Geek Gestalt

Jane McGonigal, Tuesday's keynote speaker at South by Southwest Interactive, and one of the world's leading designers of alternate-reality games, dances on stage, doing the Soulja dance at the end of her presentation.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

AUSTIN, Texas--Game designers may be the professionals best suited to help humans find happiness in the future.

That was the thesis of world-famous alternate-reality game designer Jane McGonigal's Tuesday keynote address at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) here.

McGonigal began her talk by looking at the idea that happiness is something scientists and sociologists are increasingly studying and that embedded in the mechanics of games may be the very things that people need to be happy. And quality of life will likely be a key consideration of many interactive media projects.

An artist's rendering of SXSWi Tuesday keynote speaker Jane McGonigal and the points she made in her presentation.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

"Because positive psychology will be a principal, explicit influence on interactive design and development," McGonigal said, "we're also going to see communities forming around different visions of a real life worth living....We will see communities forming around different brands, platforms and visions....Value will be defined as a measurable increase in real happiness or well being. Well being becomes the new capital, something we can trade, and which might increase or decrease."

So designers might benefit from heeding and incorporating into their games what McGonigal defined as four distinct things that make humans happy: satisfying work, being good at something, spending time with people we like, and having the chance to be a part of something, she said.

"What just completely blew my mind was the realization that nothing in the whole world gives these four things in higher quality than games," McGonigal said. "Games give you satisfying work, (players can become very good at them), multiplayer games give you time spent with people you like and games give you the chance to be part of something bigger with their mythologies...I'm pretty sure that most of us in the game development business are in the happiness business."

A second artist's rendering of McGonigal's keynote address.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

A big part of the picture, McGonigal added later, is that games have the power to kill boredom, alienation, anxiety and depression.

"Games have a value as an aid to quality of life even greater and more direct than has hitherto been suspected," a slide from her presentation read. "The ordinary routine of playing a game is fatal to conditions of depression, existential angst, human suffering and other serious afflictions of real life."

One part of her keynote that many attendees were particularly taken with was a description of "ten strengths mapping ARGs against what scientists say is needed for happiness."

McGonigal proposed ten strengths that game designers would do well to understand when trying to build games that help people seek happiness.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

These were: "mobbability," an ability to collaborate and coordinate on really large scales; cooperation radar, the ability to decide who would be an ideal collaborator for any given mission; the ping quotient, which measures your ability to reach other people in a network, and your ability to respond to people reaching out to you; "influency," the ability to adapt someone's persuasive strategies to specific and distinct individuals since each community requires different motivations; "multicapitalism," an understanding that people are increasingly trading in new currency systems; "protovation," an understanding that failure can be fun because that's when people learn the most; open authorship, a comfort with giving content away and knowing it will be changed; signal/noise management, an element of games that is able to handle large amounts of "noise," and to be able to detect right away which data are relevant in the moment; "longbroading," an ability to think in much bigger systems, bigger cycles and bigger scales; and "emergensight," being able to spot patterns as they emerge and take advantage of them.

McGonigal suggested that the next thing for game designers to do would be to look for systems that incorporate some of these ethos and others that allow users to seek happiness.

Based on her talk, McGonigal proposed several takeaways.

McGonigal said happiness science has been incorporated into several recent books, and that game designers could help themselves prepare for games geared at improving quality of life by reading these books and other such science.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

First, she said, most game designers will "soon be in the happiness business." She suggested that such designers spend some time reading many of the recent books on happiness science in order to prepare for when that science is in demand in the game industry.

Second, she said game designers have a head start on providing additional quality of life because that pursuit is built into virtual worlds and simulated environments.

And finally, she said alternate realities signal the desire, need and opportunity for people to redesign reality for a real quality of life.

"It's our responsibility to hear that signal," she said, "to say you're right and that life doesn't work as well as games. It's our job to fix" that.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

'The Lost Ring' is a new alternate-reality game that is tied to the Olympic Games and which tasks players with discovering a 2,000-year-old sport lost to history.

(Credit: The Lost Ring)

AUSTIN, Texas--To players of alternate reality games (ARGs) like I Love Bees, Tombstone Hold 'em, A World without Oil and others, Jane McGonigal is a household name.

If the people at the International Olympics Committee, McDonald's, and worldwide brand experience firm AKQA have anything to say about it, the list of people who know McGonigal and her work will soon expand geometrically.

