I’m pleased to share the news that Microsoft’s Ribbon Hero 2 is now freely available to all users of MS Office 2007 and 2010. If you have any interest whatsoever in the educational power of games or business-related uses of games, you absolutely must check this out.

Danc and I had the pleasure of assisting in the development of RH2, which improves on its predecessor in a variety of ways, including: the addition of a narrative, a more polished feedback system, substantially more interesting and creative challenges, and a tighter, more streamlined activity loop in general. Each of these changes are notable in and of themselves; together, they represent a remarkably evolved and polished gameplay experience. (See Danc’s just-published thoughts on the design.)

Most serious gaming projects fail because the organizations behind them lack the will to iterate on, test and polish their prototypes as needed. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been working on the Ribbon Hero franchise (can we call it a franchise now?) for approximately two years. The development team behind Ribbon Hero has approached the daunting challenge of “making it fun to learn Office” with humility and persistence. Its members have attended GDC, studied game design, consulted with expert designers, and playtested/polished the heck out of this game. Most importantly, they have developed skills which represent a significant competitive advantage to Microsoft. Two years may sound like a long time, but once you’ve figured out how to make learning fun, there are an unlimited number of ways in which you can dramatically improve the fortunes of your business.

So here’s to Ribbon Hero 2! May it be the first of many such educational experiences to emerge from Microsoft.

Lots of people have been jumping onto the anti-gamification bandwagon lately. I’ve been surprised by the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the critiques that I’ve read… particularly those that are short, sweet and to the point. And since so much has been eloquently said about the problems with gamification, I won’t bother to repeat the arguments here. Instead I want to address something that everyone else has ignored up till now: why some of gamification’s proponents have allowed it to devolve into the mindless application of points, achievements and leaderboards.

Is it because the proponents of gamification are generally not game designers and don’t understand how hard it is to make a good game? In some cases, probably so. But there’s a deeper and more pervasive problem that is driving the “dumbing down” of gamification. The problem is: gamification is a very tough sell.

It doesn’t matter how many books on the subject are published: most executives aren’t reading them. It doesn’t matter how many conferences are created: most executives aren’t attending them. But these issues are positively trivial compared to the biggest challenge of all: getting your average executive to understand the importance of prototyping and iteration.

I mean, a fair percentage of executives who work for publishers in the video game industry still do not understand the importance of prototyping and iteration. What are the odds that a marketing VP at Coca Cola is going to get it? Certainly not zero, but not too far above zero either.

Corporate executives are accustomed to being pitched things in a very defined way and don’t like it when the pitch includes too much ambiguity. “Hire my consulting firm and we’ll tell you the best strategy for entering an exciting new market after a three month research phase in which we will do X, Y and Z.” That works. “Hire my software development firm and I’ll have a new and better intranet built for you in nine months, and it will look almost exactly like this [insert mockups here].” That works, too.

You know what doesn’t tend to work? “Hire my game development studio. We think we can gamify your product in about three months, but it might take two months if prototyping goes really well and six months or more if prototyping takes longer than expected. And we can’t show you pretty mockups of what the final product will look like because we don’t know yet — that’s the point of the prototyping phase. Hey, you can trust me — I’ve done this 100 times before! No, not in your industry. Does industry expertise matter to you? Damn.”

I’m exaggerating a bit to make a point. The folks who are trying to sell gamification services are trapped between a rock and a hard place. The product they are selling is naturally hard to sell. And it’ll be another five to ten years before most of the senior executives at any given company are people who grew up with and “get” games, which complicates things further.

Given all that, is it any wonder that some folks have been driven to distilling the power of games into “points”, “leaderboards” and “achievements?” Those are easily defined things. You can show pretty pictures of them. And if you can convince a buyer that they are easy enough to implement, the buyer might be willing to take a gamble on you. In other words, gamification proponents are under enormous pressure to dumb down their pitch.

I’ve never talked publicly about why I didn’t focus my career primarily on the topics in my book after it was published. It wasn’t for lack of interest — I’m a deep believer in the power of games to transform business and I expect them to infect every aspect of the corporate world during my lifetime. One reason I chose to focus primarily on traditional entertainment (aside from personal passion) is because I believed the next several years would be an extremely hard slog for the serious game and gamification movements. So far, given the relative dearth of great gamification case studies to be published since my book was released in 2008, it appears that I was right.

I still do a little bit of serious game and gamification consulting. Every once in a great while, I meet a client who actually understands and appreciates the risks and uncertainties associated with game design. But more often than not, when I explain how game design works, my only reward is a blank stare or a nervous smile. And at that point, I know they’ve basically stopped listening to me. They’re thinking, “This sounds complicated and risky. I’m just going to buy some Google Adwords to advertise my product. I know that works.”

