Epic wins abound in gamer circles, for two reasons. First, in the face of ridiculous challenges, long odds, or great uncertainty, gamers cultivate extreme optimism. They have perfect confidence that even if success isn’t
probable
, it’s at least possible. So gamers’ efforts to achieve an epic win never feel pointless or hopeless. Second, gamers aren’t afraid to fail. Failing in a good game is at the very least fun and interesting; it can also be instructive and even empowering.
Extreme optimism and fun failure mean that gamers are more likely to put themselves in situations where epic wins can happen—situations where we take up unlikely missions and surprise ourselves with new awe-inspiring positive outcomes.
Ideally, the real world would present us with the same kind of intensely gratifying, save-the-world work flow we get from good games. But in real life, epic wins can be few and far between. We just don’t have the same kind of carefully designed opportunities to surprise ourselves with our own superpowers.
We don’t have an endless stream of opportunities to
do something that matters right now
, presented with
clear instructions
, and finely tuned to our
moment-by-moment capabilities
. Without that kind of creative and logistical support, there’s no easy way to go after epic goals and successfully achieve them in our everyday lives.
Fortunately, a new genre of games called
social participation games
is trying to change that. They’re designed to give players real-world volunteer tasks that feel as
heroic
, as
satisfying
, and—most importantly—as
readily achievable
as MMORPG quests. And as a result, a growing number of gamers are getting their hands dirty doing real-world good—and improving and saving real lives.
Take my friend Tom. He’s a young math teacher who lives in Portland, Oregon. He usually gets his epic wins playing
Rock Band
, or, as he tells me, “any game where you get to play as Spider-Man or Batman.” But recently, he started playing a social participation game called The Extraordinaries—and it has dramatically expanded his sense of his own potential.
THE EXTRAORDINARIES
The Extraordinaries is a Web and mobile phone application designed to help you do good in your spare time, wherever you happen to be. Created by a team of San Francisco-based designers, entrepreneurs, and activists, its primary objective is to make being heroic in the real world as easy as being heroic in a virtual world.
The game’s motto is “Got two minutes? Be extraordinary!” Players can log in to the game from wherever they are and browse a list of “microvolunteer” missions that they can start and finish in literally just a few minutes. Each mission helps a real nonprofit organization accomplish one of its goals.
By design, The Extraordinaries’ mission dashboard works almost exactly like the
World of Warcraft
log of available quests. You flip through available opportunities, and every mission you see comes with a story about why it will help save the world, along with a step-by-step explanation of how to get it done. There’s never a shortage of important work to be done, and everything is designed to be doable by anyone willing to make a good-faith effort.
The first time my friend Tom logged in to The Extraordinaries, he immediately found a heroic mission he felt confident he could actually do. The mission was to use his iPhone to snap a photograph of a special “secret object,” tag the photo with his current GPS location, and upload it to a database.
The secret object was a defibrillator, or AED—the device used to deliver a lifesaving shock to thousands of heart attack victims each year. The mission was designed by First Aid Corps, which is creating a map of every publicly accessible defibrillator in the world. As the organization explains in its mission’s instructions:
Each year, more than 200,000 Americans go into cardiac arrest—and within five minutes, the brain dies. Unfortunately, ambulances just can’t always get there in time. Only those in the nearby vicinity can respond within that time.
Government buildings, airports, schools, and more are installing defibrillators (shock pads) so that ordinary citizens can save lives in the event of an emergency. First Aid Corps is building a map of these devices with The Extraordinaries so that 911 can give someone a location to run to in the event of an emergency.
In other words, if you can find a defibrillator that isn’t on the map yet, and if you successfully photograph and report it, you can help First Aid Corps save lives.
With good mission design—a focused task, a clearly defined context for action, a real window of opportunity—something previously impossible to achieve, like saving a life, becomes possible. That’s the power of making volunteer work more like a game: players can be empowered to do amazing things, if their volunteer work is designed like a good quest.
In the First Aid Corps mission, the task of saving a life is presented just like a
World of Warcraft
quest. The instructions are straightforward, the reason for the mission compelling, and the task well within your ability level. If there’s a defibrillator somewhere you plan to be today, then you can be a superhero right away. If not, you now have a secret mission everywhere you go, until you find the brokenhearted logo that is the international symbol for a defibrillator.
The defibrillator that Tom found was in an elevator bank at Portland State University, where he is completing a graduate degree in math education. “I’ve looked past it while waiting for the elevator for years,” he told me afterward. “Suddenly it was relevant, and I was glad to have this random secret info.” Of course, it wasn’t secret information at all; the defibrillator was in plain public view. But Tom’s words here reveal just how effective The Extraordinaries’ promise really is: to give you a real chance to feel like a superhero, on a secret mission to save the world.
After Tom completed his mission, the win was scored on The Extraordinaries’ activity board for every other player to see: “Tom H mapped a defibrillator and helped to save lives.”
Later, Tom e-mailed me the news. “It was like a lifesaving scavenger hunt,” he told me. “Inherently awesome. Massive epic win.” The defibrillator mission was an epic win because, until that morning, Tom had no idea he had knowledge that could help save a life. He had a secret power he didn’t know about—and he was given a real opportunity to put that power to use.
What happens next? If Tom’s defibrillator does help save a life, he’ll know. The First Aid Corps updates its global map with links to news stories about each defibrillator’s usage. If “Live Saved” pops up next to
your
AED location, then you know that the AED you found really
has
helped save the day. Right now, it’s up to players to proactively check the status of their AEDs. But it’s easy to imagine a platform like The Extraordinaries evolving to push updates directly to players via text message or social network update whenever their small act of good helps accomplish something bigger. In that case, the small yet epic win of discovering and sharing a defibrillator’s location could lead to an even bigger epic win down the road.
The call to action of The Extraordinaries—“Be extraordinary!”—is really just another way of saying: Surprise yourself with how much good you can do. Redefine what your best possible outcome for the day could be. It’s not that we don’t have the ability to do good for others. It’s just that no one has shown us how fast, easy, and addictive it can be to tackle what feel like missions impossible.
By the fall of 2009, within just a few months of its launch, The Extraordinaries had become a small but growing social network, with more than thirty-three hundred members who had collectively completed more than twenty-two thousand missions on behalf of more than twenty nonprofit organizations. That’s an average of seven epic wins per member. Judging from just that statistic alone, the app clearly isn’t the most addictive experience in the world yet. But it’s doing extremely important work: it’s showcasing the potential for more epic wins, every day, for everyone.
Which brings us to our next fix for reality:
FIX # 12 : MORE EPIC WINS
Compared with games, reality is unambitious. Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together.
Why do we need more epic wins in our everyday lives? Right now, as a planet, we are collectively facing some of the most incredible odds in our history: climate change, global economic crises, food insecurity, geopolitical instability, and rising rates of depression worldwide. Emphatically, these are problems that cannot be solved online. They require real-world action, not just online interaction.
The exciting promise of a project like The Extraordinaries is that we can do more than pick the brains of gamers.
3
We can harness the social participation of the masses.
Social participation means using more than our minds: it requires throwing our hearts and our bodies into action. So the challenge that lies ahead is to design
social participation tasks
(SPTs) to stand alongside the growing number of human intelligence tasks (HITs) that currently make up the majority of online crowdsourcing projects: transcribing and subtitling videos on DotSUB, for example, analyzing an MP’s receipts in Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, or even simply evaluating an idea for a new product name as “good” or “bad.” What these efforts all have in common is that they appeal primarily to our cognitive, rather than our emotional and social, capabilities.
HITs are, without a doubt, important work, but we are more than just thinking machines. We are human beings capable of reaching out to others, feeling empathy, recognizing need, showing up, and making a difference in someone else’s life. We have
social powers
, and we can mobilize them for good—in real-world spaces, not just online spaces. All we need is the right kind of mission support.
Consider one more mission from The Extraordinaries game—it’s my personal favorite, the one that made me feel the biggest epic win. This one is a social participation task for Christel House, an organization dedicated to helping children living in poverty get the education, nutrition, health care, and mentorship they need to become self-sufficient, contributing members of society. And it’s a perfect example of a mission that takes advantage of some of our key social powers: the ability to empathize, advise, and provide positive emotional support.
The mission is simple: Write a short text message of good luck to a child about to take a potentially life-changing standardized test. You can choose whether to send your message to a child in the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, South Africa, or India. Christel House will ensure your online message gets into the hands of a real student, in a physical classroom, moments before he or she takes the test. Nathan Hand, the development associate for Christel House who helped design this social participation task for The Extraordinaries, explains it this way:
All these kids around the world have at some point, in every country, some sort of standardized test that they need to pass. Sometimes it makes or breaks graduation, sometimes it makes or breaks them getting into the next grade level—it depends on the country—but no matter where the child is, it’s a lot of pressure, and they spend their whole life preparing for it. What we’re trying to do is basically crowdsource the pat on the back.
4
I chose to write my good-luck message to a student in India. I shared my favorite trick: “Before you start the test, smile as wide as you can! If you get stuck on a hard question, stop, and smile!” I knew from scientific research that smiling even when you don’t feel like it can actually trigger real feelings of confidence and optimism.
5
As I clicked send, I pictured a young student in India taking my advice. In that moment, I felt meaningfully connected to another human being I had hardly any hope of meeting or speaking to otherwise. I had real hope that I was able to reach out to another person in a time of difficulty and give them support that mattered. In other words, I had exactly the experience Hand describes as the goal of the Christel House Extraordinaries mission: “People literally, in a matter of seconds, can have a meaningful engagement with a kid in need through us. They have the warm glow, then they remember us, and they remember those kids, and that’s what it’s about.”
6
Before I found this mission, I’d had no intention of trying to help a child halfway around the world ace an important, potentially life-changing test. It’s not just that it wasn’t on my to-do list. It wasn’t on my
possible to-do
list. The good game design of the Christel House mission changed that: it made it incredibly easy to play a helpful role in a stranger’s life. It showed me a capacity to help I didn’t know I had. It gave me goose bumps.
That’s an epic win already, because it changes our perspective of who we are, how much we care, and what we’re capable of doing for others.
SOCIAL PARTICIPATION GAMES
are innovating human potential. They are augmenting and expanding our capabilities to do good—and revealing our power to help each other, in the moment, wherever we are.
The Extraordinaries is a perfect example of how epic wins can be integrated into our everyday lives, and how we can generate more participation bandwidth worldwide. But it’s not the only example—far from it. Let’s take a look at two more extraordinarily ambitious projects that are attempting to harness the social capacity of crowds: Groundcrew, a mobile people-organizing platform that allows you to make real-life wishes come true, and Lost Joules, an online energy conservation game that invites you to make virtual currency wagers on just how much social good other players can accomplish.