Jane McGonigal giving the keynote address on Tuesday at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

That's because she's the lead designer on The Lost Ring, a new ARG that launched earlier this month that is tied to this summer's Beijing Olympics and which McDonald's, AKQA and the IOC are partnering on with McGonigal.

The game is built around the fictional concept that more than 2,000 years ago an Olympic sport was lost to history and that now, five Olympic-caliber athletes have turned up in corn fields around the world, amnesiac but sure they've been tasked with some great mission.

Players of The Lost Ring, then, are similarly tasked with helping these five people figure out their identities, and in the process, rediscovering this lost Olympic sport.

On Tuesday, McGonigal was the keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here and talked at length about the philosophies she uses to guide her game design approach, as well as to talk a little bit about her new project.

Afterward, she sat down with CNET News.com for an interview about The Lost Ring, in which she talked about how she hopes the game will change the perspective of people around the world and how she expects this game to be by far the largest game of its kind in history.

Because the game is still in its infancy, however, she didn't want to talk much about the process of its creation or about working with corporate partners like the IOC and McDonald's. Instead, she preferred to focus on how the game is innovative and what players can expect to learn from it.

Q: Talk about how The Lost Ring came about.

Jane McGonigal: I should say, we're not talking a lot about the process, because we want to keep the focus on the game itself, we don't want to get meta on process yet. I definitely want people to be thinking about the experience, and to have the experience before we get deconstructive.

Where the idea for the game come from?

McGonigal: AKQA has developed ARGs in past, on smaller scale. They really believed that this was the new genre to invest in, and to take seriously as a creative form. So they decided to talk to the different partner organizations to see who else might get this idea. McDonald's and the IOC said, 'We don't understand it, but we love it. It sounds risky but if anything is going to be the next big art form, this is it.' That all happened before I got involved. They decided to make the biggest most global ARG ever. It made sense for these gigantic global organizations, this idea to bring the world together through play...and with collective intelligence. And the Olympics brings the world together, but through sports.

For me, I thought, 'Oh, my God, this is the greatest opportunity ever,' because I knew working with those two organizations meant it would be huge, and that they were committed to making it truly global. That this would be the chance to make ARGs what they want to be. We talk about making them global, but so far, they're not really. But you have the Olympics everywhere, and McDonald's is everywhere. I just knew this would be the one that would just blow up the scale and possibility of ARGs. And obviously, with the Olympics theme, you couldn't ask for a richer, more historical theme to design for.

When did it begin?

McGonigal: I started working on it last June, right at end of World Without Oil. I was very happy that AKQA, McDonald's, and the IOC approached me on the heels of World Without Oil because it meant they wanted to make a project for good.

How much control did you have?

McGonigal: It was an intense collaboration process. They didn't have design ideas, but every time we had an idea, we were like, 'Is this cool?' And, 'Is this exciting?' But to some extent, one of my colleagues at AKQA said there's only one person who knows where this is all going. I have a lot of this stored in my brain exclusively. And I think McDonald's and the IOC feel like they're going on a ride. We can't wait to find out what happens.

You've told me that you think this game will be orders of magnitude bigger than any previous ARG. How so?

McGonigal: We're taking everything we've seen work in ARGs and amplifying it so more people can have the experience. We've seen ARGs in five cities, but now it's going to be on five continents. We've seen puzzles in other languages, but this whole game is in eight languages. Every piece of content will be translated into eight languages. And localization has been a huge part of the development process, and it's very challenging, but so rewarding. The first week of game, a whole faction of players from Argentina who have never been participants in ARG forums (became very active) on Unfiction....And people wrote in and said, 'This is amazing, this game is showing us how small our world really is.'

This seems like a pretty good example of collective intelligence at work.

McGonigal: We talk about collective intelligence, but you need a diversity of participants to really make it work. It's not just intellectual diversity, but also gender diversity and age diversity. One of the things this game can do is show what the truly geographically collective intelligence really looks like. I don't know that we've really seen one. The Wikipedia articles, maybe. In this game, everyone's writing the same article, to use that metaphor. So we just sit around thinking about how lucky we feel to be doing this.

How many people are involved?

McGonigal: Last weekend, after one week, we had 1,000 players. That's not a lot. We want millions of players. So we're putting the trailers online, and we're hoping tens of thousands of people watch those and that it grows from there. By Beijing, we hope there will be millions. That has to happen.

But it's a slow ramp up?