Via Jeremy Liew: Popular Science has published an article that describes how the 2010 Honda Insight (a hybrid vehicle) uses some principles of video games to encourage more fuel efficient driving behavior. The car’s multi-information display includes a progress meter — a (leafless) virtual plant. The plant’s empty branches grow leaves over time, as a result of efficient driving behavior recorded by the car’s onboard computer. The multi-information display helps teach the driver how to drive more efficiently (and thus, gain leaves) by signaling the impact of excessive stopping and starting, inefficient acceleration, etc.

This isn’t a short-term game, either. Over the car’s entire lifetime, a thrifty driver can earn a second tier of leaves, then a flower on each branch. The screen will eventually display a trophy if a driver performs well enough for a long enough period of time.

What I like about this idea is not just that it makes fuel-efficient driving more interesting. If Honda is smart, they could turn this into an incentive to purchase more Honda vehicles in the future. After all, when the time comes to purchase another car, you wouldn’t want to lose the virtual trophy that you had worked so hard to earn, would you? Well, why should you have to lose it? Just purchase another vehicle from Honda, and all the trophies you earned in your previous vehicle can be transferred over to the new one! Of course, this would work much better if you could earn trophies for other activities in addition to efficient driving, and it would work much better still if the accumulation of trophies led to concrete real-world benefits, like an “exclusive” t-shirt with the Honda logo on it, an entry into an exciting prize sweepstakes, a 5% discount on your next vehicle…

Given my work at MIT on Cyclescore (a platform that fused original games with stationary cycling), you can imagine my excitement over Wii Fit. The Wii + Brain Age-style game design seems like a match made in heaven. Having now played Wii Fit, I think I can say with confidence that it absolutely will be a match made in heaven someday soon. Probably v2, but not quite v1. I’m sure I’ll have more to say after using Wii Fit for a month, but here are my first impressions:

The good

A virtual exercise group: in some exercises, there are several Mii avatars around you, participating in the routine. If you’ve created Miis for your friends and family, it will be those Miis exercising around you. I don’t know how long the effect will last, but in my first experience with Wii Fit, I really enjoyed seeing that!

Balance feedback: Many of the exercises do a good job of giving you real-time feedback on your balance and center of gravity. Minimizing wiggle and keeping yourself centered a challenge, no matter how graceful and fit you happen to be. My wife, who has been practicing yoga for years and is now being certified as a teacher, still found herself challenged by the need to stay perfectly still and to move smoothly (to be fair, she certainly looked still to me, but the WF balance board wasn’t fooled!)

In fact, Wii Fit’s entertaining (and demanding!) use of balance is ultimately one of it’s greatest triumphs. I have to admit, with my fixation on cardio, I never would have come up with this myself. I probably replayed one balance minigame, skiing, at least twenty times before moving on because I was so enthralled by the challenge. (“Maybe if I tuck my knees a little more, I’ll miss fewer turns.”) Not bad at all, given that I generally want to try as many modes as possible in as short a time as possible.

All the usual Brain Age tricks: Charts, milestone ages, etc.. it’s all there. In particularly, I’ve always appreciated the way these games unlock new minigames, new modes, etc, as time goes on. When I was at my 28th minutes of exercise, I wanted to play for two more minutes in hopes of unlocking something new at 30 minutes. I’m sure the same effect will kick in 5 to 10 minutes before every 30 and 60 minute mark in the future, as long as Wii Fit keeps rewarding me semi-regularly (but not always!) with cool, if sometimes minor things. Although I hate unlockables in some games — especially party games — it makes perfect sense in Wii Fit, which needs a wide variety of positive feedback mechanisms to keep you motivated.

The bad

Occasionally inconsistent and overly-negative feedback: When you perform poorly in some minigames, you’ll be hit with 1 out of 4 stars and your Mii will hang its head in shame. Immediately afterwards, you’ll be cheered for your score (easy enough when you first start out, and there are few high scores on the board.) This was terribly irritating — it felt like I was being mocked! Nintendo would do well to tone down the shame when you fail, and tone down the painfully-undeserved praise immediately afterwards!

This was part of a confusing pattern in the game — undeserved praise peppered with borderline-insulting comments (like “do you trip when you walk?”) Positive feedback is incredibly important to a successful exertainment experience, so I understand the desire to err on the side of excess there. But the excess negativity just mystifies me.

The ugly

Board size: I’m surprised more people haven’t written about this. People with really big feet are not going to be able to enjoy Wii Fit, in general. My feet, which aren’t particularly large, felt slightly oversized for the balance board, and it definitely (if rarely) detracted from my enjoyment of the experience. I’ve got a few friends who wear size 12 and 13 shoes, and I can’t imagine that they’ll enjoy Wii Fit at all.

