Lehrblogger

People love to play games. They’re fun, of course, but they also teach us valuable real-world skills. Chess teaches pattern-matching and strategy, Dungeons & Dragons teaches exploration and collaboration, Olympic sports teach physical coordination, and others such as soccer and Halo teach many types of skills simultaneously. In all cases, games provide safe environments for learning as well as clear criteria for success. It’s better to learn to run fast when you’re on a field because you want to win a game, and not when you’re running from a sabre-toothed tiger because you don’t want to get eaten. Games create artificial environments and structure incentives in ways that make us better equipped to prosper in reality.

As technology allows us to measure things that were previously unknowable, we will design new games that improve our ability to live in this increasingly complex world.

Jesse Schell gave an excellent talk at the 2010 DICE Summit:
(I’ll quote/paraphrase the applicable parts of both talks, so feel free to keep reading and watch them later.)

Schell observes that many of the unexpectedly wildly popular games from the past couple of years (such as Farmville and Guitar Hero) “are all busting through to reality.” He predicts that increasingly inexpensive data sensors will become ubiquitous, and will record where we go as well as the things we buy, read, eat, drink and talk about. This data will enable corporations and governments to reward our behaviors with game-like ‘points’, when really those points are just a way to trick us into paying more attention to advertisements, and we will consent to this because we will be able to redeem those points for discounts and tax incentives. Schell concludes:

The sensors that we’re going to have on us and all around us and everywhere are going to be tracking and watching what we’re doing forever, [...] and you get to thinking about how, wow, is it possible maybe that, since all this stuff is being watched and measured and judged, that maybe, I should change my behavior a little bit and be a little better than I would have been? And so it could be that these systems are just all crass commercialization and it’s terrible, but it’s possible that they’ll inspire us to be better people if the game systems are designed right.

Jane McGonigal recently gave a compelling talk at TED that approaches similar ideas about how gaming can save the world:

McGonigal observes that games, and especially immersive massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, always offer quests that are perfectly tailored so as to be both challenging and possible. She offers four useful descriptive terms for these activities:

1. urgent optimism – gamers tackle obstacles without hesitation, and they expect to succeed
2. social fabric – games require trust and collaboration, and as a result the players develop strong relationships
3. blissful productivity – gamers work hard when playing because they enjoy it
4. epic meaning – game narratives make it easy for the players to see the big picture

These are part of a larger argument that gamers can save the world if they play games that are designed to have positive effects outside of the magic circles of the games. McGonigal cites an example from Herodotus in which the ancient Lydians survived a famine by distracting themselves from hunger with dice games, and she makes an argument that we can similarly use contemporary games to solve contemporary problems. That example breaks down, however, because we don’t need games that distract us from our problems like the Lydians did – we need games that enable/encourage us to face our problems and overcome them.

She goes on to describe an example of a game she worked on at the Institute For The Future called World Without Oil, which was “an online game in which you tried to survive an oil shortage.” The game provides online content to the players that presents a fictional oil crisis as real, and the game is intended to get people thinking about that problem and how they might solve it. But just as the first example is missing the direct applicability of the game to the real world, this one is missing the application of the data from the real world to the game, and both directions of influence are important.

When the ubiquitous sensors described by Schell are combined with McGonigal’s vision of games designed explicitly to save the world, the content surrounding the games (that presents real-world crises as ‘quests’) will no longer be fictional, and can instead be based on real-world data. The games will provide frameworks for understanding and leveraging all of this new data about the world. They will motivate us to act for the greater good through both monetary rewards such as tax incentives and social rewards that play to our instinctive desire for the esteem of our peers. Some games might make the model of the real world immersive, so that we as players can ignore distractions and concentrate; others might be similar to the digital tree that grows inside the dashboard of the Ford Fusion Hybrid, and will provide subtle yet constant feedback for our behavior.

