Games matter (E)

0:00Who was the world lightweight boxing champion of the world in 1951? It's a multiple-choice question. The choices are Ronald Reagan, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, or none of the above. Hey, it's Kevin Beach, and this is a special archived episode of Akemba.

0:31Social mammals spend almost all of their time playing games. From the time they're cubs, they're wrestling, they're jockeying for position, they're considering their status. Sometimes they play games with their predators, but usually they're filling their day playing games with each other. Humans are no exception. I've been lucky enough to be a game designer for a really long time. The first game I launched was when I was 16 in high school, and then I did it as a professional at Spinnaker Software in the early 80s, pioneering the first generation of educational computer games. And what I've discovered through the years is that we love to play games, even people who say they don't.

1:19Those high school kids who say, I don't play games, end up spending hours, days, or weeks figuring out what to wear to the prom, which of course is nothing but a game. Or politicians who say, I don't like sports. Well, what exactly are you spending most of your day doing when you're a politician? It's a sport. However, the scoring is imprecise, and no one knows how long the halves last. We play games all the time. There are a few reasons. One reason is to think that we're smart or physically talented or have some sort of attribute that makes us feel good about ourselves. Another reason is that we want to feel lucky.

2:04Third reason is that we want to feel connected, part of something. And a fourth reason is to feel powerful. So when we think about something like trivia, we do it to reward ourselves with a small dopamine hit, reminding ourselves that we are, after all, pretty smart. So if you thought about that boxing question and you said, none of the above, because after all, none of our presidents were boxing champions, I'd have to tell you that you were wrong. The Jimmy Carter, who was a boxing champion, of course, isn't the same Jimmy Carter who was one of our most humble, moral, and amazing presidents. A different Jimmy Carter.

2:48Okay, fine. But you're ready to play again, because now you've got something to prove. Or consider the lottery. The lottery, one of the single worst investments that someone could consider, particularly someone who doesn't have a lot of money in the bank. The return is poor. Why play? You're playing because the return on dopamine, the return on feeling lucky, the return on that moment in between when you pick your numbers and you find out you lost, that moment is worth way more than$3 or$5. That what the wizards at the various casinos have figured out how to do is wire up the slot machines so that they are constantly playing with your need to feel lucky.

3:38The slots don't work the way they used to. First of all, the slot machine knows who you are and what your history is. They've given you this card that promises all sorts of bonuses and prizes but really it's designed to allow the slot machine to play you like a violin. They figure out what kind of player you are. Are you someone who responds to streaks? Are you someone who has trouble ignoring sunk costs? Are you someone who needs lots of little wins along the way to going broke? Or are you the kind of person that one big win will keep you in the game for a long time? The slot machines are optimized to keep each individual going just to the point where they're ready to quit because we're hardwired, some of us, to play games like that.

4:31Or consider the idea of being connected. What does it mean to be part of a little league team? You know, if we look at baseball, baseball is a youth sport. The problem with baseball is it involves 17 people watching one person screw up. Over and over again, they rotate. 17 people watching one person screw up. So what keeps someone playing baseball? Well, it's probably not that they're the fastest baseball player who ever lived. It's probably that being on the team means something to them. Avoiding humiliation when you get up to bat. Being the hero. Saving the game. game going all the way back to home.

5:19I mean, it's built right into the game itself. All of these dynamics that make us feel like we are part of something. And then the fourth one, the one that goes up or down depending on the culture of the moment, is to feel powerful. To feel like we defeated the other. To feel like we won. So a couple of the things that we discovered along the way. Inventing the first generation of graphic adventure games on the computer meant that we had to teach people how to play these games. They had parsers in them, so you could type, pick up the axe or open the door, and the computer would understand what you wanted.

5:59What we found, though, is that once people came to believe that the computer could understand them, they would start using normal human language. And the computer had no clue what they were saying. So what the game was doing was making people feel stupid. That wasn't successful. We invented something called the word window. You press the function key on your keyboard and all of the words that the computer could understand in that moment would show up. Well, it took away the wonder of, oh my god, this computer can read my mind, it added to it that feeling of superiority that so many of us enjoy getting from a game.