So close to cardio, and yet so far: This is the single biggest knock against Wii Fit, and the single easiest thing to fix in v2 (which may very well be an important part of Nintendo’s upgrade plan.) Several reviewers have noted that you can’t string a bunch of exercises together into a “training regimen” and eliminate the fluff between the exercises, which means that you spend half your “exercise” time navigating menus and watching transitions. What a waste. You also don’t have the option of being “pushed” by a trainer to work harder, which means that if Wii Fit’s clever positive feedback loops don’t hook you, you’re guaranteed to quit early or spend too much time on the less exhausting exercises.

Really, truly, so close… I mean, they managed to make a virtual hula hoop game fun! The rest should have been easy. I think it’s a measure of just how high my esteem is for Nintendo (and how high my expectations were for this product) that I’m thoroughly disappointed by this particular oversight. But it’s an oversight that is guaranteed to be corrected by Nintendo or by a third party — I’d guess within 16 months, tops.

Relatedly, “running” (you stick the wiimote in your pocket and jog in place), which is probably the fastest way to work up a sweat playing Wii Fit, is also the least imaginative and most boring activity in the game. (Unless it gets more interesting after you unlock a hidden mode — unfortunately, I have no desire to do so. It’s that boring.) It would have been easy to spice up the running mode with the nunchuck, which you could use while the wiimote is in your pocket (btw, how many people have made the “is that a wiimote in your pocket” joke, yet?) Then they could have given you something to focus on while you jog in place like an idiot… coins to collect… targets to hit… anything would be better than staring at an underwhelming virtual landscape. And I don’t think the problem is “I’m too much of a gamer,” because Eve couldn’t get into the running mode either.

Sign off

So there you have it — my review, for what it’s worth. As an industry, this brings us much, much closer to the goal of popular exertainment in every home. Kudos to Nintendo for making it happen, and for doing not one, but several things brilliantly in the process. I have little doubt that they will correct the few significant flaws in Wii Fit, and that I will someday be spending $40 to $50 on “Wii Fit 2.”

I received such good feedback the last time I revealed part of my upcoming book, For Fun and Profit: How Games are Transforming the Business World, that I figured I’d try again. This time, I’ve selected a very small piece of a much longer chapter on how games can be used to train employees. I hope you like it.

Games and Training: Everest

One game-based approach to teaching teamwork skills is to focus on very specific problems that are usually hard to identify and correct. For example, one such problem is that teams often prove dumber than their individual members. This is caused by a phenomenon known as “process loss” — the opposite of the “wisdom of crowds.” Process loss happens when teams fail to share information, get trapped by various conflicting goals, lose themselves in unproductive argument, and fall into a pattern of groupthink. A game called Everest, which was designed by Harvard Business School and Forio Business Simulations, forces players to grapple with all of these issues and overcome them as a team.

Everest sends MBA students climbing up its namesake. After watching a harrowing video describing the mountain climbing experience, students are divided into teams of four and assigned roles with individual descriptions and goals, ranging from extreme sports enthusiast to the trip doctor. Over the course of the next hour, teams work their way up the mountain, and are faced with a variety of challenges such as oxygen shortages, terrible weather, and sudden illness. In the end, the only way to win Everest is to work together as a team, share information, and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

As a game, Everest doesn’t use the flashiest graphics or deepest interaction to help people suspend disbelief. Players interact with a stylized map of the mountain through a selection of check boxes. The experience is rounded out with graphs and graphics that allow the team meteorologist to predict the weather and the team doctor to analyze illnesses. The game’s genius is in its core design — it assigns slightly different goals and provides slightly different information to each player. The doctor knows crucial information about various diseases, but cannot act on that information if the marathon runner fails to report that she is feeling ill — a likely occurrence given that the game encourages her to hide the information. Players are encouraged to chat privately with one another using an instant messaging system.

These simple elements combine to create a very immersive and emotional experience — conspiracies form between the meteorologist and the photographer, while the doctor hides the fact that there is only one dose of aspirin remaining. Halfway through the exercise, any observer will be able to tell the differences between teams that are overcoming process loss and teams that have succumbed to it. The functional teams are productively calculating their remaining oxygen supply, while the dysfunctional teams horde information. Needless to say, only the functional teams make it to the summit. The result is powerful lesson to all players, who learn in no uncertain terms what the cost of poor teamwork can be and the ways in which teamwork problems might be overcome.

In any game, players are rewarded for learning the rules of the game and applying those lessons properly. In Everest, the rules are designed to encourage teamwork and punish failures to communicate. It is a simple and elegant example of how games can be used to teach the principles of good teamwork. However, as carefully constructed and compelling as this games is, it fails to take advantage of one of the most interesting recent discoveries on games and teamwork: massively-multiplayer games naturally develop and train leaders as part of gameplay.

