Serious gaming demands serious attention

Long-time readers may remember that I wrote last year about the potential of Harvey Smith’s “Peace Bomb” concept (he dreamed it up for the annual Serious Games Summit), as a way to draw the general public into preparations for terrorist attacks.

Now old pal George Mokray calls my attention to this Salon piece about serious games such as World Without Oil, that make my optimism about the potential of massively multiplayer online games to really play a substantive role in creating public interest in anti-terror preparation. More important, as the World Without War example shows, the gaming may lead to innovative thinking as well.

Sweet!

The article mentions that the game’s creator, Jane McGonigle, is “fascinated by the way games can harness the collective intelligence of their players.” (my emphasis). Does that sound like swarm intelligence, or what???

It gets better:

“‘A dramatic decrease in oil availability is not at all far-fetched,’ McGonigal says. ‘We thought we could play our way to a set of ideas about how to manage that crisis, if it were to happen.’

“The game was McGonigal’s most blatant attempt yet to test her theory that immersive entertainment has a unique capacity to change the way people think, and feel, and live. She’s calling it a success. Players didn’t just create a ‘citizen’s manual’ for how to respond to such a crisis, McGonigal says, they also changed their behavior in the real world. About 1,800 players contributed their stories, and those who used videos or photos had to have something tangible to record. Gamers planted real apple trees in their backyards, and converted their real cars to run on used cooking oil. Beyond the active participants, McGonigal estimates that more than 45,000 people followed the game. It’s harder to guess how the game affected those observers, but McGonigal points to teachers who followed along with their classes as an indication that some learning was taking place. ‘So, yay!’ she concludes.”

People from more than 40 countries participated, and they created “blogs, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and podcasts that were all collected on the game’s Web site” — just the kind of diverse use of networked communication devices and apps that I’ve visualized for the networked homeland security approach.

You may remember that entrants into the Serious Games competition won by Smith had to, in some way (no matter how oblique!) mention the Nobel Peace Prize, so it’s interesting about what McGonigle says about her gaming vision:

“‘Any time I consider a new project, I ask myself, is this pushing the state of gaming toward Nobel Prizes? If it’s not, then it’s not doing anything important enough to spend my time.’ To explain why she thinks games can get someone that plane ticket to Stockholm, McGonigal likes to quote game designer Sean Stewart, whose company created the first ARG in 2001. ‘He said that these games create ‘a collective intelligence that is unparalleled in entertainment history,’ she says. ‘Because it is unparalleled, I believe it would be a real crime to use it only for entertainment.’”

McGonigle’s work is gaining serious attention in academe:

Henry Jenkins, the head of MIT’s comparative media studies program and an expert on gaming culture, describes ARGs as ‘the perfect vehicle’ for collective intelligence. ‘The core of collective intelligence is a world where no one knows everything, but everyone knows something,’ he explains. ‘And any bit of information for an individual is available to the group at a moment’s notice.’ Tech-savvy ARG gamers set up wikis and message boards to coordinate their information and to pose questions to the players, who are often scattered over the globe.

Jenkins, who is an admirer of McGonigal’s work, believes that ARGs are the leading edge of our increasingly networked, collaborative society. ‘Through our games, we’re learning skills that we’ll put to more serious use later on,’ (my emphasis) he says. Jenkins’ colleague at MIT, Thomas Malone of the Center for Collective Intelligence, rhapsodized about those potential uses in a speech on the center’s opening day last October. Malone predicted ‘better ways to organize businesses, to conduct science, to run governments, and — perhaps most importantly — to help solve the problems we face as society and as a planet.’”

Gee. I’d been fantasizing about interesting Medfield’s Contribution to Massively Multiplayer gaming (because of his twin interests in MMOs and all-things military) in producing a hot game on homeland security, but now Jane McGonigle and all her swarm intelligence talk has got me thinking that she might be the one to pull this off (players who are obnoxious might be sentenced to read the Ready.gov site….).

After a while, the scare tactics about homeland security are beginning to wear a little thin, and I don’t see anything wrong with an approach that’s a) fun b) evokes swarm intelligence, and c) might just lead to some valuable insights that could be applied to dealing with terrorism in the non-virtual world…

Technorati tags: