video games i'm also slightly in awe of them i'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination in terms of technology in terms of concept but i think above all
in awe at their power to motivate to compel us to transfix us like really nothing else we've ever invented has quite done before and i think
and it shows no sign of slowing down in four year 's time it's estimated it'll be worth over eighty billion dollars that's about three times the recorded music industry
but i don't think it's the most telling statistic of all
really amazes me is that today
people spend about eight billion real dollars a year
buying virtual items that only exist inside video games this is a screenshot from the virtual game world entropia universe
earlier this year a virtual asteroid in it sold for three hundred and thirty thousand real dollars
and this is a titan class ship in the space game eve online and this virtual object takes two hundred real people
fifty six days of real time to build plus countless thousands of hours of effort before
and yet many of these get built at the other end of the scale the game farmville that you may well have heard of has
in society but we're here for the good news and the good news is that i think we can explore why this very real human effort this very intensegeneration of value is
and by answering that question i think we can take something extremely powerful away and i think the most interesting way to think about how all this is going on is in terms of rewards
and specifically it's in terms of the very intenseemotional rewards that playing games offers to people both individually and collectively
now if we look at what's going on in someone 's head when they are being engaged two quite different processes are occurring on the one hand there's the wanting processes this is a bit like ambition and drive i'm going to do that i'm going to work hard
and this kind of a world this vast flying beast you can ride around shows why games are so very good at doing both the wanting and the liking because it's very
it's pretty awesome it gives you great powers your ambition is satisfied but it's very beautiful
it's a very great pleasure to fly around and so these combine to form a very intenseemotionalengagement but this isn't the really interesting stuff
the really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it because what you can measure in virtuality is everything
every single thing that every single person who 's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured the biggest games in the world today are measuring more than one billion points of data
and by this i mean looking at what millions upon millions of people have done and carefully calibrating the rate the nature the type the intensity of rewards in games to keep them engaged over staggering amounts of time
and effort now to try and explain this in sort of real terms i want to talk about a kind of task that might fall to you in so many games go and get a certain amount of a certain little game y item let 's say
for the sake of argument my mission is to get fifteen pies and i can get fifteen pies by killing these cute little monsters simple
you can think about this if you like as a problem about boxes i've got to keep opening boxes i don't know what's inside them until i open them and i go around opening box after box until i've got fifteen
like warcraft you can think about it if you like as a great box opening effort the game 's just trying to get people to open about a million boxes
too difficult to find a pie so what do you do well you look at a million people no one hundred million people one hundred million box openers and you work out
if you make the pie rate about twenty five percent that's neither too frustrating not too easy it keeps people engaged
of course that's not all you do there's fifteen pies now i could make a game called piecraft where all you had to do was get a million pies or a thousand
be very boring fifteen is a pretty optimal number you find the you know between five and twenty is about the right number for keeping people going but we don't just have pies in the boxes
a hundred percent up here and what we do is make sure that every time a box is opened there's something in it some little reward that keeps people progressing and engaged in most adventure games it's a little bit in game currency a little bit experience
but we don't just do that either we also say there's going to be loads of other items of varying qualities and levels of excitement there's going to be a ten percent chance you get a pretty good item there's going to
and each of these rewards is carefully calibrated to the item and also we say well how many monsters should i have the entire world full of a billion monsters
we want one or two monsters on the screen at any one time so i'm drawn on it's not too easy not too difficult so all this is very powerful but we're in virtuality these aren't real boxes so we can do some rather amazing things
we notice looking at all these people opening boxes that when people get to about thirteen out of fifteen pies their perception shifts they start to get a bit bored a bit testy
games don't always do this and one thing they certainly do at the moment is if you got a zero point one percent awesome item they make very sure another one doesn't appear for a certain length of time to keep the value to keep it special and the point is really that
we evolved to be satisfied by the world in particular ways over tens and hundreds of thousands of years we evolved to find certain things stimulating and as very intelligentcivilized beings we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and
but now we can reverse engineer that and build worlds that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes so what does all this mean in practice well
second multiple long and short term aims five thousand pies boring fifteen pies interesting so you give people lots and lots of different tasks you say it's about
doing ten of these questions but another task is turning up to twenty classes on time but another task is collaborating with other people another task is showing your working five times another task is
this particular target you break things down into these calibrated slices that people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged and that you can use to point them towards individuallybeneficial activities
you reward effort it's your one hundred percent factor games are brilliant at this every time you do something you get credit you a credit
for trying you don't punishfailure you reward every little bit of effort your little bit of gold your little bit of credit you've done twenty questions tick it all feeds in as minute reinforcement
fourth feedback this is absolutely crucial and virtuality is dazzling at delivering this if you look at some of the most intractable problems in the world today that we've been hearing
amazing things about it's very very hard for people to learn if they cannot link consequences to actions
the element of uncertainty now this is a neurological goldmine if you like because a known reward excites people but
what really gets them going is the uncertainreward the reward pitched at the right level of uncertainty that they didn't quite know whether they were going to get it or not the twenty five percent this lights the brain up
and if you think about using this in testing in just introducing control elements of randomness in all forms of testing and training you can transform
as you probably know the neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine it's associated with reward seeking behavior and something very exciting is just
beginning to happen in places like the university of bristol in the u k where we are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain
and what this means is we can predictlearning we can predict enhanced engagement these windows these windows of time in which the learning is taking place
two things really flow from this the first has to do with memory that we can find these moments when someone is more likely to remember we can give them
the second thing is confidence that we can see how game playing and reward structures make people braver make them more willing to take risks more willing to take on difficulty harder to discourage
this can all seem very sinister but you know sort of our brains have been manipulated we're all addicts the word addiction is thrown around there are real concerns there but the biggest neurological turn on for people is other people
so players addressed this problem by spontaneously coming up with a system to motivate each other fairly and transparently what happened was they paid each other
a virtual currency they called dragon kill points and every time your turn up to go on a mission you got paid in dragon kill points they tracked these on a separate website
uses a version of this system tens of millions of people and the success rate is at close to one hundred percent
this is a player developed self enforcing voluntarycurrency and it's incredibly sophisticated player behavior
and i just want to end by suggesting a few ways in which these principle could fan out into the world i'll start with business i mean we're beginning to see some of the big problems around something like business
yes we could take that so much further by allowing people to set targets by setting calibrated targets by using
in terms of education perhaps most obviously of all we can transform how we engage people we can offer people the grand continuity
together and we can use the kind of group behaviors that we see evolving when people are at play together these really quite unprecedentedly complexcooperative mechanisms government well
one thing that comes to mind is the u s government among others is literally starting to pay people to lose weight so we're sayingfinancialreward being used to tackle the great issue of obesity
but again those rewards could be calibrated so precisely if we were able to use the vast expertise of gaming systems to just
jack up that appeal to take the data to take the observations of millions of human hours and plow that feedback into increasing engagement
and in the end it's this word engagement that i want to leave you with it's about how individual engagement can be
scale in games and if we can look at these things and learn from them and see how to turn them outwards
i really think we have something quite revolutionary on our hands thank you very much
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