I went into this keynote with no expectations, having never heard of either Jane McGonigal or Alternate Reality Gaming (for a great example of ARG, check out World Without Oil, one of Jane’s creations) before. In fact, I was debating whether or not to go to this or Secrets of JavaScript Libraries. However, I found this event to be unequivocally, the most inspiring and eye-opening event I attended during SXSW.

I had been fairly interested in positive psychology since reading an article in the NY Times magazine a while back so when Jane began her keynote with a quick introduction to positive psychology, it immediately struck a chord with me. Jane went on to explain that the reason that there has been essentially a mass exodus of people who have chosen to disengage from the real world in favour of virtual worlds is that the multi-player games contained within these virtual worlds are in Jane’s words,”the ultimate happiness engine.” Elaborating, Jane explained the three factors that allow multiplayer games to be better at making people happy than real life:

1. Better Instructions - Multiplayer games have clear goals with specific avenues for advancement while providing users with the opportunity and means to effectively participate.
2. Better Feedback - Ever get caught off guard by some of the feedback you receive in your annual performance review? That doesn’t happen in the world of multi-player games. They provide dynamic, real-time information about your performance along with metrics that you can aspire to all within a singular, highly responsive environment.
3. Better Community -Multiplayer games provide a shared context for action and decision making coupled with a sense of common purposed, creating a foundational experience.

Jane went on to argue that there is no reason why we can’t learn from multiplayer games and try to transport aspects of their happiness engines into other systems, something Jane has attempted to do with her alternate reality games. This is a fantastic way to approach system design. As someone who regularly conceptualizes and prototypes websites and web applications, I am ashamed to admit that in my mind, a user’s happiness has always been tied almost directly to task efficiency. While I am certain that is a big part of it, we should be thinking about ways that we can increase the user’s engagement and sense of fulfillment beyond the completion of key tasks. One great example of how a web application can utilize multi-player game elements to create a more fulfilling experience is the way LinkedIn tracks your profile’s completeness, something a gamer would immediately recognize as experience points. I know several people who have obsessed over their profile’s completeness and have worked really hard to get it to 100% and I wonder how many other people have invested more time in LinkedIn (consciously or subconsciously) than they otherwise would have in order to receive the validation of a higher completion score. Jane also broke down the key traits that make muli-player gamers successful. They are as follows:

1. Mobbability - The ability to do real-time work in large groups or a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously.
2. Cooperation Radar - The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task.
3. Ping Quotient - Responsiveness to other people’s request for engagement and the propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network.
4. Influency - The ability to influence others.
5. Multi-Capitalism - Fluency in working with different forms of capital (eg. intellectual, social, financial).
6. Protovation - The ability to innovate in rapid, iteritive cycles, essentially lowering the costs and increasing the speed of failure.
7. Open Authroship - The ability to create content for public consumption and modification.
8. Noise Management - The ability to produce meaningful information, patterns and commonalities from multiple streams of data.
9. Longbroading - The ability to think in terms of higher level systems and cycles, to see the big picture.
10. Emergensight - The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and multiple levels of complexity.

In the same way that these traits enable players to succeed in games, they can also be used as indicators of what types of features can be incorporated into systems in order to encourage a higher level of engagement. I can’t help but notice that Facebook and other social networks tend to be more rewarding for users who are able to embrace the majority of the above traits. Given their ability to tap into the same qualities that are embraced by multi-player games, is it a surprise then that they have been so successful in capturing audiences over the past few years? While this type of thinking may not be applicable in many situations, I do believe that it is widely applicable and should be embraced wherever possible. As evidenced by Jane’s games, this multi-player game influenced thinking can extend well beyond the interactive realm. Imagine the potential power of some of these elements being introduced into gym memberships, blood donor organizations and public libraries, to name a few.