Reality is Broken, by Jane McGonigal

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Chris Hibbert

Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken is a fascinating exploration of how we could make reality better by adapting various lessons that designers of today's best alternate reality games (ARGs) have learned and applied to make their games more fun. In order to do so, McGonigal has to spend a good amount of time explaining what makes games fun, sticky, and great arenas for training us to be better at collaboration. I found it very informative, since I'm currently helping develop Ingress, a MMO, real-world, ARG. If you're interested in games, or would like your life to be filled with more fun and more purposive action, I recommend the book.

McGonigal starts out by describing several ways in which games are well designed to draw us in and keep us entertained. One of the more important ways in which games keep us in a state of flow is by arranging challenges so we can always be working just at the comfortable edge of our abilities and constantly trying to get better at whatever we're doing. The psychology literature (follow the previous link) has shown that these are crucial to the kind of happiness that is satisfying over the long-term rather than merely momentarily entertaining.

McGonigal describes ARGs as antiescapist games; games you play to get more out of your real life, as opposed to games you play to escape it.

She describes quite a few games she has designed, some for entertaining other people, some to entertain herself or help herself through a tough period in her life, and some to get people to work together on a collective goal. There are games in each of these categories that are worth learning about, and if you're interested, you should read the book. My favorite is probably SuperBetter, which is an approach to self-help disguised as a game.

While in the midst of writing this book, McGonigal had a serious concussion, and struggled to recover. After a month or two of enforced rest that didn't lead to the hoped-for recovery, she took her game design skills and made a game out of doing a little bit of the right kind of retraining every day. Game design taught her that she should set herself a series of goals that were reachable, but not trivial; that she should enlist friends to provide reinforcement, and that she should find ways to reward herself for sticking to the plan, and for every little bit of progress. The right reward structure keeps you coming back for more. She's shared that approach and the rules framework she devised so others with analogous challenges can follow the same path.

Reality is Broken offers 14 relatively concrete Fixes for Reality. These are lessons from the way modern games are designed that can be applied to the real world to make life more fun and business more productive, to help us achieve important goals collectively, and to help us apply the things we learn while playing to our daily lives and relationships. I don't think she hit all 14 out of the park, but probably 80% are worth paying attention to, which is a pretty high achievement level.

Along the way, McGonigal introduced me to new terms for emotions that I recognized immediately, but didn't have words for before. Fiero (from an Italian word for pride) is a term for the feeling you get from triumph over adversity. It's the feeling that first led to end-zone celebrations, though nowadays those are often more about taunting than celebrating. Another useful term is naches, which is a Yiddish word for pride in the accomplishments of those we've coached or mentored. There's a substantial portion of the Ingress player base that gets their rewards by helping other people get better at the game.

Reality is Broken is a very entertaining presentation of the idea that while modern ARGs are packaged and enjoyed as games, they serve a serious purpose in helping us enjoy our real lives, and some of the ways they do so could be usefully applied outside of the world of games.

Understanding Institutional Diversity: Elinor Ostrom

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Chris Hibbert

Elinor Ostrom's Understanding Institutional Diversity presents some of the work that led to her Nobel prize last year. Ostrom has developed new frameworks for analyzing the way people organize to manage shared use of common resources. She seems particularly interested in the interaction between spontaneous orders (whether or not relying on markets) and government systems at different scales. The core of the analysis is a robust grammar for describing how an institution is organized and enforces the rules it intends to impose on participants. The grammar lays out 5 elements to be described in relatively standardized language, which results in descriptions that make it possible to compare disparate institutions. Systematically cataloging their relevant features makes it easier to compare institutions to find out what common features lead to their relative levels of success.

Few of the institutions Ostrom studies are government mandated; most have been around longer than the local government. This means the mechanism they use to enforce adherence to traditions, and adjudicate disputes must rely on something other than the rule of law and police power for its effectiveness. Ostrom shows that there are a variety of approaches, and there's a systematic relationship between membership forms and workable enforcement mechanisms.