According to research by IBM and start-up firm Seriosity, people who play MMOGs like World of Warcraft naturally learn some of the same leadership techniques taught to MBAs. Indeed, every skill expected of leaders in the well-studied Sloan Leadership Model was found to be echoed in online games.[22] This is because players of MMOGs learn to operate in challenging environments that encourage people to develop their leadership skills. For example, to achieve success in an MMOG, players must jointly tackle specific projects (i.e. “we need to kill that dragon”) that require individuals to persuade and lead groups. MMOGs also help leaders with the difficult task of team selection by giving players clear roles and skills. A leader knows they need a teammate who can heal the injured or is capable of flying, and can easily see whether current team members have that skill. Finally, MMOGs tend to make incentives very clear (“the warrior wants armor, the wizard wants a staff, and everybody wants gold”), which makes it easy for leaders to align the goals of players on a team. Under these conditions, leadership emerges quickly and naturally, as individuals step up to lead a team, and then, just as rapidly, hand off control to other players. This provides lots of leadership practice to everyone involved.

In fact, in IBM’s survey, three quarters of all MMOG gamers surveyed said that the leadership skills they learned in games has helped them lead in the workplace. IBM’s study concludes, “It’s not a stretch to think resumes that include detailed gaming experience will be landing on the desks of Fortune 500 executives in the very near future. Those hiring managers would do well to look closely at that experience, and not disregard it as mere hobby. After all, that gamer may just be your next CEO.” In both virtual environments built for training teamwork, and virtual environments made purely for fun, the social and leadership skills learned are very real.

IMO, few things are as “newsworthy” as a major publisher declaring their real commitment to the pursuit of the serious game market — at least today, while declared publisher interest in serious games is still rare. And by “real commitment”, I mean more than just publishing another take on Brain Age. I was thrilled to attend Ichiro Otobe’s talk at GDC, a rough but relatively faithful transcript of which is copied below.

Background, for those who don’t know: Square Enix is developer/publisher of game franchises such as Final Fantasy, which has sold 75M units worldwide, and Dragon Quest, which has sold 41M units worldwide.

So why is Square Enix interested in serious games?

“Burden of new media” — games are affected by a generation gap. They are judged based on values appropriate to old media. For example, they are compared to books and movies and found lacking from a story perspective, but that’s not a fair comparison. Games should be judged by how they challenge your brain — not by how they compare (story-wise) to old media.

If we don’t expand games beyond the core market, we may find ourselves stuck in a niche, as opposed to becoming a mainstream medium. but we need active efforts to insure that we become mainstream.

So why do we (Square Enix) want to do serious games? Well, because then we can make games that are taken “seriously.”

Also, we can make money.

The “serious” comic book has elevated comic books in general to the status of mainstream media in Japan. The Himitsu (Secret) comic series by Gakken (1970s) told interesting, fact-based stories and sold over 20M copies. I learned many things from this kind of comic book. I learned Japanese history from comic books — my parents bought a 20 volume Japanese history comic book and I read it so many times I memorized it. If we push serious games in the same way, we can make games mainstream.

“Serious games” are already top sellers in Japan. Of the top 20 titles in Japan in 2006, you can call five of them “serious”. They are: two Brain Training games (7M units combined), English Training, Common Sense Training, and Cooking Navigation.

Serious games present many new challenges to developers:

• The customer is totally different (they have little interest in games, in general). We’re used to selling to people who love games, which is true all over the world. Our new customers have very little in common with these existing customers.
• The game design requires different skills. educational, medical, etc. Art design vs. “exploration” design — i.e. encouraging the customer to do whatever it is that stimulates their mind.
• Different business models
• Internal politics: for example, our serious game needs to compete internally with final fantasy for attention.

Our approach to these challenges:

• SG Lab — we partner with pros in the education space
  • JV established in 2006 with Gakken, a publisher which has strengths in education and an extensive networks with schools, libraries, etc. Gakken, again, is the company that helped turn comic books “serious” in Japan. SG Lab is focusing on BtoB (again, schools, libraries).
  • Gakken created a comic book, on behalf of the toiletry industry, that explained the importance of tooth-brushing and distributed it in schools. We’re following a similar model.
• Project GB — teach what we are good at… i.e. how to make games! Project GB is a serious game on the Nintendo DS that will communicate the fun of game development.
  • Game development involves many useful skills: programming, graphic design, music composing, writing, etc.
  • Many people choose to make a game when they are first learning programming — it’s just a natural outlet for that skill.
  • Project GB lowers the hurdles to successful serious game development. We’re targeting the same customer we always do. We know how to train people in game development because we have to train our employees. And the business model is known (straightforward Nintendo DS game), and same for internal politics (i.e. “we’re just making a regular DS game.”)

