Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (45 page)

Of course, this didn’t really happen—at least not for most of us.

But for two thousand online gamers, this peak-oil scenario was the basis for a life-changing six-week experiment: a collaborative simulation designed to find out what
would
happen if demand for oil did eventually outstrip our supply, and what we could collectively do about it.

The project was called World Without Oil (WWO), and it was the first massively scaled effort to engage ordinary individuals in creating an immersive forecast of the future.

Funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and presented by the Independent Television Service (ITVS), World Without Oil was first conceived by Ken Eklund, an independent writer and interactive developer based in San Jose, California. He pitched the idea in response to an ITVS announcement of funds up to $100,000 being made available for innovative educational online games. I was invited by ITVS to serve on the evaluating committee for online game proposals.

“No one today has a clear picture of oil availability or what will happen when demand inevitably outstrips supply,” Eklund wrote in his proposal. “That will largely depend on how well ordinary people respond to the crisis. Until now, no one has ever thought to ask them what they might do. WWO will evoke the wisdom of crowds in advance, as players work together to gain grassroots insights into the forces that will rule at street level in a crisis—and figure out the best ways to prepare, cooperate, and collectively create solutions if and when a real peak-oil shortage happens.”

It was designed as a massively multiplayer thought experiment: players would spend six weeks imagining how such a crisis might play out in their local communities, their industries, and their own lives. They would make highly personal forecasts using online social media. And they would rely on an “alternate reality dashboard” to get daily updates on the scenario, in the form of fictional news stories, video reports, and economic indicators from the peak-oil crisis in order to flesh out their personal forecasts in more detail.

Players would also be strongly encouraged to take the simulation a step further, and spend some time each day living their real lives as if the simulated oil shortage were true. How hard would it be to get to work, or to prepare dinner, or to see friends and family if the fictional simulation were real? Players were challenged to test their own ability to adapt, rapidly and dramatically, to a potential oil crisis. Instead of just imagining a peak-oil scenario, they could start making changes and testing adaptive solutions for real.

Each day in real time would represent a week in the simulation. This would enable players to consider longer-term impacts and strategies. The game itself would last for thirty-two days, so the scenario could play out over thirty-two weeks.

WWO would give players firsthand insight into a plausible future, helping them prepare for, or even prevent, its worst outcomes. The game would also create a collective record of how a real peak-oil scenario might play out—a kind of survival guide for the future, a record of tremendous value for educators, policy makers, and organizations of all kinds.

I happily accepted Eklund’s invitation to join the project team as the game’s “participation architect”—a fancy way of saying my job was to help make sure every single player found a way to contribute meaningfully to the collaborative effort.

Of course, to start, we had to attract a community of players. I set our target at one thousand players, a number based on my experience with online communities and collective intelligence. One thousand participants seems to me to be a critical threshold to allow for an online game to get interesting—to ensure enough diversity among players, to have enough participants to tackle missions on an epic scale, and to produce enough chaotic interaction to generate complex and surprising results.

For six weeks before we launched, we spread the word online and at public events. We asked our friends and colleagues to blog about it. I announced the game in my keynote for the Serious Games Summit, an annual two-day meeting in San Francisco for people working on games designed to teach, train, and solve real problems. ITVS reached out to educators and media creators across the country. There wasn’t any other marketing plan or promotional budget for the game. It was simply an open, public invitation to simulate the future, and the game was free to play.

So who showed up to play? They numbered just over nineteen hundred (nearly doubling our initial goal), evenly divided between men and women, and representing all fifty United States and a dozen countries abroad. Most players were in their twenties or thirties, but there were notable clusters of every age group, from teenagers to seniors. And our most active players brought together an astonishingly diverse range of personal concerns and real-life expertise to the game. For example:

Once we’d assembled our forecasting community, it was crucial for us that a significant portion of our players stay engaged with the game for its entire six-week duration. That’s because when it comes to future forecasting, our first ideas are often the most obvious and generalized, and therefore the least useful. It takes a while, even for an experienced forecaster, to drill down to the most interesting specifics and spin off unexpected possibilities. So we adopted several strategies to keep players engaged and actively investigating different aspects of the scenario.

