Strange Aeons

The Interactive Institute has a range of energy consumption interfaces, devices and services designed to feedback to folk about the amount of energy that they are consuming and possibly also to influence their behaviour with respect to their energy consumption. These include:

• The Energy Coach - a service to help you take better control of energy usage
• The Energy AWARE Clock - a feedback device that visualises the spikes of energy usage in your household on a clockface.
•  The Energy Plant - an LCD that visualises household electricty consumptions as a growing plant

Many of the ideas in isolation are not entirely novel although they do have a shiny factor that isn't to be found in similar offerings elsewhere. For example, OPower have a similar system that they describe as their smart grid front-end. This is designed to influence customer behaviour through a combination of feedback via a hardware peripheral, good usage analytics and visualisation, and social influence, e.g. see how much energy you are consuming compared with the aggregated consumption of your neighbours.

One of the interesting things that the Interactive Institute is doing is combining serious games with energy consumption monitors. The important thing I find with this approach is having a game that is worth playing in the first place. Once you have done that I can imagine a game in which data from the sensors in your, and possibly your neighbours houses, affect the game world. Increased energy consumption might negatively affect the variety or amount of game items available. Other things, such as running a higher consumption device at a peak usage time might affect how exciting or dangerous the game world is.

I have posted before about gamification and the use of persuasive techniques to improve the efficiency of drivers. For example, the Ford Fusion prototype dashboard and the use of simple lights and meters to encourage drivers to accelerate smoothly without aggression. Here is another take on the same idea that doesn't require buying a new car just an iPhone. The glass of water app displays a glass of water and the aim is to not spill any of the water as you drive. I am assuming that the app is correlated to the movement of the iPhone so that if you drive smoothly then you won't spill the water, and hence will improve your driving efficiency.

This seems like a great way to improve fuel consumption. Link it to an online leaderboard, possibly with prizes for the best drivers, or best improvement, and you can make a broader multiplayer game out of it. Link the leaderboard to each individual drivers social network and you might actually begin to get real improvements in average drivers fuel consumption. Of course there is also a corresponding race-to-the-bottom game that could conceivably develop as well and the rules should take this into account. If the GPS could also be used to log journeys then, suitably anonymised, it would be interesting to visualise whether there are particular roads, areas, or times that lead to increased fuel-consumption or bad driving. I also wonder how much penetration would require before we could use a system like this to monito traffic flow. Whilst many autonomous-traffic management systems rely on transponders attached to individual cars or cameras watching all vehicles, perhaps there is a lower bound to the number of vehicles we track that can still give meaningful statistics about traffic conditions?

I do wonder about how traffic police in the UK would see this though. In one sense it is only an add-on version of what could be built into the car dashboard, and is not that different to a tom-tom, especially if there were an audible cue that could be used so that the driver wasn't watching their glass rather than the road. That said, an iPhone has a screen and could be used to display video and hence should not be within the drivers line-of-sight as far as I am aware.

Now we just need an android version, and cheap mass produced widget that sits on your dashboard and does the same thing for the non-smart phoners amongst us.

In her TED talk, Jane McGonigal hypothesizes that the pursuit of the “epic win” is one of the prime motivators for gamers who sink many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into their game of choice. She suggests that when we design games that are aimed at tackling a real world problem or achieving some real world goal we need to take advantage of the incentive to participation that the epic win represents. I think that it is particularly in the context of world-changing hard problems that this approach represents another tool in the arsenal.

There seem to be many people arguing against this approach however (commenters in this thread [boing boing] and this one [ massively ]), some taking the idealistic approach that gamers should just stop playing games and should get out into the world and solve those hard problems directly. The problem is that this has not, and probably will not, happen. Others take the approach that because “I Love Bees” or “World Without Oil” are not their kind of game and are less fun than say World of Warcraft, then the whole approach will come to nothing, not realising that what McGonigal has been doing over recent years is to peform the fundamental research and develop the theoretical basis that will underpin the dynamic for participatory games that affect the real world. Finally, others are not seeing that there is more to gaming than playing the latest console game. For some gaming is about rolling the dice and playing according to the rules, for others gaming is about playing with the rules themselves to see what unintended consequences stem from them, for others, gaming is about saying, “to hell with the rules lets just play”. It is this final sense of play, and to a lesser degree fun, as prime motivator, that set McGonigal’s conception of games apart from the others. It is less about the rules and more about the interaction. When you see this you then see that there is already an interplay between the real world and the game world, for example, we can take real world situations and model them formally using games ,as I do with my research into dialogue, or we can do as McGonigal has, take real world situations, such as a looming oil crisis, and associated problems, such as getting people both to care and to become involved, and build a game that raises participation, inspires dialogue, poses possible solutions, and ultimately attempts to the fix the problem. These two approaches are essentially sympathetic and could be unified;

1. taking a problem,
2. using a formal model to characterise the problem,
3. playing with the formal model, assuming a linkage back from this to the real world, something that is rarely direct
4. affecting the problem by manipulating the game model rather than working directly

It is steps 3 and 4 that McGonigal is really looking at here, using the game abstraction from the real world problem to inspire, structure, and scaffold involvement rather than as a way to withdraw from involvement. Once you see this you also see parallel approaches being carried out elsewhere, for example, the Play Decide dialogue card games which are being developed to support public engagement and understanding of real world issues like, climate change, nanotechnology, neonatal screening, stem cell research, and xenotransplantation, to name but a few.

I am sure that eventually McGonigal’s ideas will underpin or at least inspire games that affect the real world on a large scale. This is not happening yet but what is described is the vision for how we can take something that is essentially about withdrawing from the real world, which is gaming, and turn it on its head, so that that withdrawing from the real world causes you to simultaneously become intimately involved with it.

The world has had problems ranging from difficult, to tough, to hard, for many years and yet it is still a minority of people who get involved and try to fix them. The vast majority are happy to let others fix the world for them. McGonigal’s approach potentially brings many new eyes into focus on these problems and lets the owners of those eyes get involved, via game playing, without getting involved, although possibly many gamers who become as intimately aware of the problem as the games allow will also get involved for real.

To find out more about McGonigal's ideas you can follow her on twitter @avantgame or read her academic papers. A more accessible description of her ideas can be found in her recent book "Reality is Broken ".