Jane McGonigal Keynote at SXSW

Jane McGonigal Keynote.

The Lost Ring Video played. A call for help. Being going a week – are you in?
going to talk yo you about alternate realities. instead of trying to make games more realistic, trying to make the real world more like games. we need more alt. realities and the real world needs to be changed to function more like a game. it will start on a game designers perspective on the future of happiness. I work at the Institute for the Future. we look at interesting things that are happening today and imagine what the future will be like.
Happiness – the last year has seen a lot of growth and attention to happiness. there has been the launch of a new field – positive psychology, to look at brains working well, the good stuff. what makes us happy, what is the best case scenario. good books, one thing that really interests me, is the parallel between what makes us happy and the core tenants of game design.
Last month, book Against Happiness came out. this is not about warm fuzzy feelings, it is about the trying to capture the best experience possible and using research to define it, how to make lives more worth living
there are many metrics for measuring, to implement and insert happiness making things in your life.
what i wanted to ask if you think you re in the happiness business.? I don’t think we are quite yet imaging product as happiness, but you will be in the business very soon.
It’s coming faster than we think.
Predictions – quality of life becomes a primary metric,. Positive psychology will be used to design tools; communities will form around different visions of a real life worth living. Value will be defined as a measurable increase in real happiness or well being – the new capital.
Happiness is the new capital. you need to be explicitly generating some positive well being for them. happiness does not mean what it used to..the internets has changed. Happiness is not a warm puppy.
researching for a while..so will distill the 4 key principles
- satisfying work to do
- the experience of being good at something
- time spent with people we like
- the chance to be a part of something bigger.
nothing in the world gives you these things better than games,
Multi-player games are the ultimate happiness engine. as the rest of the community starts to catch up, then more of us will be in the business of this happiness venture/
Signals for things changing? Some graffiti in my town…’I’m not good at life’. for a lot of gamers their experience of life is that it is not sufficiently designed for them to be good at. we can be really good at them, at games. In real life there is not the collaboration as there is in the games. you get visualisation in WOW of all the data, help that you use ingame. you don’t gain speaking points for presentations in life. you gain points in game.
- So you have better instructions in games.
- Games are giving us better feedback all the time. we know how we are doing.
- games have better community. shared rules and story give you better time.
there is a global mass exodus..started in asia…towards virtual worlds and game worlds. I’m not critical of the mass exodus as I understand it. it is a rational decision to spend time and money in virtual worlds as those environments are set up better for them to succeed. there is a better chance for them to learn. An MMO players spends 16 hours a week and that is average.
we could make better and better online and console games to take what we have learnt from there and do something in the real world. for many people, quality of life, virtuality is beating reality.
us here are lucky compared to many who play the games we do, real life is not as exciting as virtuality, it does not make them as happy. if I was as good at life as I was in my games, what would it be like.
I think games are awesome..it is like we invented the writen word and we only write books. why are the games not in the real world, to use the games to navigate, meet people…
ChoreWars -experience points for housework. you get to claim XP for chores.
zyked – in alpha. exercise is the target, give points and skills for working out
Seriosity – for games at work. an overlay of virtual currency for work. you have to pay people to do things at work. you can set priorities. it creates flows of virtual currency, you can watch it. you can see who is important, connections.
Citizen Logistics – missions to help other people. knows where you are because of GPS etc, people can tell you what to do. mobile co-ordinations.,
Good news as some people are trying to make the world into a game.
What do they mean? to imagine the future it is important to look backwards at least twice as far as you are looking forward. the best analogy is soap, in 1931. ‘Soap kills germs’ was a headline. games are like soap..we should install them in every building, in our pockets we are killing boredome….games Kill boredom, alienation, anxiety, depression,
AR designers are trying to embed these happiness engines in everyday life.
So, AR comes from Science fiction. the community names it. it is not an alternative, it is an alternate way of experiences this reality, these are immersice experiences in this reality. one of the earliest OED entries for AR is 1978 – another way of experiencing existence. they sit and exist in your real world, the game is there at the street corner.
World Without Oil – won an award at SXSW. we told the players that we had run out of oil and they players had to run real life as this was true. we would give you updates in your area about the gas and process and impact on food etc. levels of chaos, misery etc. you would know what the fictional parameters and you would document what it was like. we had a soldier in iraq on LJ about what it would be like it would be like without oil. people changed trucks, people were interviewing non players. it’s all archived. it lasted 32 weeks, it got really dark at times, then the players got it together and kind of fixed things. there;s a lot of info all still there. worldwithoutoil.org. still have people doing it.
so how do args amplify happiness., they deliver 10 superhero capabilities to people who play. 10 kinds of happiness that match up with research.
- mobbability. the ability to collaborate and co-ord really large scales.
- cooperation radar – the ability to detect who would make the best collaborator for any given mission.
- Ping quotient measures ability to reach out and respond to other people in your networks
- influency – the ability to adapt your persuasive strategies to individuals and media and environments….understand communities require a different motivation.
- multi-capitalism – understand that people are trading in different capital systems. so how do you get the different capitals trading?
- Protovation – big companies get scared of this. rapid innovation, that failing is fun and that is when you are learning the most. fail rapidly and often…
- Open Authorship – naturally to blogger age. comfort with giving content away and knowing it will be changed. it’s a design skill about creating something that won’t be broke by others changes
- signal/noise management. he ability to handle noise and know which clue is relevant.
- longbrading – the ability to think in much bigger systems – the zoom out.
- emergensight – this is the trickiest. the idea that you can spot patterns as they come up, comfortable with messy complexity.
- lost ring game is in 8 languages…a lot of content, players will create more. it gets really big, so how do you spot opportunitiy etc.
they amplify our tendency towards the optimal human experience doing lots of research.
so how can interactive systems amplify happiness?
so where to next?
- twitter is a good place to start, a natural interface.
- the nike ipod. I love it. want to make a game.
- planes – comms sytems. would love to play a game on a plane.
- dogs..need a game to fix it….i feel guilty for playing. how about an MMO when you avatar is your dog. you have to get them all working together.
- a friedd said – ‘my car is a video game’..a Prius using games
- trackstick – records GPS every 5 secs and follows you.
- neuro detector, hook up to games. an idea for a game about people I don’t like and using my brain to destroy them
the Lost Ring is for the Olympics. we are going to give people the opp to have an AR at the Olympics. a game that no one has played for 2000 years. thelostring.com. learn a lost sport and be an olympic champions.
The important stuff –
- I believe that most of us will be in the happiness business, study it and be ready for when the public demand it
- game designers have a huge head start. we have been trying to optimise human experience.
- AR signal the desire, need and opp for all of us who design interactive systems to redesign reality for real quality of life.
- jane at avantgame com

