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You Don’t Need Virtual Worlds When You Can Game Reality

Don’t get me wrong: Virtual worlds can be awesome, and escaping into a good video game is a wonderful thing, and profitable too — just look at the billions of dollars generated by World of Warcraft, Wii/360/PS3 consoles and Zynga Facebook games like Farmville. And the time will come when these games and virtual worlds accomplish important work in the world, as foretold in Jane’s TED talk which I’ve embedded at the bottom of this post. But until then my message to organizations, companies, schools and governments who would like to use elements of ‘fun’ (hat tip to @carlhaggerty, link below) to accomplish outcomes other than pure entertainment is this: you can keep it simple and you don’t need virtual worlds and you don’t need video games: you can game reality.

So what do I mean by gaming reality? Games are powerful. And to be more specific, the elements of games when thoughtfully applied. Game designers have a toolbox of elements or ‘game mechanics’ to engage people — narrative, level-ups, points, data-rich information dashboards, replayability, game clocks, antagonists, social competition, ranks, reputation, achievements, missions, quests, progressive and adaptive levels of difficulty, real-time feedback, scavenger hunts, easter eggs, gear, gold, ‘rares’ and so on — and the elements in this toolbox can be applied to everyday life.

How can they be applied? One way, as my Co-Baxter likes to point out, is overlaying elements of games on top of activities where people are already playing a game or doing an activity that can be gamed, but don’t realize it. Take driving a car or running as examples. Honda uses a game mechanic on their dashboard called Eco-Assist(tm) to nudge people into driving in an environmentally friendly way. The nudge is accomplished thusly:

A sophisticated feedback system uses both ambient color behind the speedometer to indicate efficiency [1] as you drive and an Eco Guide display to provide feedback on your braking and acceleration to help you drive more efficiently [1]. A cumulative Eco Score scoring system provides ongoing support.

Despite the incredibly non-fun, non-game corporate gobbledy gook description, the interface isn’t bad, and has shades of our Garden project.

An exercise-related example is Nike+, which uses challenges, competition and a dashboard to get people to “Set a goal, track your progress and find the motivation to become an even better runner.” Good stuff, this, and I’ll be sure to use it to train if I’m fortunate enough to make the Annapurna Circuit trek before it’s too late.

In these examples driving & running are both acting as game controllers. In our work at NB, we are exploring a bevy of behaviors at school and work that can be turned into game controllers and combined with other game elements to increase engagement. I won’t list them all here (don’t want to give away too much of our thinking), but some mundane but (we believe) powerful examples are keeping a clean email inbox (reduction of corporate email storage costs), timely reporting of billable hours and expenses, regular attention to health and wellness programs and maintenance medications, school attendance, and homework completion.

Let’s shift gears from application of games at school and work and have a look at this amazing example of using games to clean up the environment, courtesy of the Pervasive Games blog: Estonian volunteers of Teeme Ära 2008 cleaned up their whole country in a single day.

Game on indeed.

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Hat Tip for ‘elements of fun’ to Carl Haggarty’s awesome post about increasing citizen engagement with applied gaming in government, World of GovCraft

And thanks dad, for describing this crazy venture as using games to do ‘important work’.

PS I must say that I am flattered that my quote ‘you don’t need virtual worlds when you can game reality’ made it into the EVOKE press release that appeared on the Somali Research & Education Network website. It’s fun to be global, especially when working from my humble abode on an old MacBook in Missouri.

PSS Here’s Jane’s awesome 20-minute TED talk themed ‘Design like you give a damn’, Gaming Can Make a Better World:

© 2010 Nathan Verrill.