The grammar Ostrom presents has five elements: the attributes that qualify someone as a participant in the system; whether actions are permitted, required, or forbidden (may, must, must not); the covered actions; the conditions under which the rules apply; and the consequences of not following the rule. These components can be used to describe rules, norms and shared strategies. Rules have all 5 components, norms specify all but the consequences, and shared strategies are statements that only contain the first three components. When using this framework, you have to be aware that most rules can be rephrased between prohibitions and compulsions without changing their sense. When comparing two institutions, a little care is usually enough to penetrate this surface distinction. For example "Actor X is forbidden to take action Y" could be written as "X must perform a non-Y action" or "X does not have the option of doing Y".

Writing descriptions of a variety of institutions using this consistent format has allowed researchers to catalog the kinds of attributes that are used by long surviving non-governmental institutions and contrast those with the kinds of attributes that governments often rely on. The successful private institutions tend to depend on attributes that reinforce a sense of community and mutual obligation (residence in a locality, paying dues or working in a local organization) rather than ones that are easier to administer in a consistent way and have a surface appearance of fairness (paying for a license, passing a test).

The book is organized in three parts. Part I provides background of the context in which Ostrom writes, and introduces vocabulary and some canonical problems. Much of this content is pulled from earlier papers and doesn't flow seamlessly. Other parts are reviews of now well-known examples and experiments and can be skipped or skimmed if the material seems repetitious. Part II explains the grammar's framework, gives some justification, and shows how it has been applied (by Ostrom and others). This is the meat of the book and rewards careful attention. I thought the presentation was clear and the contents quite valuable. In Part III, Ostrom talks about the implications of the theory and the approach for designing and repairing real world institutions.

This was the first place I got a feel for her own attitudes, and I was pleasantly surprised. Since most of her work has been in the context of common pool resources, and she studies communal or voluntary solutions, I expected her to argue that emergent systems somehow "naturally" resolve the issues. Instead she argues that markets have a crucial role, and that it's important that there be multiple institutions at various aggregation levels so rules and meta-rules can be handled through institutions with different incentives and varying feedback systems.

She seems most averse to solutions imposed by central authorities, since they seldom know enough about local conditions to be able to design systems of reciprocity that will fit with the ways that people interact in different locales. In order for a common pool resource institution to succeed over the long term, the participants have to feel ownership of the resource and of the reward and punishment system so that they'll both follow and enforce the rules. If someone else is responsible for enforcement, then the people with the most knowledge of local activities won't be watching one another carefully, and they'll find ways to shirk when times get tough. If they're watching one another, they'll assume they're being watched, and will be much more likely to follow the rules.

I've read other books that talk about how people solve problems in the absence of law and government, but this is the first to present a framework for analyzing existing approaches. The framework doesn't give the answers, but Ostrom's work has allowed her to look at many different approaches that have been taken around the world, and to systematically compare them to see what works and what doesn't. Her conclusions should be studied widely.

Progress on Augmenting Intelligence

I just read a new paper by Jeff Shrager (currently at CommerceNet, which funded my work on Zocalo in 2005 and 2006; thanks to Tom Malone of MIT's Sloan School for the pointer to the paper) on a system designed to support group reasoning processes based on Bayesian principles. Having just read Eliezer Yudkowsky's post on Artificial Addition, I was sensitive to the notion that some older attempts at AI had failed to enforce any semantic relationship between the nodes that are intended to represent particular concepts.

The system described by Shrager et. al. uses a language understanding system (presumably based on the same tools as PowerSet relies on; I've been admitted to PowerSet's trials, but can't access the activation code, so I haven't tried their demo yet). This means that for the first time to my awareness, the system can help by finding semantic connections between assertions. This isn't trying to be AI, but computer support for collaborative reasoning is just as much on the path to enhancing our power to change the world as is AI.