6:42Or if you're playing a crossword and you discover after you get stuck that the puzzle master has broken the rules of crosswords, that the crosswords don't just go straight up or down, they bend in the middle and take a right-hand turn, you're incensed because the game just made you feel stupid. The game made you feel impotent. Some people look at that and say, let me play again. I will teach the game a lesson. And some people look at that and walk away, maybe forever, because we don't want to be exposed, even in the privacy of our own home, to that feeling. After I left Spinnaker, I invented a game for an online service called Prodigy, which was the web before there was the web.

7:27Millions of people used Prodigy every day. Prodigy had a significant problem. The problem was if you used it a lot, they lost money. That's because they charged a flat monthly fee, and the cost of running all those modems was so high that what they needed were people who would use it a little. Not so little that they would quit, but little enough. So the goal of the game we invented, Guts, was to get people to use Prodigy every week, but just for seven minutes. And the rules of the game were pretty simple. There were seven trivia questions each week. Each trivia question had seven multiple choice answers.

8:10Each question got harder, so the sixth question was much harder than the second question. and the key rule was this. If you got it right, you doubled the number of points you had for that week. But if you got it wrong, we took away all your points from the seven-week game. So if you're in week five and you've gotten question four right, the question you need to ask is, do you want to move on to question five? Because if you do, you're risking five weeks worth the points. But if you don't, someone might move up ahead of you. Well, here's what we discovered. We discovered that people really liked this game.

8:53It was probably the most popular online game in history at its time. We also discovered that almost no one did the intelligent strategy of stopping. Almost no one got to round four or round five of that week's questions and then said, I'm going to stick. Because if I can just keep coming up to level five every week, I'll add up enough points over the course of the game that I'll win. No, people went all the way till they got one wrong. Every week, almost every single person went all the way to number seven. Why is that? Is it because the prize was so great? Well, it turns out the prize was putting your picture on the homepage of Prodigy.

9:39That's it. That's all you got. But the game was so competitive that we found people, one guy in Iowa, who had opened 42 Prodigy accounts so that he could play under many different names until he memorized the thousands of questions that were in the database just so that he could earn the status of putting his picture on the homepage of Prodigy for a week. We learned a lot from this experience. We learned that people engage in games because they're battling mostly with themselves, because they're seeking status, because they want to become part of something. Did people find intimate best friends because they were playing guts with each other?

10:21I don't think so, but they felt that way. They felt like they were engaged in parallel play with millions of other people. And for a minute, one of their big problems, one of our big problems was answered. for a minute. They weren't so lonely. They weren't so disconnected. On the strength of the success of the game at Prodigy, we started a company called Yo-Yo Dine. And the idea was to be the game show host of the internet, the Goodson Todman of the internet. And so we were going to do game shows. And the game shows were going to revolve around games of skill. If you could show that you were smarter than everyone else, you would win hundreds of thousands of dollars.

11:05One guy, we ended up giving him a million dollars. We were the first people to do that online. So it was really fun. Every day we'd come in and make up games. And of course, since they're games of skill, you need to have a tiebreaker that's not random. And that was even more thrilling for us as designers. What we did was, because we couldn't count on the speed of the internet, because some people had slow, slow, slow connections, we used a conference call to settle the tie. So there are 12 people tied for first place. Everyone calls into the conference call. We give them six questions. Each question has a number as the answer, and they have to do math between the six numbers.

11:48First person to say the right number at the end wins. Go. So now there you are with six questions. Everyone else has the same six questions. If you get them right, you're going to win a car, an autographed Babe Ruth baseball, World Cup soccer ticket, something fun. And the clock is ticking in real time. You can bet people were fully engaged. But here's what we discovered. We discovered that if we wanted to build something at scale, we couldn't challenge people to show that they were smarter than everyone else. because what our culture has done is taught people two things at the same time. One, that you're super special and really smart and probably smarter than everyone else.