(At this point, a version of Project GB was demo’d. The demo showed, for example, how the player would be taught to understand the RGB color scheme and quickly pick the color he/she wanted on the fly.)

What are the challenges of serious game design?

• No cheating allowed
• We need to inspire user creativity instead of tell a story
• We need to avoid creating a completely open simulator; there needs to be a clear educational path from beginner to expert

Bottom line: learning is fun! Serious games should not be thought of as a “sugarcoat” for something bitter — they should communicate the fun of learning more effectively.

A question I’d like to pose: do you think a game with a serious theme (i.e. the Holocaust, or the African-American civil rights movement) could be commercially successful in the US market?

Such a game would almost certainly go a long way towards silencing skeptics who say “games can’t be art.” More importantly, it would help young people understand the great injustices of the past. Reading a textbook is one thing, playing a prisoner in a concentration camp is quite another.

But would these games reach enough people? Would they be profitable? And how would you make them fun without blurring the social message?

It works for movies, but…

Movies like Schindler’s List seem to be evidence of a possible market for this kind of game. However, there’s a big difference between asking consumers to commit to a passive two to three-hour experience and a longer, much more interactive experience. Furthermore, while the age of the average gamer is rising every year, it’s still true that most adults above the age of 35 aren’t playing too many console games… and of course, a fair chunk of Schindler’s List’s audience was probably above the age of 35. That’s primarily a profit issue; educationally, a younger audience is great!

But *if* there is a large enough market for this type of game, what would be the pre-requisites for success? I’d imagine that a game would have to strike the perfect balance between providing the player with a near-constant sense of accomplishment (i.e. the “fun” of the game), while frequently (but not constantly) bombarding the player with negative imagery, interactions, etc. Tasteful-if-infrequent comic-relief would, I suspect, be crucial.

Some examples

A Holocaust game could take place in the Warsaw Ghetto. Starting activities might be as simple as obtaining food and hiding personal valuables, but might quickly graduate to activities related to the establishment of the Jewish resistance, and eventually, the Jewish uprising. Player activity could even end on a “high note” (i.e. a major victory during the uprising), though the closing sequences of the game should clearly reflect that in the end, the uprising was crushed. I imagine this game playing like a stealth-centric FPS.

A civil liberties game might work best as a simulation (i.e. Sim City-ish). The player would be tasked with coordinating non-violent protests, helping individuals who are unjustly jailed, courting friendly journalists, etc. Bad things (threats, beatings, property damage) would frequently happen to the population the player is trying to protect, as would less frequent “major setbacks” (i.e. a legal attack by a powerful politician). I believe there have been attempts at making a game like this, though I don’t believe any of those were serious commercial attempts with a clear social message. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

In conclusion…

Sorry, no conclusion today. I’m just curious to hear what you all think.  :-)

It’s taken a while, but I want to return to my article on using games to tap the wisdom of crowds. First and foremost, I’d like to bring attention to the writings of Raph Koster. Raph informed me that he’s been thinking about this idea as well for quite some time now. However, Raph one-upped me: he found someone who actually tested the theory! From Raph’s blog:

What [Byron Reeves] showed was a mockup of a Star Wars Galaxies medical screen, displaying real medical imagery. Players were challenged to advance as doctors by diagnosing the cancers displayed, in an effort to capture the wisdom of crowds. The result? A typical gamer was found to be able to diagnose accurately at 60% of the rate of a trained pathologist. Pile 30 gamers on top of one another, and the averaged result is equivalent to that of a pathologist — with a total investment of around 60-100 hours per player.

Remarkable stuff! Raph also happened to blog about my article. Some of the comments on his post are worth drawing attention to:

Crowd intelligence can fail (and fail spectacularly) when there’s too much information passed between members of the crowd. Members start to alter their opinions based on the opinions of others, which skews the results. The online communities that build up around any popular game would seem to promote exactly this kind of skew.

An excellent point. Herd mentality can indeed disrupt the wisdom of crowds. However, the online communities that build up around games are not necessarily too different from the online communities that build up around publicly-traded equities (ever visit the forums at finance.yahoo.com?) Active discussion communities are not inherently bad. That said, there are also ways to negate “excessive” information sharing. Some examples:

• Use competition to discourage group-think. The scope of information-sharing is typically more limited when players (in any game genre) are working to best other players. Of course, blocks of information-sharing players will still form (in formal teams or otherwise) but that’s not necessarily a critical problem.
• Online game communities typically form (the most persuasive) opinions about the objective aspects of a design mechanic; i.e. “you’re better off using the shotgun than the pistol, except when you’re fighting at a great distance.” But if a challenge and its feedback mechanism both incorporate real-world data, as I suggested in my earlier article, it becomes harder for any individual (or the community as a whole) to form clear strategies around.
• Encouage population diversity to decrease the likelihood of groupthink. Distributing a game in different countries and courting players of different ages are both examples.

