Talking to TED: transforming engagement by learning from videogames

Earlier this year, I went to Oxford to speak at the TED Global conference. The video of my talk is now online, and you can watch it on the TED site. I was talking about the topic that consumes most of my time when I'm not thinking about arts or books: videogames, and the staggering amount of human time and effort they claim every year. It's a $50bn global industry projected to surpass $80bn in a few years' time, while some games are—to the great concern of many—better than almost anything else we've ever devised at getting people to pour very real effort, time, attention and affection into virtual worlds.

This year's TED was about "the good news," so I tried to look beyond the understandable worries that games can feed, and to analyse the structural reasons that games are so good at commanding so much attention. It's a power in part due to how fundamental game-playing is as a human activity, and in part due to the staggering quantity and quality of data electronic games gather about what does and doesn't keep people playing. We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be satisfied by the world in particular ways; and to be intensely satisfied as a species by learning and problem-solving. We are now able to reverse-engineer that, and to produce environments that exist expressly to tick our evolutionary boxes.

When it comes to creating an actual game, the "fun first" principle is an absolute: before anything and everything else, a game must be fun. And building great games is an exceedingly tricky business. But not everything can be made into a game, and so I've come up with seven larger ideas about engaging people, based on the tactics developed by hugely successful games like World of Warcraft and Farmville. These are ideas that can be deployed far outside the world of games and—something I know many gamers will groan about—outside of "fun" as usually conceived within a game.

For those who want a potted verbal summary of these key points, here they are:

1. Using an experience system. This is something that games designer Jesse Schell has talked about brilliantly during this past year, and is actually being experimented with in places like Indiana University. In a classroom, for example, do away with grades: instead give students an avatar or a profile that progresses steadily based on things like attendance and performance. Everything should count in some way towards this precisely-measured, steady individual progression: a far more intimate, involving and nuanced way of measuring progress over time than most conventional means. 2. Multiple long and short-term aims. You break something down into many parallel tasks. You don’t just to say to someone, do 5,000 sums, or 100, or even 50: you create a whole spectrum of larger and smaller objectives that help people take ownership of their progress, and keep them feeling they are progressing and succeeding—as well as targeting particular sets of skills. 3. You reward for effort. People should be credited for everything they try and do. Don’t punish failure. Instead, reward and reinforce, and make everything count towards a clear measure of progress. As I've said elsewhere, one of the most profound transformations we can learn from games is how to turn the sense that someone has "failed" into the sense that they "haven't succeeded yet."

4. Rapid, clear, frequent feedback. This is absolutely central to all forms of learning and engagement. With many of the most intractable problems in the world today, like global warming and pollution, it can be almost impossible to learn or understand something when consequences and feedback are distant from causes. Showing a clear link between things, and allowing people to experience this experimentally, allows learning to take place: you need to be shown and to experience exactly how an action plays out, what it caused, whether your attempt worked or not.

5. Uncertainty. This is the real neurological goldmine so far as gaming is concerned. Dopamine elevates when you get a little prize for doing something, but what really lights up the brain is the unexpected reward: the one that couldn’t be predicted. And so the right amount of well-calibrated uncertainty can create intense engagement in all manner of tasks.

6. Windows of enhanced attention. This is about using the emerging field of neurological modelling to identify those moments when attention and memory are enhanced in the brain by an elevated dopamine level, and putting learning into them: literally dropping the nugget of fact into those few seconds when attention is elevated. It's early days here, but the potential of the field is vast.

7. Other people. If games should remind us of one crucial aspect of our evolutionary natures more than any other, it’s that reward is not just money or personal achievement points; and it’s not just solitary individuals slumped in front of screens: it’s the intense validation of doing something in comparison and in collaboration with others.

Virtual worlds offer an unprecedented laboratory for observing group psychology and motivation; from analysing Guild structures in games to exploring how the public visibility of participants' levels of achievement can encourage both competition and collaboration—transforming collective engagement. This is, for me, perhaps the most thrilling area of all.