We live in a world in which ‘all models are wrong but some models are useful,’ and as that world becomes increasingly interconnected and complex, the games will provide us with the data collection tools and data processing shortcuts that enable us to act intelligently. In this future we will design game-like incentives that teach and encourage us to make wise long-term decisions, so that we can outrun that tiger and save this planet. Which is important, because we only get one shot at each.

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Note: the remainder of this post contains spoilers of the novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.

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In the book, Card’s characters play war games that they do not know are actually quite real. The protagonist Ender, who is just a child, excels at the games because he thinks they are games. He uses ruthless tactics to win, unaware that he is actually committing those atrocities in the real world. Ender, unburdened by the extreme pressure resulting from real-world consequences, believes that he is merely playing a game and is thus able to save humanity from an alien threat.

Of course the games of our future need not be so ethically questionable, but the point – that games can simplify the world to enhance our focus and remove our hesitation if we are less sure that they are actually real – is still important.

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Sup dawg, we heard you like games, so we wrapped a game around your game so you can save the world while you save the world.

Paul Adams, a member of the user experience team at Google and the user research lead for social, recently gave the below presentation at the Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference:

It’s worth reading through the entire thing, but there were a few groups of slides I found particularly clear/insightful/interesting (you can jump to a particular slide from the bottom toolbar) –

• social contexts: 15, 58, 71, 83, 181, 212
• evolution of the web: 19
• status updates: 145, 179
• memory and information: 150, 152
• influence: 158, 159, 171, 172
• privacy: 193, 198, 199, 204

There are lots of other useful ideas in there, but there’s one in particular on which I want to expand. Adams discusses the categorization of our relationships into strong ties and weak ties, saying that, “Strong ties are the people you care about most. Your best friends. Your family. People often refer to strong ties as their “circle of trust.’ [...] Weak ties are people you know, but don’t care much about. Your friends’ friends. Some people you met recently. Typically, we communicate with weak ties infrequently.” Adams then goes on to define a new type of relationship online, the temporary tie, for “people that you have no recognized relationship with, but that you temporarily interact with,” such as strangers in public online social spaces.

He also discusses the cognitive limitations of the human brain that make us unable to stay up-to-date with more than 150 weak ties at a time (see Dunbar’s number). Given that we now have social tools for keeping track of many more people than that – Facebook ‘friendship’ seems to be for “everyone I know and don’t actively dislike”* – I wanted one additional term to help me think about the portion of my 859 Facebook friends with whom I wasn’t keeping up at all and had some sort of tie that was weaker than a weak tie.

Latent ties seems to work nicely here, for those people with whom I’m not at all in touch but also have not forgotten, and who could potentially become a bigger part of my life and replace one of my weak ties. This is a new type of tie – it used to be possible to have no way to contact someone I once knew but hadn’t heard from in years, and these new tools will prevent this from ever again being the case. I think it’s especially important to design for these latent relationships on Facebook/other websites where there are social stigmas around friending and unfriending that make it difficult for the user to keep her ‘friends list’ as an accurate representation of only her current strong and/or weak ties.

* Who was it that first said this? Please let me know if you have a source for that quote.

Several weeks ago I presented my project Where Do You Go at the NY Quantified Self Meetup Group‘s seventh Show & Tell at ITP. Evan Creem recorded and edited together videos of the presentations, and mine is below:

If you’re interested in self-quantification in general, The NYT Magazine recently ran a good article titled The Data-Driven Life. About a month ago I received my Fitbit, one of the devices mentioned in the article, and you can see the public data I have collected so far here. I’ve been using it primarily to get a sense of how much I actually walk and how little I actually sleep – two things about which it’s slightly too tedious to make daily notes but which still might be interesting to examine in the aggregate.