The subject of group-think probably deserves an entire post to itself, but you get the idea.

Game gods can’t help but always build into the warp and woof of every game their ideal vision of How Things Should Be. Their particular take on things, their demographics, class, experience, education, etc. all skew the very platform that you’re supposed to be using for some supposedly open-ended search.

A rather cynical comment (and one that ignores the entire range of “non-game-gods” — such as informed academics — who are trying to make serious games). In response, I’ll simply re-iterate: you can avoid many problems by incorporating real-world data into a game’s feedback mechanisms. If a game uses real-world, real-time data to judge the merits of a player’s actions, it should be less susceptible to simulation problems.

You can aggregate guessing, common sense, opinion and these are valuable insofar as they relay information, but it should not replace expertise and specialization. There is granularity to every subject matter that requires well trained decision making processes. Aggregated opinion says nothing and is invalid without applied knowledge making it actionable.

I think the results speak for themselves: when you combine players’ efforts, their accuracy equals that of the pathologist. Get a few hundred thousand players working on this problem (perhaps without even realizing it) and you’ve got the greatest and most cost-effective “second opinion” system in the history of health care — at least. And remember: a few hundred players aren’t susceptible to individual problems, like, for example, your doctor’s nasty divorce proceedings the morning of your examination.

And, from my original post, two comments by Ben Mattes:

A big reason games like SimCity can be as accessible (and successful) as they are is that they take the complex (city planning) and streamline it to a much more manageable level. Anything that isn’t “fun” about running a city is left out of the game (as it should be).

No arguments here. SimCity (as it is currently designed) wouldn’t be suitable for tapping the wisdom of crowds, and the game probably wouldn’t be fun if every aspect of it were modified to incorporate substantial amounts of real-world, real-time data. That’s why I think it makes more sense to focus on shaping just one aspect of an otherwise purely entertainment-centric gameplay experience (i.e. the cancer screening in Star Wars Galaxies, or weather prediction in Roller Coaster Tycoon.)

Would you really feel comfortable proposing a new zoning restriction for LA (taking into consideration all of the political, financial, moral and ethical issues) based off of the group-think of even a million SimCity gamers?

No, because I doubt I could design a (fun) game that would feed players all the relevant real-world information they’d need to make an informed decision. Too many variables. Maybe Will Wright could pull it off — he’s much smarter than I am. ;-)

I suppose the bottom line is, it’s easy to imagine lots of problems that you can’t solve by trying to tap the wisdom of crowds via games. Problems with no “correct”, objective answer (i.e. “does God exist” or “should abortion be legal?”) Problems that are impossible to communicate to the average person in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. PhD-level mathematics equations). Etc. But there are problems that, while quite complex, are possible to communicate to the player, along with a reasonable amount of real-world support data (i.e. cancer scans.) That’s what I’d like to focus on.

Every few months, it seems like a new “exertainment center” is unveiled (i.e. a glorified gym featuring a few exertainment devices, most of which have been on the market for a few years and have failed to develop a large customer base.) The latest, Overtime Fitness, got a writeup in ArsTechnica which inspired me to finally write this article.

I won’t mince words — the “exertainment industry” is a troubled beast, despite profound media interest and a notable influx of venture capital. Several exertainment startups (both on the gym and the equipment sides) have gone out of business in the past few years alone. The reasons for this are numerous:

Overpriced and/or Unenjoyable Equipment

First: most exertainment equipment is simply not very good. All the products on the market that I’m aware of have one or more of the following problems:

• Fuses traditional, commercial games (which were not designed with exercise in mind!) with funky equipment that tries (but fails) to overcome the inherent design contradiction.
• Fuses custom-built games to traditional (but proprietary) exercise equipment. Unfortunately in this case, the products tend to be dramatically overpriced (i.e. three to four times what gyms are accustomed to paying for cardiovascular equipment), poorly engineered (i.e. the equipment or software is likely to break down with heavy use), and/or poorly designed (i.e. the games are terrible, possibly because the people who designed them don’t know much about games.)
• Offers nothing more than a virtual landscape through which to locomote. Newsflash: that’s not a game, so it’s not a surprise that neither consumers nor gyms have proven terribly interested in it.

Conservative, Skittish, Hard-to-Reach Buyers

Second (and more insidiously): two decades of exertainment product failures have made traditional gyms — already conservative entities by inclination — extremely cautious about purchasing new exertainment equipment. Who wants to spend several thousand dollars on a single, exotic piece of equipment when there’s a decent chance the maker of that equipment will be out of business in the next few years? Who will support the equipment then? And even if the maker stays in business, will this fancy equipment be a pain to support? Gyms are fond of machines that don’t break easily, and more importantly, of manufacturers who’ve been in business for a long time, have a good reputation, and aren’t going anywhere. New, experimental “exertainment centers” don’t (collectively) have enough purchasing power to change this troubling aspect of the market landscape. So you’ve got a serious chicken/egg problem.

