Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (35 page)

You can stack up as much virtual rice as you want, and at the end of your game, it gets converted to real rice, which is donated to the United Nations World Food Programme. (The rice is provided by sponsors whose online advertisements appear underneath every question in the game.)

To earn enough rice to feed one person one meal, I’d have to answer two hundred questions correctly. But it’s not the kind of game you really want to play for hours on end. In fact, usually I just play for about a minute or two, or roughly ten questions at a time, whenever I want a quick burst of satisfying productivity and feel-good activity. But earning a hundred grains a day is barely a teaspoon’s worth; luckily I’m not the only person playing. On any given day, between two hundred thousand and five hundred thousand people play Free Rice; together, according to the game’s FAQ, their efforts add up to enough rice to feed an average of seven thousand people per day.

Why is Free Rice able to capture so much engagement? It isn’t just that it is a force for good; it’s also classically good game design. It takes just seconds to complete a task, meaning you can get a lot of work done quickly. You get instant visual feedback: grains of rice stacking up in a bowl, with a constantly rising total of grains that you’ve earned. Because the game gets easier when you make mistakes and harder when you answer correctly, it’s easy to experience flow: you’re always playing at the limits of your ability. And since the game was created, in 2007, its game world has expanded significantly: there’s a seemingly endless stream of potential tasks, with thirteen different subject areas, from famous paintings and world capitals to chemical symbols and French vocabulary. There’s also a clear sense that you’re a part of something bigger as you play. As the Free Rice site explains, “Though 10 grains of rice may seem like a small amount, it is important to remember that while you are playing, so are thousands of other people at the same time. It is everyone together that makes the difference.”
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So far, that difference is nothing less than epic: 69,024,128,710 grains of rice and counting—enough to provide more than 10 million meals worldwide.

Free Rice in one respect seems like a perfect embodiment of the crowdsourcing philosophy: lots of people come together to make a small contribution, all of it adding up to something bigger. But Free Rice actually falls short of real crowdsourcing. That’s because the grains of rice aren’t coming from the players—they’re coming from a small number of advertisers who agree to pay the cost of ten grains of bulk rice for every correct-answer page view. Those advertisers are paying for the gamers’ eyeballs on the page. So the actual game-play activity isn’t generating any new knowledge or value; the advertisers are just happy to have their advertisement on a page they know hundreds of thousands of people will see daily.

That means Free Rice is less like Wikipedia and more like clever fundraising. But Free Rice is still an extremely important project, for one big reason: it irrefutably shows that gamers are, on the whole, happier when a good game also does real-world good. There’s no evidence that hundreds of thousands of people would show up to play a bad game just to help out a good cause. But the combination of good game design and real-world results is irresistible.

It also points the way to bigger possibilities. What if people playing Free Rice were actually contributing something other than their attention to advertising? What could gamers easily contribute, and what would it add up to? We can catch an even better glimpse of gamers’ potential to engage in epic problem solving in a different crowd project: Folding@home, a project designed to harness gamers’ hardware for good.

“If you own a PS3, start saving lives.
Real
lives.”
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That’s how one blogger put it when he discovered Folding@home for the PlayStation 3, the world’s first distributed computing initiative just for gamers. A distributed computing system is like crowdsourcing for computers. It connects individual computers via the Internet into a giant virtual supercomputer in order to tackle complex computational tasks that no individual computer could solve alone.

For years, scientists have been harnessing the processing power of home computers to create virtual supercomputers tasked with solving real scientific problems. The most famous example is SETI@home, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home, a program that harnesses home computers to analyze radio signals from space for signs of intelligent life in the universe. Folding@home is a similar system created by biologists and medical researchers at Stanford University in an effort to solve one of the greatest mysteries of human biology: how proteins fold.

Why is protein folding important? Proteins are the building blocks of all biological activity. Everything that happens in our bodies is a result of proteins at work: they support our skeleton, move our muscles, control our five senses, digest our food, defend against infections, and help our brain process emotions. There are more than one hundred thousand kinds of proteins in the human body, each consisting of anywhere from one hundred to one thousand different parts and made up of any combination of twenty different amino acids. In order to do its specific job, each kind of protein folds up into a unique shape.
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Biologists describe this process as a kind of incredibly complex origami. The parts can be arranged and folded up in almost any imaginable combination and form. Even if you know which amino acids make up a protein, and in how many parts, it’s still nearly impossible to predict exactly what form the protein will take. One thing scientists know for sure, however, is that sometimes, for unknown reasons, proteins stop folding correctly. They “forget” what shape to take—and when they do, this can lead to disease. Alzheimer’s disease, cystic fibrosis, Mad Cow disease, and even many cancers, for example, are believed to result from protein misfolding.