Lawrence Lessig has a book titled Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace that I have not yet read, but my friend Jorge Ortiz was telling me about it, and I think his explanation was worth sharing:

He argues that there are several kinds of “code” that can shape human behavior. So, for any given problem (e.g., speeding in a residential neighborhood) there are several codes at work trying to prevent you from committing it. There’s a moral/social/ethical code (e.g., you diswant the disapproval of your neighbors who have small children), there’s legal code (e.g., if you speed you’ll get a ticket, maybe lose your license, go to jail), and there’s physical/reality code (e.g., a speed bump that physically prevents you from going too fast). The premise of the book is that there’s increasingly a new kind of code, computer code, that is stronger than laws and social norms, almost on par with reality (e.g., if your car has software that prevents it from going faster than a certain speed, perhaps tied to GPS to track what street you’re on and what the speed limit is).

I’ve now read/heard several pieces arguing for and against the catastrophic affects of the Internet on our brains and our ability to think well:

• Is Google Making Us Stupid? from The Atlantic, by Nicholas Carr
• Your Brain on Computers – Attached to Technology and Paying a Price from the New York Times, by Matt Richtel
• Wired Life and Your Brain from the On Point radio show, with Nicholas Carr and Nick Bilton
• Does the Internet Make You Dumber? from the Wall Street Journal, by Nicholas Carr
• Does the Internet Make You Smarter? from the Wall Street Journal, by Clay Shirky

The arguments range widely in their responsible citation of academic research, reliance on anecdotal evidence, and general quality. While I agree more with Shirky and Bilton than with Carr and Richtel, I don’t see that any of them have examined the issue from the perspective that I find most interesting: It should not be a question of whether or not the Internet is making us better or worse at thinking. Instead, it should be a question of whether we are better at thinking now that we have the Internet than we were without it.

We, as humans, are unique in that we modify the things in our environment into tools that extend our natural abilities. Consider, for example, our ability to run. Running is useful for both catching trains when we’re late and for escaping sabre-toothed tigers when we don’t want to be eaten. Thousands of years ago, when we were more likely to be worried about the latter situation, we had thick calluses on our feet to protect them from the uneven and unpredictable surfaces on which we might have to run. Now, we have shoes that we have engineered to serve that same purpose and to provide additional support, making us even faster than before. If we were to be caught by a tiger without our shoes then we woud not be able to run as well as our ancestors could have, since the calluses and muscles in our feet have adapted themselves to the shoes and are no longer optimized for running barefoot. But that is practically never the case – we always have our shoes, so they always augment our natural abilities, and we’re always better runners than we could otherwise be.

The Internet does for our thinking what shoes do for our running. My thought processes have developed in a world in which I am always connected to the vast resources of the Internet for both seeking information and communicating with others. The Internet exposes us constantly to additional pieces of information (in-line hyperlinks, emails, tweets, etc.), and while Carr sees these things as distractions that make it difficult to focus on the task at hand, I experience them as sources to be synthesized into the broader thought to which I am devoting my energy. The multiplicity of inputs enhances the output.

Of course not all of these ‘distractions’ are relevant to the task at hand, and we must make intelligent decisions about what it is to which we are connected at any given time. It would be silly to try to read a book while at a noisy bar with friends, and it would be foolish to blame the book if the reader found it difficult to focus in that physical environment. Similarly, it would be silly to try to read a PDF at my computer while receiving constant notifications of new tweets, and it is foolish to blame the Internet if the reader found it difficult to focus in that digital environment. When Carr cites the study in which students using Internet-connected laptops during a lecture retained less information than those who did not, he should be blaming the students for not paying attention, not the Internet for making distractions available.

There are many other specific statements made in the articles that I’d like to discuss, but I don’t have time to go through them point by point. For now, I’d like to draw attention to the illustration by Charis Tsevis in the last article linked above, in which the connected devices are plugged directly into the Internet-augmented thinker.

As we become increasingly connected to the Internet through an ever widening array of devices, our ways of thinking will adjust further to take advantage of the increased access to the Internet’s vast resources. Those that feel that the Internet is making them dumber should re-examine the ways in which they are using it. Tools must be used properly in order to be effective – running shoes work best when the laces are tied – and I feel that I’ve found ways to use the Internet that make me smarter than it was possible for me to be before.