So How Did DDR Succeed?

Dance Dance Revolution is a rare ray of hope in the bleak picture I’ve painted. It’s both a commercial and an institutional success (they’re putting DDR machines in gyms and schools nationwide), and it’s unequivocally fun to play. But DDR, unsurprisingly, was created by professional game designers, and it was only adopted by fitness institutions after it had become a resounding success in the entertainment space. I can say with 99% certainty that if Konami had simply tried to pitch DDR to US gyms and schools (and to home consumers via traditional fitness channels), DDR would never have gotten off the ground.

Recommendations for Exertainment Entrepreneurs

I still believe that exertainment applications have an incredible future, both as profit drivers and (more importantly) as socially-beneficial forms of entertainment in an age of obesity. But it ain’t easy.

I think that budding exertainment product entrepreneurs should consider targeting consumers, not gyms. Thanks to Microsoft’s Live Vision Camera, Nintendo’s Wiimote, and Sony’s Eyetoy, there have never been more opportunities for exertainment in the home, and that doesn’t even include the large number of dance mats already on the market. A successful home game can always be updated and pitched to institutions. If, however, you really insist on going after gyms first, forming a strong alliance with an existing equipment manufacturer and distributor would probably be a very good idea.

As for entrepreneurs hoping to create the first great exertainment gym franchise… well, good luck to ya. There’s certainly a chance that someone will pull it off. In fact, possibly a good chance. But we’ll be driving past the wreckage of many failed hotrods on our way to that glorious finish line. I wouldn’t personally bet my money on any driver, no matter how dashing…

I’ve been mulling over an idea for several months now. It goes something like this:

Nowadays, everyone is talking about the broad potential applications of video games. Combating obesity. Managing chronic disease. General education. Employee training. Military preparedness and recruiting. The list seems endless. But one unique and important aspect of games has yet to be tapped: I believe they can effectively aggregate individual players’ actions into a form of collective intelligence.

Basis of the Idea: Wisdom of Crowds

First, a bit of background. Few things have become conventional wisdom so quickly as the Wisdom of Crowds, an idea that has captivated savvy businesses seeking to improve their internal prediction and decision-making processes. There’s great reason to believe the hype — just ask HP, which has used idea markets to generate more accurate sales predictions, or read about the Iowa Electronic Markets, which have predicted presidential election outcomes more accurately than the polls in 75% of cases.

However, despite a lasting surge in media, business, and academic interest, proven mechanisms via which to harness the wisdom of crowds remain in short supply. Idea markets have existed for many years, as have the “opinion aggregation” systems in websites (i.e. the user-generated product rankings found in Amazon.com). The chief obstacle is and always has been: how to properly incentivize the participants in a system, such that they generate meaningful, unbiased input.

Idea markets use real or virtual currency to give participants a vested interest in the outcome of their predictions. Opinion aggregation sites rely on social and cultural forces to encourage useful behavior. Unfortunately, anything other than markets based on real currency investments can be manipulated by those who wish to bias the system for personal gain (or perverse pleasure). Amazon, for example, has always struggled in the fight against “shill” product rankings. And of course, even real currency-based markets can be manipulated under certain circumstances, if the incentives are great enough.

Games are Wonderful Incentive Systems

There is, however, one well-known mechanism that does an amazing job of incentivizing people to think seriously and passionately about a given set of problems. A mechanism that compels people to meaningfully compete, against other people or against themselves, for no monetary benefit whatsoever. That’s right — video games.

For many years now, developers have been creating games that revolve around real-world problems such as resource development, political maneuvering, etc. One of the most famous of these is called SimCity; in it, players are taught to grapple with zoning issues, tax rates, etc. What if games that encouraged people to solve real-world problems (as a means of accomplishing larger objectives) were developed in tandem with corporate or government sponsors? Not “business games”, but commercially-viable, entertaining games that consumers might not even recognize as out of the ordinary?

Give Me An Example

Imagine a SimCity-esq game in which the player is given the financial reins to a region. The game could be set in a real location (i.e. California), incorporate real world constraints (i.e you can’t indulge in deficit spending forever), and could dynamically import the latest available real-world regional data via the Internet (i.e. demographic figures, current spending levels, etc). That way, when players begin a new game, they are immersed in a situation that closely resembles whatever situation California’s politicians are currently grappling with. But here’s the catch: once players get out of the tutorial phase, the game can begin recording their decisions and transmitting them to a central database, where they are aggregated into a form of “collective vote” on what actions to take (i.e. raise the sales tax or lower the sales tax). If the Wisdom of Crowds is correct, the collective choices of 100,000 game players in California (which would include knowledgeable people as well as many less-knowledgeable people) may very well be better than the choices of 1,000 Californian policy experts.

