have the whole thing documented.”

The minute gamers get their hands on a new game, they start compiling collective intelligence about it. It’s not something that happens after they get tired of playing—it’s an essential part of gaming. And, according to Wikia’s traffic statistics, for every single wiki contributor, thousands more players show up to make use of the data. Gamers make daily use of collective intelligence, and as a result they instinctively understand the value and possibility of big crowd projects.

In short, gamers are already our most readily engageable citizens.

We also have ample proof that gamers want to do more than just save the virtual world. Two key projects show just how much online gamers want to do real-world good: the world hunger-fighting game Free Rice and the cancer-fighting gamer initiative Folding@home on the PlayStation 3.

“Feeling guilty about wasting time on computer solitaire? Join the growing guilt-free multitude at
FreeRice.com
, an online game with redeeming social value.”
¹¹
That’s how
USA Today
described Free Rice, a nonprofit game designed to help gamers battle world hunger while they play.

The gameplay is simple: answer a multiple-choice vocabulary question correctly, and you earn ten virtual grains of rice. The better you do, the harder the questions get; it took me only six questions in my latest game before getting stumped by this one:

(
Hint:
It turns out “acrogenous” is a botanical term—see the endnotes for the answer.)
¹²