The Email Wars

Tues Keynote: The Future of Happiness: Jane McGonigal, Creative Dir, Avant Game
Is it a game or is it real life? When you get right down to it, is there really a difference? Learn about the growing popularity of ARGs from one of the most innovative minds in this industry. Jane McGonigal explains what it is like to be a puppet-master of this exciting new genre.

Speech starts with a killer movie trailer for “The Lost Ring” At the www.thelostring.com. Worth checking out

It is the alternate reality game for the Olympics in China this year. About a sport that was lost and no one knows how to play. MUST check this out.

This game has been going on for a week now. Flickr photos are tagged with “tr01″ for secret q’s on the game. If you want you should go look these up as I think this is going to be massive.

Back to the panel (WHICH completely was 200% better than I expected)

Alternate Reality Game designer: Instead of making them more realistic, interactive, etc, she is trying to make the real world to be better designed, like a game. Odd idea, but let’s see how it falls out.

“The Future of Happiness”
Doing research on the science of happiness. More growth and happiness going on in buzz.
Positive Physcology: to look at our brains not as things that can malfunction, but really that of what makes us feel good, function well, what is the best case scenario for the human brain?

She has found the amazing parrallel between what everyone is finding, and the impact of gaming and alternate realities.

This is a new kind of “happiness”. It is finding out what are the optimal conditions about to have the best experiences in life. So many people are writing on it : Gross National Happiness, Worlds Most Livable Cities Index, The Happy Planet Index, etc. So why is everyone so consumed with happiness?

Are you in the happiness business? (Asking the panel)
She does not think that all of us are in the happiness business but thinks we should all be thinking in that direction in interactive and life.

Future Forecast for 2013 (actually moved in 4 years closer as things are moving so fast).
Quality of life becomes main driver in ads.
Positive phsycology influences design and UI/UA

Communities continue to form around different brands, services, things that help people connect and define happiness to them.

Well being becomes the “new capital”

HAPPINESS IS THE NEW CAPITAL:
If you want people to value and use your service, you need to be generating it.

4 Rules for happiness:
1. Satisfying work to do
2. Being good at something
3. Spending time with people you like
4. The chance to be part of something bigger.

Games do this. Multiplayer games do this as well on a larger level. “Multiplayer games are the ultimate happiness engine.” These types of game enforce the rules above.

Signals:
Real life does not build all these people to go after the same goals and working together like multiplayer games do.

Feedback: You get real time feedback in games, score, wins, you get instant rec repeatedly. You have clear goals, purpose, etc. (I personally feel that if this is how you feel, then you need to find a new job in a new industry. at eROI I think this is how we work internally as well as with clients. Collaboration, feedback, props, awards, common goals, etc are the drivers of culture not matter online or offline.) But she reinforces that many of us at SXSW are in this business doing what we love doing already.

She sees: “A Global Mass Exodus: to games and computers instead of community in real work places.” (I would personally agree with this as we see more people everywhere we go living on computers, devices, etc and having interactions on a digital level.)

We might want to take everything we have learned about games and make this work in the real world. It all boils down to quality of life - Virtuality is beating reality in the US. For the majority of people we need to help with this as interactive designers to TAKE these adventures and experiences into the real world.

Why aren’t we taking an approach to games with online and offline games?

Some examples:
Chorewars.com - you can use it to get kids to do chores and get experience points.

Zyked - Treating exercise as am MMO and giving you points.

Seriosity: Giving you virtual currency at work to get co-workers to do something.
Creates virtual flows to show you who is important and doing the most work. Shows connection between depts etc. Attent™ with Serios™ is an enterprise productivity application inspired by multiplayer online games. It tackles the problem of information overload in corporate email using psychological and economic principles from successful games. Attent creates a synthetic economy with a currency (Serios) that enables users to attach value to an outgoing email to signal importance. It gives recipients the ability to prioritize messages and a reserve of currency that they can use to signal importance of their messages to others. Attent also provides a variety of tools that enable everyone to track and analyze communication patterns and information exchanges in the enterprise.

Citizen Logistics: What is life were a team activity. GPS works to get people to do good, adventurous things.

WorldWithoutOil.org
Game: World Wide Oil: told players that they ran out of oil and they have to go through their real lives as if this is true. You would know what the fictional parameters to know how to interact with people in their areas. Everyone playing was creating online and offline media and experiences of this game. Lasted 32 weeks, things got dark and apocalyptic. This game gave them an idea of how things would play out. Or may play out.

Signals: What do they mean in the big picture?

To imagine the future it is always important to look backwards at least twice as far as you are looking forward.

Games are not escapist experiences, but alternate (note not alternative) experiences.

HOW are alt reality games amplifying human happiness.
1. Mobbability: The ability to collaborate and motivate at really large scale
2. Influency: Being able to change your persuading abilities, motivations, approaches in any audience.
3. Ping Quotient: Maeasures your ability to be able to reach out in a network and vice versa get back to others that reach out to you. Being open to requests for engagemnt.
4. Co-operation Radar: being able to detect who would be the best at any given task or mission
5. MultiCapitialism: Money, introductions, carbon offsets, everyone wants someone different so how can you get everyone to learn to trade these?
6. Protovation: Means rapid, fearless innovation, the notion that failing is fun. If you fail quickly and learn you can learn and grow faster as an ability.
7. Open Authorship: Comfort with giving content away, know it might be changed, a design skill that won’t be broken by others changes, or knowing that it will hold together with the changes of others.
8. Signal noise management: The ability to know what info, clue, data point, etc that you should hear and use at any given moment
9. Longbroading: The long term look at things
10. Emergentsight: The idea that you can spot patterns as they start o bubble up and you can deal with them as they happen. So much content from some many places, you need to be able to spot things in systems as they grow, get messy and be able to SPOT opportunities.

Takeaways:
Soon enough we will all be in the happiness business. - get learning
Game designers have a HUGE head start on human experience.
Alternate realities signal the desire and need and opportunity for all os us to redesign reality for real quality of life.

Reality is kind of broken and it is up to us to fix it…..

If you want research:
jane AT avantgame,com

SIDE NOTES:
Check out TRACKStick as a USB GPS tracker. Follow yourself EVERYWHERE
SF0.org - check out as a ARG where ALL missions are in the real world.
The Ministry of Reshelving
About Ministry of Reshelving:
The Ministry of Reshelving is dedicated to the proper classification of fiction and nonfiction books. The current Ministry initiative focuses or relocating a total of one thousand nine hundred and eighty four copies, across all 50 United States, of George Orwell’s _1984_ from “fiction” or “literature” to more suitable sections, like “Current Affairs”, “US Politics”, “True Crime”, or “New Non-Fiction.” You are invited to join us in our reshelving efforts.

Visit the link below for full instructions and everything you need to conduct your own reshelving mission!
http://avantgame.blogspot.com/2005/08/ministry-of-reshelving.html

Tombstone Holdem Playing Holdem using grave stones.