12:34And two, that you're a fraud, that when it comes right down to it, lots of people are smarter than you. So given the choice of investing in a game where you have to show you're the smartest, or investing in a game where you can rely on luck or hustle. Most people want the second kind. Most people want the thrill of imagining that they're going to win without the reality of discovering that someone is better than them. And the culture has evolved as well. It has gotten there fast. This whole idea of overnight success, that you will be discovered, that a giant spin of the wheel will help you win.

13:20That if we think about Facebook and Twitter and all the social networks, they're nothing but a game. That's what's really going on. They're a game. It's a game show. And some people are using that game to win. Some people are using that game to make other people feel badly so that the player, I guess, feels a little better. And some people are using it to find connection. On a regular basis, there's a hot restaurant in Los Angeles. The identity of it changes from year to year that has an unlisted phone number. If you don't know the phone number, well, then you're not welcome here. What is that but a game?

14:00And the parking lot at the supermarket in the Hamptons, where you see each Ferrari just a little bit more expensive than each Bugatti or Lamborghini. What is that but a game? We're playing games high and low. We're playing games in street corners and we're playing games at the bank. The key thing to understand is that they're games. Real life doesn't have to be a game. Real life can be whatever we choose to make it. It can be about generosity and connection and possibility. It can be, did you open the door for someone else? because that can be a game too. When we were playing games as kids with dice and little wooden pieces, we knew that we were in a game and we could have our tantrum when we lost and put the game away and then it might be a week or two before we sat down to play a game again.

14:55But now, because everyone's got a buzzer and a clicker and a timer in their pocket, because we've attached a number to just about everything that used to be based on intuition and instinct. We've gamified all of it. So you're playing a game. You're playing a game when you run a business. You're playing a game when you launch a project. And you're playing a game when you wake up in the morning and turn on the internet. The question we need to ask ourselves is, is this a game worth playing? Am I getting better at this game? Is this game helping the people around me? Am I glad I'm playing the game?

15:33I don't play Monopoly anymore. I used to be good at it, I invented my own version of Monopoly that's significantly better than the other version. I don't play anymore. And the reason I don't play anymore is when I thought about what I was getting out of Monopoly, the feelings it was generating in me and the people around me when I was playing with them, I decided it might be better to have a cup of coffee with them instead. Your turn. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, in Wisconsin. Hi, Seth. Alicia from Charleston here. Hi, Seth. This is Anupam.

16:07Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi, Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. Three great questions to answer today. If you've got a question, please visit akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K. You'll see our show notes and you can press the appropriate button to ask your question. Hi, Seth. This is Pete from New Jersey. I've been wanting to ask this question for a while, but up until the Honest Signals episode, I really thought that it could be a Stephen King's pencil question.

16:55But regardless, your early TED Talk, you're wearing jeans, a black t-shirt and no glasses, but then seemingly you developed a style. And I was just wondering whether the style that you have with the glasses and the socks and the tie and everything, if that is an honest signal of who you are, where you were, Or were you changing your style in order to send signals that you thought were more important to make sure that the message gets across, putting it in a package that makes sense for your particular audience? There's a dress code at TED. Famously, at the very first TED conference, Richard Saul Wurman, the founder, got on stage with a big pair of scissors and cut Nicholas Negroponte's expensive silk necktie right off of his chest.

17:58The idea behind the dress code is this. Your ideas matter more than your appearance. And so, amping up the way you look when you go to TED isn't a signal that says, I've got something to say. It might be seen as a signal that says, I've got nothing to say. Many people don't realize that the first decade or so of TED was filmed, but nothing happened to those recordings. So you're right, the purple cow talk I gave, I'm wearing a turtleneck and jeans, and I'm glad I didn't know that that was going to be on the internet. I don't think I would have done quite as good a job. But when I'm not at TED, I have a choice to make.

