McGonigal, ‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play
Dicussion leader (positive discussant): Anamary
Summary:
This paper discusses one instance of how an immersive game can help many people take collective action, and provides an analysis of immersive games and how such games can help map strategies in-game to challenges in the real world.
The first portion of the paper discusses Cloudmaker, an online gaming forum for a fictional puzzle game “The Beast”. The game is called an “immersive game” where media like movie trailers, dropped digital clues, like unusual credit attribution, to a rich complex puzzle game with no clear goal or reward. It has 3 core mysteries, 150 characters, with digital and in-person clues, like randomly broadcasting clues to players’ TVs.
Gamers play timed puzzles with a massive amount of clues, and solving the clues may deal with anything from programming to the arts, lending itself to be a crowdsourced endeavor. Puzzles meant to be solved in three months were solved in a day. Players were playing all the time, mixing in game elements into the real world, declaring itself that “this is not a game” (TING).
What is curious about the community’s 7132 members are their initial reactions to the 9/11 attacks. At the day’s end, the members felt empowered to help solve the mysteries surrounding the attacks, by posting threads like “The Darkest Puzzle” asking for the crowd to help solve the attacks. Many gamers in the crowd mentioned that the virtual game helped shaped their perception of the attacks, and have gained skills to solve the attacks. But the moderators noted that it’s dangerous to connect real-life to a game, and stopped the initial activity.
This example brings about two key questions to the piece:
- What about “the Beast” helped encourage gamers to be confident that they could solve the attacks?
- What qualities are in the Cloudmaker forum that helped gamers forget the reality of the situation and to debate between whether the game is virtual or real?
The second part answers these two questions. One key aspect about these TING games is that gamers are unsure what parts of real-life are a game and what are not, and this effect was so prevalent that so much so that gamers’ relationships, careers, and social lives were hampered by The Beast. Another similar TING game, Push, had a final solution, but many gamers were not satisfied and thought it had continued. Acting is believing, and these players kept on acting and believing in a game.
These gamers also developed strategies on these detective TING games that may be applied to crime-solving as well, such as researching sources, researching the sources themselves, do analysis and see if secondary information connects to hypotheses. Additionally, gamers felt like they were a part of a collective intelligence, mentioning a sense of belonging into a giant think tank.
These key features (immersion, unsure whether in or out of the game, trained on related strategies, and sense of belonging) helped motivate and move a crowd towards problem-solving, which has several optimistic and negative consequences to them. This paper shows the promise of crowds in problem-solving using game design, and how to design games to motivate and retain these crowds to continue puzzle solving for free.
Reflection:
McGonigal’s core message that games can bring crowds together to help solve real-world problems, seems incredibly influential. This paper was published in 2003, and to my memory, games back then were a child’s toy that maybe trained kids to be violent. In the public’s mind, games are just a useless escapist hobby. But, this paper’s core message can be seen in crowdsourcing endeavors that promote public good and awareness, like FoldIt, various other examples seen in class, and in other fields that are more focused on problem-solving complex problems, like visual analytics.
Features that helped motivate TING games may be applied to other crowdsourcing endeavors as well. I remember one of our oldest papers, “Online Economies”, discussed how a sense of belonging helped nurture these communities, and this feature can be seen in Cloudmaker. It would be very interesting to see the more immersive features of TING games applied to crowdsourcing.
The gamers in Cloudmaker did not solve the crime, and there are many good reasons for this (protection of the gamers in an unprotected site, blurring of fiction and reality, false accusations afoot). This reminds me back to the Boston Bomber Reddit incident, where redditors made their own subreddit and collectively tried to solve the identity of the bombers. I hope the anti-paper presenter talks about this, but even the author can’t help but discuss the negatives associative with such a crowd solving crimes.
Initially, the subreddit was praised for publicizing key evidence, but ended up accusing and defaming many innocent people. I wonder if there are ways for law enforcement to collalborate better with crowds (which I’m sure is currently researched now!). The capabilities of these crowds is still fascinating, that a huge collective of puzzles meant to span 3 months, were all solved in a single day.
I loved the philosophical and psychological aspects employed in these games to summon crowds. The Sunken Cost fallacy is one where you keep on sinking money into a failed project, because you did it before. Similarly, these players were obsessed with the game for so long, that they still see everything as a game.
Could we map-reduce this kind of larger massive puzzle? Maybe some parts of these crimes could be broken down into smaller ones, but I imagine many aspects are interrelated.
I also wonder if augmented or pervasive games may better help gamers distinguish between reality and games and use their power for good. What if foldIt were combined with an always-on game? Much of the games discussed in the paper were geared towards detective-style games, but I wonder if this style could be employed to solve historical puzzles, public awareness challenges or even puzzles by the crowd, like “how much of the $X I paid in taxes went to what of my government?”.
Questions:
- In the cases of both 9/11 and the Boston bomber, the police usually are selective in what evidence is publicized since some evidence is uncertain. What are your thoughts on designing systems that help crowds collaborate better with law enforcement to harness the crowd’s problem-solving skills, in ways to help protect the crowd and prevent false accusations?
- Are there strategies to breaking down this problem solving task into smaller ones that crowds can do? Or does the entire crowd need to see the whole task at once to tackle it effectively, like the beast?
- Are there real-life puzzles that are important, but are not as life-threatening like crimes? I’m casting puzzles broadly in these questions. There are many complex challenges and issues that have multiple solutions, like wicked problems, that may be framed like a huge puzzle.
- How can these crowd-based games help or not help solve such puzzles?
- Can these puzzles be both given to the crowds and solved by the crowds? That is, can the crowd both supply and solve the puzzle?