So scientists want to understand exactly how proteins fold and what shapes they take, in order to figure out how to stop proteins from misfolding. But given the nearly infinitely many different shapes each protein can take, it requires an incredibly long time to test all the various potential shapes. Computer programs can simulate every possible shape that a protein with a certain amino acid composition could make. But it would take
thirty years
to test all the different combinations for just one single protein, out of the hundred thousand proteins in our bodies. As the Folding@home FAQ section puts it, “That’s a long time to wait for one result!”

That’s why scientists use distributed computing systems. By dividing the work between multiple processors, the work can go much, much faster. Since 2001, anyone in the world has been able to connect their personal computer to the Folding@home network. Whenever their computer is idle, it connects to the network and downloads a small processing assignment—just a few minutes’ worth of protein-folding simulation. It submits the data to the network when it’s done.

But after nearly a decade of tapping into the spare processing power of personal computers, the team behind Folding@home realized that a more powerful platform for virtual supercomputing exists: game consoles like the PlayStation 3.

When it comes to data-crunching ability, game consoles are significantly more powerful than the average PC. That’s because the computational power required to render constantly changing 3D graphic environments is much greater than what’s required for ordinary home or work computing tasks, like Internet browsing or word processing. Even though there are collectively many more PCs in our homes than game consoles, if scientists could get even a small fraction of gamers to participate in distributed computing projects, they could double, triple, or even quadruple their supercomputing power.

But would gamers do it? Sony, the makers of the PS3 console, bet that they would. And they were right.

Screenshot of the Folding@home application for the PlayStation 3 system.

As a philanthropic venture, Sony developed a custom Folding@home application for the PS3. Gamers could log in, accept a protein-folding mission, and donate the power of their PS3 to get the mission done. They could watch the folding simulation in action, and keep tabs on just how much computational effort they’d personally contributed to the project.

Help save real lives when you’re not saving virtual lives.
The message was compelling, and it caught on fast. Within days of Sony releasing the application, thousands of blog posts and online articles about “gaming for the greater good” spread across the entire online gamer landscape.

The gamer community has rallied around the mission with enormous enthusiasm. Online articles and blog posts proudly proclaimed: “PS3 Gamers Trying to Save the World!” On forums, players encouraged each other: “Have you cured cancer lately? Now is the best time to jump in and join the cancer-saving fun.”
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They set up competitive folding teams and tried to rally each other to action: “Your PS3 can’t do it without you.” “It’s time to do your part for humanity.”
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Within six months, gamers collectively helped the Folding@home network achieve supercomputing milestones never achieved by any other distributed computing network anywhere in the world. As a senior developer for the PS3 Folding@home project announced on the official PlayStation blog:

With an epic context like that, it’s no wonder gamers rose to the occasion. They live for opportunities to be of service to extreme-scale goals. As one gamer said, “You might as well be bragging that you helped cure cancer, instead of just beating the game on the hardest difficulty level without dying once.”
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Today, PS3 users account for 74 percent of the processing power used by Folding@home. So far, more than a million PS3 gamers on six continents have contributed spare computing cycles to the Folding@home project. That’s one out of every twenty-five gamers on the PS3 network.
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The gamers are vastly outcontributing everyone else on the network—and they’re far more active on Folding@home forums, keeping close tabs on what their efforts are adding up to.

Now every PS3 comes preloaded with Folding@home software, making it even easier for any gamer to opt in to a scientific mission. As it stands, long after the initial September 2008 launch, gamers continue to sign up for the collective effort at the rate of three thousand a day, or two new volunteers every minute.
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The Folding@home project for the PlayStation 3 is a perfect example of matching ability with opportunity, which is the fundamental dynamic of any good crowdsourcing project. It’s not enough to draw a crowd—you have to ask the crowd to do something they have a real chance of doing successfully. Every PS3 gamer is capable of easily and successfully contributing spare processing power. Meanwhile, Sony, working with Stanford University, has created an opportunity for that contribution to really mean something.

 

 

GAMERS’ MASS PARTICIPATION
in, and enthusiasm for, this big crowd project is a clear sign that there is a growing desire to be of service to real-world causes. For decades, gamers have been answering heroic calls to action in virtual worlds. It’s time we ask them to answer real-world calls to action, and all the evidence suggests that they are more than happy—they are
happier
—to rise to the real-world occasion.

The next major step to take, then, will be to harness gamers’ minds, and not just their consoles. Gamers are creative, persistent, and always up for a good challenge. Their strong cognitive resources, combined with their proven engageability, are a valuable resource just waiting to be tapped. In fact, a team of medical scientists, computer scientists, engineers, and professional game developers from the Seattle area are banking on that fact. They believe that gamers can use their natural creative ability and problem-solving abilities to learn to design new protein shapes and actively help cure diseases. They’ve created a protein-folding game called Foldit, which represents a dramatic leap of faith forward from the Folding@home project.

Instead of harnessing their video game
hardware
to run complex protein-folding simulations, Foldit harnesses the real brain power of gamers, challenging them to use their creativity and ingenuity to fold digital proteins by hand.