From World Game to Global Gaming
The chart below estimates the size of the global market for the various hardware platforms on which gamers play games. As we consider how the big concept of World Game has become something else, it is worth noting the 8.5% estimated rate of growth of this market and the nearly $100 Billion revenue estimate for 2016. Commitment to spend that amount to clean up our ocean and to shift from a plastic disposal society could be critical to save life on this planet. While we’re gaming, the Titanic (our Spaceship Earth) is sinking.
Four Historical Precedents
earthDECKS is inspired by four distinct historical precedents:
- World Game,
- Meetup,
- Wikipedia, and
- Pokémon GO.
World Game
Buckminster Fuller’s concept for World Game (1961) hails from the pre-Internet era, when massive, multi-player online games did not exist. Several hundred players assembled in university gymnasia to play World Game. An enormous dymaxion map was laid out on the floor as the gameboard. A day-long improvisational theater experiment in collaborative problem-solving occurred. All players were given hard copy manuals, instructions and assigned roles, either as officials or as citizens of countries (with the number of citizen gamers proportional to each country’s actual population). The players, from college-age to senior citizens, became engaged in this experiment. At the end, some recounted the significance of what they realized through playing World Game and how it changed their understanding of our co-dependency on this planet.
For several decades this hard copy version of World Game was played around the world and described as “a script … [for] a production ensemble of gigantic proportions to achieve a new science of action in testing out the script. That is what a metaphor can do when it is powerful enough and when it is successfully delineated by the consummate artist of his era – that is what Buckminster Fuller has done with the design of his World Game.” In May 1968 World Game was presented by Dr. Fuller to a White House sponsored conference, convened for this purpose in Washington, D.C.; to the Muskie Committee to establish a select Senate Committee on Technology and the Human Environment in March 1969; to the Joint National Meeting of the American Astronomical Society and the Operations Research Society of America in June, 1969; and to the United Nations Conference on Human Survival in May, 1970. After an intense flurry of interest, this Reality Game, conceived ahead of its time, was archived. Buckminster Fuller was neither the first, nor the only person to explore such ideas. H. G. Wells published his book World Brain in 1938, arguing that the world needs a new kind of organization, “a super university I am thinking of, a world brain; no less. It is nothing in the nature of a supplementary enterprise. It is a completion necessary to modernize the university idea.”
Meetup
Scott Heiferman, Co-Founder of Meetup, described how adversity inspired him to start Meetup. Living in New York City at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks, he observed how people in New York City galvanized into neighborhood communities in the aftermath of that traumatic event. People who had not spoken to their neighbors now spoke; they had something to ask about, an experience to share. Observing how community formed around this event inspired him to want to use the Internet to make it easier for people to connect with strangers in their community. Meetup was conceived to harness the effectiveness of online organizing to bring people together for in-person events. Meetup served a real need and grew to more than 29 million users and more than 266 thousand groups in more than 180 countries [28].
Wikipedia
Wikipedia now has more than 30 million users, and a format to elicit swarm intelligence from collaborators who do not know each other [40]. Each Wikipedia co-author is an experimenter, initiating an article that elicits feedback from other co-authors. Each article evolves as those interested in the topic contribute. Key principles of collaborative intelligence are illustrated in how Wikipedia articles converge toward improved coverage of topics:
1. Collaborative autonomy describes how each autonomous agent, in this case an author, works within the generic instructions (weak linkage) of Wikipedia formatting and editing, transforming generic instructions into specific content in the context of the topic of each article.
2. Performance criteria take precedence over goals as each agent operates with game rules for how to make decisions in context, but no pre-stated goal for an article and no final control of the article that will emerge through joint authorship with other authors whom the original author has probably never met. Outcomes are not controlled by goals; they emerge from uncertainty.
3. The critical path of each agent writing an article is guided by the situation architecture of the context, and what other authors add or edit. Each agent exercises Autonomy and capacity for Pattern Recognition [A|PR] as a local information processor, compiling received data in context.
4. Effective novelty is the outcome of content integration, converging toward context-responsive solutions by applying the principle of weak linkage through which natural evolution operates.
5. Agent search mirrors the capacity of evolutionary search to harness useful results through continual cycles of experiment, adjustment and improvement, supported by the swarm intelligence of a huge distributed community of authors.
6. Embedded Continual Assessment (ECA) mirrors environmental selection, as editors respond to each experiment, providing rapid feedback to guide the next iteration.
Wikipedia demonstrates collaborative autonomy as each contributor brings unique motivations, skills and knowledge to a shared framework. Performance criteria take precedence over goals as each article evolves, a work in progress, reassessed differently by each new editor.
Pokémon GO
Gamebox versions of Pokémon have existed since 1996. A redesigned game for the smart phone mobile platform called Pokémon Go was released July 6, 2016 as a mobile app. Within one week of the Pokémon Go July 6th release date, the game had surpassed 10 million downloads (a record for a mobile platform game) and by July 14 the game hit its peak of 25 million daily active users, more than Twitter, Spotify, and Pandora [5]. On August 1st, Engadget reported that the game had been downloaded 100 million times and was generating $10 Million in daily revenues from in-game sales (the game itself is free to play).
After this meteoric rise, the game rapidly declined in popularity. The simple gameplay that worked for a rapid start was too uninteresting to hold interest. Our objective to launch Code Alerts as a parallel reality game can be designed learning both from what worked to achieve rapid takeoff and what was inadequate to sustain interest. Code Alerts, as a 21st century update of World Game, with new tools, is timely, critical, and can strike a chord. Like the new version of Pokémon Go, earthDECKS features an augmented reality overlay so that as a player travels the real world, his digital avatar “Guide” leads him on a map gameboard. But going beyond Pokémon Go, players have real contributions to make to the world.
Sources:
Fuller, R. B.: The World Game: Integrative Resource Utilization Planning Tool. Foreword by Thomas Broussard Turner. ix. (January 1971) https://www.bfi.org/sites/default/files/attachments/literature_source/world_game_series_document1.pdf
Wells, H. G.: World Brain. London: Methuen. (1938)
Meetup: About: https://www.meetup.com/about/
Zann Gill. Wikipedia: Case Study of Innovation. In: The Experimental Nature of New Venture Creation: Capitalizing on Open Innovation 2.0, edited by Martin Curley and Piero Formica. Dordrecht, Springer. (2013).
Moon, M.: Pokémon Go’ hits 100 million downloads. It’s also earning $10 million in daily revenue. Engadget. (August 1, 2016) https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/01/pokemon-go-100-million-downloads/
Wikipedia Statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics