2007 Serious Games Summit GDC
Speaking at the recent 2007 Serious Games Summit held during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, alternate reality game creator Jane McGonigal presented a keynote address titled 'The Future of Collective Play at GDC 07,' during which she commented, “I design games from the future,” a statement that makes sense given she is a Berkeley PhD who works for the Bay area's Institute for the Future. McGonigal focused on alternate reality games, or ARGs, in her keynote, in particular noting their ability to teach collective intelligence skills and even to generate socially useful outcomes. The idea behind collective intelligence, McGonigal explained, is that there are some difficult tasks that be achieved through the emergent behavior of large numbers of people. Sometimes termed crowd-sourcing, examples of collective intelligence are Wikipedia, Google Image Tagging and Yahoo! Answers. Each of these shows the three common hallmarks of collective intelligence: 1. Massively Multi-human users Referencing the theorist and author of 'Convergence Culture' Henry Jenkins and Vernor Vinge, author of 'Rainbows End,' McGonigal argued that collective intelligence based problem solving is a key skill that humans will use in the future. So much so that Jenkins argues that collective intelligence techniques should be part of the curriculum. This is where ARGs come in. McGonigal suggested that collective intelligence is a ‘real part’ of ARG games to the degree that we can talk about 'Collective Intelligence Gameplay' and even understand stages of game-play development. These McGonigal typified as: 1. Collective cognition To illustrate these points McGonigal used the example of the ARG ilovebees developed and run by 42 Entertainment for the launch of Microsoft’s Halo 2. McGonigal was a designer of ilovebees as well as being the community lead and ‘playing’ Dana, a character in the game’s alternate reality. Stage 1 – Collective Cognition / Re-constructing the hive mind In the initial stages of ilovebees, players gathered evidence from a range of sources and tried to work out what was going on. The game provided no specific instructions or goals. In stead, what was provided was a call to action and a data set in the form of numbers and times. This, according to McGonigal, resulted in a huge amount of activity including: 2358 comments to one new clue, 33k lines of chat (on average) per day and 50 new posts every 30sec on one site.
This collective cognition phase pieced together a basic narrative: the AI from a crashed space ship from the Halo universe had taken over a bee keeping web site and was trying to make contact with the crew of the craft. What the players did not have was a clear goal – at this point they moved to the next of McGonigal's stages.
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