First, each game day we added a new piece of information to the mix: rolling brownouts from oil-dependent power companies; airlines canceling flights and dramatically raising the cost of tickets; empty shelves and food shortages due to inability of deliveries to be made to local stores. In return, players told us about difficulties dealing with unreliable power at home; business travelers getting stranded in other countries when airports unexpectedly shut down; public transportation overcrowding in towns and cities with previously underutilized systems; a disruptive uptick in work-from-home days; the rise of bicycle thefts and a new bicycle black market; impromptu homeschooling as a result of gas shortages in suburban and rural areas; and neighborhood pot-luck meals to deal with the food shortage.

Another important tool for continuing participation was our alternate reality dashboard, which included a map depicting thirty-eight different regions, such as the Boston metro area, the Cincinnati-Columbus metro area, the Great Lakes, the High Plains, and the Atlantic South, each with its own set of “power meters” reflecting the local rise and fall in quality of life, economic strength, and social stability. The power meters fluctuated in direct response to player activity. The more positive forecasts they made, the more cooperative strategies they developed, and the more actively they reduced their own collective daily oil consumption, the more favorable the regional metrics. However, if players chose to imagine a darker turn of events, or if they chose to focus on how increased competition might play out, or if they reported significant difficulties or hardships in adapting to a lower-consumption lifestyle, the metrics would reflect increased chaos, rising misery, or even economic collapse. The meters created a clear feedback loop between players’ stories and the scenario updates.

Of course, the sizable online audience that assembled for World Without Oil was also a huge incentive for players to tell the best stories possible. For every active forecaster, we had an additional twenty-five people watching the game and writing about it. This amplification of their ideas helped make the players’ efforts feel more meaningful.

In the end, the game produced more than a hundred thousand online media artifacts—including a core set of more than two thousand future-forecasting documents from the players and tens of thousands more blog posts and articles reflecting on the game and its findings. One reviewer called it a “huge growing, twisting network of news, strategy, activism, and personal expression.”
¹⁰

At first, the majority of players focused their efforts on imagining how local, regional, and international competition for oil resources would play out in this new environment of increased scarcity. They exercised a dark imagination, anticipating the worst possible outcomes and the most serious threats. They documented gas theft, riots, food shortages, widespread looting, job loss, school closures, and even military actions worldwide. At a more personal level, they told stories of personal stress, anxiety, and families in crisis.

But over the course of thirty-two weeks, the balance shifted. About halfway through the game, having exhausted their dark imagination, players began focusing on potential solutions. They started imagining best-case-scenario outcomes: new ways of cooperating to consume less, a focus on local community and neighborhood infrastructure, less time spent commuting, the geographic reassembly of extended family, and more time spent in pursuit of a new American dream—happiness built around notions of sustainability, simplicity, and stronger social connectivity.

The game started with near-apocalyptic undertones; it ended with explicit, if cautious, optimism. The best-case-scenario outcomes were posed not as probabilities—and certainly not as inevitabilities—but rather as
plausible
possibilities worth working toward.

There was no explicit prompt to start with dark imagination and only later veer toward optimism. But it is, in fact, a very sound forecasting strategy. Researchers have pointed to a particularly American failure to believe that the worst can really happen, because we’re systematically trained by our culture to focus on the positive. It’s a failure that makes us more susceptible to catastrophic events, like Hurricane Katrina or the 2008 housing market collapse, for example. In
Never Saw It Coming
, sociologist Karen Cerulo argues that our collective inability to focus on negative futures is our culture’s biggest blind spot.
¹¹
As one reviewer of Cerulo’s book summed it up: “We are individually, institutionally, and societally hell-bent on wishful thinking.”
¹²
We are very good at positive thinking, but we tend to avoid articulating worst-case scenarios, which unfortunately makes us more vulnerable to them and less resilient if they occur.

World Without Oil gave players a space for nonwishful thinking; that’s what created a sense of urgency to find solutions. That mind-set also lent a sense of gravitas and realism to even the most hopeful stories players told later in the game—stories we later compiled into a guide, “A to Z: A World Beyond Oil.”
¹³
It contains some of the most interesting community solutions players devised and can give you a taste of how massively multifaceted the final collaborative forecast was. Here are a few of my favorite topics from the document:

“The forecasts are of astonishing quality,” one reviewer said of WWO afterward. “The players got to the heart of a complex subject.”
¹⁴
I think “heart” is a key word here, because players were telling stories about the futures they cared about most—the future of their industry, their religion, or their own town and their children.