The second days is about technology and we kicks off with a presentation of Sibley Verbeck, a gaming expert who uses the mechanics of gaming in everything around him. “Games can save the world, specifically the idea’s behind gaming can make all projects more successful.

The keywords in game design are: directing, challenging and giving back feedback to people to maximize their motivation. What you see in the online gaming world is that people want to work together to overcome challenges, are matched with something that is hard but not impossible, are always optimistic that their close to an epic win and should document their action to receive points of wins.

Then, how can we use these principles for social Change? In general Sibbley says that you see people who want to use games for a social cause and look at games to change the world. He doesn’t think that this is necessarily the most productive path, you need to look at the design and rational behind the games and incorporate this into a social environment.

In online communities people have different motivations; some are motivated by competition and other by the social aspect. In the foursquare communities you will get badges, points and tips on features you haven’t used yet. These goodies/gadgets are not the core element of foursquare but it increases people’s incentive and motivation to participate. People should think about these extra’s incentives when looking at changing industries.

World Without Oil is a good example how you can try and change the world by game dynamics. The game simulates the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis. It established a citizen “nerve center” to track events and share solutions. In fact the game designers just put up the framework and ask the community what if oil becomes really expenses, what would you do? Then, challenging people to write about what they would do and ask them to behave like it has happened in real live and test out ideas and share them on the virtual world. In the end 1500 people were doing a simulations on what they would do. For example take their bike to work instead of the car, making this game into a real life ‘life changer’. At the end of the 32 weeks many people where keeping up these changes in their life’s.

San Francisco Zero (SF0) is another example of how game dynamics can stimulate change. The creators found that there needed to be more creative fun in San Francisco. They put up a framework where anyone in the SF0 community could put up a task. An example of the task is: split up in teams and randomly go to a bar and high five strangers and you need to documents this. By doing this you as a member of the community are getting points for each action. What makes it interesting is that there are different types of points. For instance if you high five the Mayor of San Francisco you get more points then if you high five a random person on the streets. In the end the community decides the point system and chooses how many points you can earn by each high five.

Both examples show the importance of a feedback cycle. This feedback circle can give people the incentive to be and stay active in the group. This can be done by awarding points and enabling the community to decide which good content will be rewarded.

Question and Answers:

There are quite a lot of questions from the digital natives, please find the questions and answers/discussion below here:

Q: you talked about positive reinforcement, do you also give negative aspect to influence and organise the community/people?

A: I can understand that if you write or do the wrong things you need negative reinforcement. Games meant as commercial games stay away from this, it is always positive enforcements. But I can understand that for social aspect negative reinforcement can help.

Q: when you are taking the game dynamics into a social cause do people get lost in the point system and in the game, that they want to win and forget out the overall objective.

A: As with everything there is always the chance that there going to by unintended consequences, some people will become overeager to get points without keeping the overall goal in mind. So in one of our more social projects we have a maximum number of points you can receive per day. We want people to come to the community and not come to get the most points. When designing something with a game dynamic you will have to think about. And the further away you get from being a real game you need to think about reinforcing the overall objective

Q: when you think about how to reach the audience, for games it seems to be easy as it is going to be fun.

A: In understanding game dynamics you need to replace the word fun with rewarding. Especially when talking about things that stray away from entertainment games, you will need to think more and more in terms of rewarding. In Amazon and added incentive for people entering in book reviews is how many people like this review and the impact is has, the increase of popularity of a particular book . Wikipedia stumbled on this when things started to go wrong; they needed to power of the crowed. Especially when things that nobody likes, like correction errors, need to be done.

Q: Pink Panty campaign felt like being in a game, but it was a very short lived campaign; it doesn’t live in society anymore not in social or political?

A: It is true and I can imagine that people are interested in trying to preserve the community and see how the community can preserve each other. We have seen that political campaigns are slow to use technology but when they get it right it can help a lot. The question is once it catching on, how do you make it in a self organising campaign.

Q: When you introduce flashmobs into the conversation? How does that work in light of gaming theory? As some communities don’t want to be a self sustainable organisation, people can just want a one time thing. For an example many people considered the Pink Panty campaigns as a one time thing.

A: In gaming you have a small percentage of players how are loyal and stay in one game for a long time, they are called Wales. As a game engineer or social actor putting gaming mechanism into practice you want to identify them and treat them different. Maybe you want to give them tools to do the next thing/flashmob on their own or giving them special credits.

Q: In the university course I taught we used a forum as a virtual classroom, here behind your name it said how many post you put on the forum. Amongst the teaching assistant we had a competition who posted the most post. The competition on the forum took our focus away from the content of the post. So not getting back to an earlier discussion I would like to know if you should focus on the wales or not and how should you do that?

A: With points and the possibility of being a winner, you always have the risk that people lose track the overall objective and maybe even cut corners. But you can also give people different incentives, like on foursquare there is no winner; you get a badge and other incentives to do more like specific rewards for incremental achievement and not the epic win. What you want to do is empower people more.