What drives gamers?

Jane McGonigal,a game designer and researcher at the Institute for the Future,sums up the new argument in her coming book,Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. It’s a manifesto urging designers to aim high—why not a Nobel Prize?—with games that solve scientific problems and promote happiness in daily life.

One game-design consultant,Nicole Lazzaro,the president of XEODesign,recorded the facial expressions of players and interviewed them along with their friends and relatives to identify the crucial ingredients of a good game. One ingredient is “hard fun”,which Lazzaro defines as overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a goal. That’s the same appeal of old-fashioned puzzles,but the video games provide something new: instantaneous feedback and continual encouragement,both from the computer and from the other players. Players get steady rewards for little achievements as they amass points and progress to higher levels,with the challenges becoming harder as their skill increases.

Even though they fail over and over,they remain motivated to keep going until they succeed and experience what game researchers call “fiero”. The term (Italian for “proud”) describes the feeling that makes a gamer lift both arms above the head in triumph. It’s not a gesture you see often in classrooms or offices or on the street,but game designers like McGonigal are working on that. She has designed Cruel 2 B Kind,a game in which players advance by being nice to strangers in public places,and which has been played in more than 50 cities on four continents. She and her husband are among the avid players of Chorewars,an online game in which they earn real rewards (like the privilege of choosing the music for their next car ride) by doing chores at their apartment in San Francisco. Cleaning the bathroom is worth so many points that she has sometimes hid the toilet brush to prevent him from getting too far ahead.

Other people,working through a “microvolunteering” website called Sparked,are using a smartphone app to undertake quests for nonprofit groups like First Aid Corps,which is compiling a worldwide map of the locations of defibrillators available for cardiac emergencies. Instead of looking for magical healing potions in virtual worlds,these players scour buildings for defibrillators that haven’t been catalogued yet. If that defibrillator later helps save someone’s life,the player’s online glory increases (along with the sense of fiero).

To properly apply gaming techniques to school and work and other institutions,there are certain core principles to keep in mind,says Tom Chatfield,a British journalist and the author of Fun Inc.: Why Gaming Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century. These include using an “experience system” (like an avatar or a profile that levels up),creating a variety of short-term and long-term goals,and rewarding effort continually while also providing occasional unexpected rewards.

Some schools are starting to borrow gamers’ system of quests and rewards,and the principles could be applied to lots of enterprises,especially colossal collaborations online. By one estimate,McGonigal notes,creating Wikipedia took eight years and 100 million hours of work,but that’s only half the number of hours spent in a single week by people playing World of Warcraft.

Castronova envisions creating financial games to study how bubbles and panics occur,or virtual cities to see how they respond to disasters. “One reason that policy keeps screwing up—think Katrina—is because it never gets tested,” he says. “In the real world,you can’t create five versions of New Orleans and throw five hurricanes at them to test different logistics. But you can do that in virtual environments.”