Questions. DOD/war…using gaming language. do games help prevent wars
- i would want to differentiate the types. games make soldiers easier to fight. that’s not the best direction for blurring the line between reality and games. it is extremely powerful ..do we design games to draw people to benevolent action., i think game devs should be trying to win noble prize by 2032. if we are playing games together than much harder to hate each other.
to what extent that gaming etc are substitutes to things that are missing..
- for some things..blogs can work better than conversation for many people. games work better for some people. not everyone who plays games has a life that needs fixing. I do worry that some gamers do replace, and it is something we should talk about. we need a real conversation
interested in the idea we have more forms but a lot less social. ARGS narrative story and not necessarily with people.
- a lot of the press for args are online…but they have a real history of real life stuff. ie SF0. all mission in real world. a lot of stuff going that way
args..successful ones are productions, narratively intense. they are temp and they go away how do you…when do have continues things
- business model needs to get fixed. it was seen as marketing and budgets fixed. tried as pay to play, lots of people trying to figure out new models. it has to happen, i want my nike+ to run for my life
I’m interested in the whole business model things….Macdonalds is one of the sponsor for lost ring..how do you reconcile that with the game considering the relationship with mcdonalds
- we don’t actually have a sponsor, we had a group of people who wanted to get involved..IOC, McD, AKQA. it’s a different model, it’s like P&G when they invented soap. I’m thrilled to be working with orgs that are big enough to get the game in may places. it’s going to be tricky to walk the line…where do you get the money,.it is moving more to TV…it is the ecosystem…
i played the game to reclassify books.and when i go to bookshops I do the same things. is it changing how people look at the world (ministry of reshelving)
- its one of the most powerful things…we had 40k people doing this. I love Tombstone Holdem, we designed games that allowed people to play serious with tombstones…
SF0 does a geat job of balancing creativity and real life..how do you script vs openness
- it’s a combination. if you are trying to solve world problems, you need a bit of a harder top down approach at the beginning
- The x2 project, with scientists, playing games about future of research and science. we use real world science scenarios. our players inhabit the AR. we guide it with a story, we are interested in a particular reality. do research first, get people to solve the problem, then let them figure out of you are right or wrong.
The Game – pick up artists…evolutionary pyschology…people are gaming each other in life…
- it is important to define the game you are playing. any game is collaborative as you are playing the same rules. in real life is they do not know there is a game playing then a problem. AR announce them selves as a game, it is better. rules are explicit.