McGonigal: Yeah, one of the things I learned about I Love Bees is how important it is to respect the ARG community and give them the opportunity to play with something first, and kind of get things organized, and set up for when someone who's never played before shows up. So we sent out The Lost Ring rabbit holes--a box of clues to the game--to about 50 all-star players to get them going. It's not we were advertising on TV. So by time other players show up, they won't get lost. We're thinking about how to make this huge narrative experience not be overwhelming.

So the game is for people at any level?

McGonigal: Yes. I'm so excited about the historian podcasts. If someone did nothing but listen to the historian podcasts, which blend history with our alternate reality, if they did nothing but listen and then take the quiz, take the poll, if that were all that you did, you would have such a great experience of the summer Olympics. Your head would be full. You'd be like, I know the secret reality. I definitely hope that when people put the Olympics on the TV, they'll feel they're not vicariously experiencing it, but feel, 'I'm in it, it's not something I'm experiencing remotely, I'm having my own true, real Olympics experience.'

What can people learn from the game?

McGonigal: They're going to learn about their own strengths. We're going to help them learn what they're good at and then give them missions that are totally customizable to their personal strengths. That's the part of the game I'm most proud of, that innovation. In the ARG world, you don't always know what you're supposed to do. You spend a lot of time waiting and waiting. So we wanted it to be so that for everybody, every time you come to one of the game sites, you know exactly what you're supposed to do, and that we need you because this is what you said you were good at. But that part hasn't started yet.

How can this game impact someone in China or India?

McGonigal: The answer to how any ordinary person will experience this game lies in the Lost Sport podcast. It will be the first alternate reality podcast. It appears that this ancient sport has been lost for 2,000 years, and if people can figure out how to play it, this new sport will be something anyone in any country can play. And the experience of playing it is going to be a very big part of the mainstream experience.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

'Find the Lost Ring,' a brand-new alternate-reality game, is a promotional vehicle for McDonald's and the Beijing Olympics. The game, which went live on Monday, is centered on a woman named Ariadne, who claims to have woken up with amnesia in a South African corn maze on February 12.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

For anyone who follows alternate-reality games (ARGs), it should come as no surprise that the latest entry in the genre, The Lost Ring, is the brainchild of, among others, Jane McGonigal.

Until now, it was only suspected--though with extremely high levels of confidence--that the game, which is centered on helping a fictional amnesiac woman named Ariadne discover her identity, was a promotional vehicle for this summer's Beijing Olympics.

But McGonigal, who is keynoting at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin on Tuesday, confirmed to me that the game was in fact designed in collaboration with the International Olympic Committee and that McGonigal's partners in the creation of the game were McDonald's and global interactive experience design shop, AKQA.

"This ARG extends McDonald's historic sponsorship of the Olympic Games in a brand-new direction," said McGonigal, who is a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future. "Its goal is to create global collaboration and bring the spirit of the Games to people around the world. It will invite players from across the globe to join forces online and in the real world, as they investigate forgotten mysteries and urban legends of the ancient games."

McGonigal, an alumna of leading ARG design firm 42 Entertainment, has either been lead designer on or helped create a wide variety of multimedia games such as A World without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, Last Call Poker, and I Love Bees.

Since The Lost Ring went live on Monday, its Web site has offered up a number of clues for players to follow, while ARG-related sites like ARGNet and Unfiction have been actively discussing the game. It will play out over many months, likely not finishing at least until the closing ceremonies of the Olympics on August 24, 2008.

'Find the Lost Ring,' a new alternate-reality game that seems to be tied to the Olympics in Beijing, went live Monday morning.

(Credit: findthelostring.com)

As I predicted Sunday night, the Web site for a new alternate-reality game that seems to be tied to the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing went live Monday.

The game, known as Find the Lost Ring, is built around a story line in which a young woman named Ariadne says she woke up on February 12 in a South African corn maze with amnesia and knows nothing about who she is or where she comes from.

The game's conceit will be to have players help Ariadne find her identity through a complex series of online and, most likely, real-world clues and puzzles. Somehow, it will all be tied in to the Olympics. One clue on the game's site says she offers up the "fact" that, after waking up, she spent a week in the hospital being treated for her very rare form of amnesia and that doctors there "say I'm an Olympic-caliber athlete."

To me, it's all very Bourne Identity-ish, except probably without a lot of gun play and CIA involvement.

For the full list of clues that launched the game, see my blog entry from Sunday night, which includes photos and the text of the initial clues.