18:41If I'm going to be on stage, if I'm going to be there in front of people, the choice is, how do I respect the audience? How do I send them the signal that I have something to say today? And I made the decision a long time ago that the way that I looked was a signal that's up to me. And I believe that's true for everybody. Clothing is always a signal. You can send the signal of, I want to fit in. You can send the signal that may be seen as, I am confident. I am au courant. I am stylish. I am poor. I am saving my pennies. These are all signals that are available to each of us. If you show up Ginger Rogers style, completely rocking a pair of high-heeled shoes that you could run a marathon in, to a certain audience, that sends a message of confidence.

19:37If you show up with high heels that are a size too big, and it's clear you haven't spent a lot of time in high heels, you might have been better off wearing flats. These are all choices that we make when we send these signals. That's one important reason why a dress code might work in a high school setting. It takes the pressure off of sending signals. Hey, Seth. Josh from Ohio here. Thanks for the recent podcast on the National Anthem and Colin Kaepernick. I'm not sure Colin's cause is any better today than it was prior to him doing what he did prior to the National Anthem. And that's because, in my view, for the cause to move forward, there has to be some consensus built.

20:21And there's got to be some persuasion of those that don't believe in what you do and influence and having them join you in what you believe. And I'm just not sure that offending those people is an effective persuasion technique. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, Seth. And I mean, I understand that he's trying to create change and draw attention, but I think he's only raised his profile amongst people that already believe in what he does. Thanks, Seth. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. I think we agree here. The point of the episode about anthems is that it is tempting and powerful and scary to show up in front of the late adopters, the majority, the people who aren't interested in change.

21:11And the way Sachi and Littlefeather did get their attention for a while. But in order for cultural change to happen, something else also has to happen. The grassroots, person to person. People like us do things like this. So the episode, of course, wasn't about the politics of Colin Kaepernick. The episode was about the possibilities we have in changing our culture and the hard work we have to do from the top to the bottom. Hey, Seth, this is James from Glendale. And in your latest episode, Anthems, Pledges, and Change, I'm curious to know, when you define those three groups, the three being traditionalists, the masses, and neophytes, do you see any distinction between that and our current political polarization?

22:00Thanks. Thanks for this question. It gave me a chance to clarify. I said neophytes. I didn't mean that. A neophyte, of course, is a beginner. I meant neophiliacs. A neophiliac is someone who likes things that are new. And what we know is that you're not born that way and you're not that way all the time. So somebody who is a late majority or mass market or laggard when it comes to, say, clothing might be a neophiliac when it comes to the NFL draft, that we make a choice every time we choose to pay attention. Are we choosing to look at something because we're interested in what's going to happen next?

22:42Or are we avoiding looking at things because we don't want things to change? So we can't have a demographic associated with this. We don't know, based on your age or your zip code, how you're going to act in a given situation. It's a choice that early adopters clump up through their activity. If you go to the giant Saks Fifth Avenue shoe department in Manhattan, you will find nothing but neophiliacs when it comes to buying shoes. There's nobody there who belongs in a payless. This isn't even based on income. It's based on a choice of what people want to see. So your question about today's political environment.

23:24I think it's important to understand that today's political environment is driven in large part by the media because the media now profits from creating breaking news more than ever before. So it's not the reality of the choices that are in front of us. It's the way those choices are being described and the way we're being asked to engage with them. So, yes, there's always been, on the part of independents, Republicans, Democrats, socialists, communists, capitalists, there have always been causes that in that moment are for the neophiliacs. Hey, we've got something new. And there have always been, among those same parties, causes that say, don't change anything.

24:15It's not broken. Let's be conservative about this. And so I think it's a mistake to say that one group is always on behalf of the laggards and one group is always on behalf of the neophiliacs. That's not true. I think what's true is that waves go through our culture and those waves cause different people to take action differently, to pay attention differently at different times. And the engine of that, the ratchet that moves it forward, is often technology. It also might be the competitive nature of markets or politics. Someone shows up and we have no choice but to respond, even if we don't want to.

25:01Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.