Sound like something that governments would never even consider? The French government recently announed that it would be releasing a video game called Cyber Budget that enables French citizens to play finance minister. Cyber Budget appears to be purely educational (and promotional?) in nature, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

There’s Gotta Be A Catch

Unfortunately, there’s one fundamental problem with this particular example: a video game player can only be as good as a simulation permits her to be. A game has to reward “correct” choices with positive feedback and “incorrect choices” with negative feedback. But, if governments could create a perfect simulation (and thus always reward the “correct” choices in any given situation) they wouldn’t need a video game to aggregate collective intelligence for them, now would they?

Put another way: games are incredibly effective educational tools, which makes them very useful in this context… but if you aren’t careful, you may end up making a game that simply “teaches” people how to win your imperfect simulation, rather than how to solve real problems! This doesn’t mean the government game absolutely can’t work for collective intelligence, but it does present a very serious design challenge.

So Was All This Just A Tease??

No, this was not a big tease. I just wanted to illustrate a potential problem with this idea early on, since it’s easy to be blinded by the possibilities, otherwise!

So how do we sidestep this pitfall? One solution is to incorporate real-world data into the game’s feedback mechanisms. If the game uses real-world, real-time data to judge the merits of a player’s actions, it should be less susceptible to simulation problems.

Consider the following example. Accurate weather prediction is extremely important to society, but the vast majority of people would never be interested in voluntary meteorology. However, weather prediction might fit nicely within the context of a turn-based game that plays out over a long period of time — something vaguely like Roller Coaster Tycoon (in which players operate a virtual theme park.) The mechanism would look something like this:

• Players are made to understand that spending heavily on advertising before a rainy day is not a good business strategy; after all, if it’s raining, customers are sure to stay away no matter what. On the other hand, spending heavily before a beautiful, sunny day greatly amplifies an already good turnout to your theme park.
• Players are given real-time weather data on their actual, physical region (in which the game is also set). They are given access to simplified meteorological tools. In game tutorials teach them how to use all this, of course.
• Players then base their advertising decisions on how much cash they have and what they think the weather is likely to be the next day. They may not realize it, but they’re implicitely “voting” for sunny weather when they spend more on advertising, and voting for terrible weather when the drop spending to zero. These “votes” are aggregated via the Internet.
• Since the game is turn-based (i.e. you take actions today and realize their full impact over the next several days), the game can take into account actual changes in the weather when giving feedback to the game players. In this way, the simulation is kept “pure” and players kept “honest.”

It’s possible that a turn-based convention isn’t necessary. Perhaps the majority of weather data in the game could be historical — i.e. players are exposed to true weather data from the past, and thus, the game knows exactly what should happen “a few days later.” However, every once in a while, the game is remotely triggered (by the developers) to expose current weather data to all players. In this situation, the game would use meteorologists’ current best guess about tomorrow’s weather in order to provide feedback to the game players. But meanwhile, the players’ collective votes could be used for predictive purposes, without too much risk of “impure simulation spoiling.” In this example, you’d get useful data on rare occassions (as opposed to every single day), but the tradeoff opens up many game design options.

Also: if you don’t like the theme park thing, weather prediction could be incorporated into a military-centric game, too. Or something else.

Economists Love This One

Some games (both single-player and massive multiplayer) already include complex economic systems as part of their design mechanic. It would be easy to embed real-world, real-time financial data (such as commodity prices) within those games. Companies could track how players react to the data, then aggregate the reactions to predict real-world economic events accordingly. And, as massive multiplayer games with rich, dynamic economies become increasingly popular, opportunities to learn from player behavior will be enhanced accordingly.

Players Don’t Need to be Experts — Or Even Close

Games like these could enable companies to harness the wisdom of thousands (if not millions) of independent individuals, and harness it in a manner that reduces the risk of group-think (one of the few deadly sins in a communal, predictive system). And while it’s easy to worry that “average people” can’t contribute to the solution of complex problems, evidence suggests that Average Joe has more to offer than you might think; at least, in aggregate. That’s a central premise of the Wisdom of Crowds.

I encourage my readers not to fixate on any given example of this idea, which may or may not have specific flaws. Rather, consider the bigger picture and — if you’re so inclined and don’t completely disagree with my premise — propose examples that may work better than mine, in this context. Collective intelligence has enormous potential value — we just need the way and the will to unlock it. Video games offer an interesting potential mechanism via which to do just that.