What’s Urgent EVOKE again?
Depending on how you look at it, EVOKE is either a game or a learning experience — or both. Designed and run by alternate reality game master Jane McGonigal, EVOKE is supported by the World Bank Institute. At the end of Season One, EVOKE has 19,329 member-players. It was conceived as a way to teach young people to become social innovators; each week, players explored a social issue by learning about it, taking action on it, and imagining a future where that issue has been addressed. Players posted evidence of their work on the EVOKE site and received credit in the forms of runes and points in different EVOKE Powers (creativity, collaboration, local insight, sustainability, courage, knowledge share, resourcefulness, spark, vision, and entrepreneurship — labeled as key skills for social innovators). This week, some players are preparing EVOKATIONS, or proposals for real-world projects they would like to work on. The World Bank Institute hopes to award up to 20 $1,000 grants to start the best EVOKATIONS. Originally, the rules specified that entrants had to be born in 1985 or later, but that was changed this week when the game runners realized that many of the players were actually older than the target demographic.

What I did
Players were assigned quests and missions. Quests were single-page questionnaires that prompted players to think about their own actions and motivations; taken together, the 10 quests make up each player’s personal story. I completed all 10 quests and you can read them on my profile page (the first one is displayed; use the “Select a Story” drop-down to see the other 9).

For the first five weeks, I dived into each mission, completing one per week, more or less. I temporarily cut way back on my World of Warcraft playing time so that I could focus on EVOKE, and I really enjoyed it. Right around the middle of the season, I had some travel and some other things come up and I fell a bit behind; at the time of this writing, I have completed at least one objective for each of the 10 missions, but only 7 missions are completely finished. I have until next Wednesday to submit the remaining objectives (I think; the rules are a little unclear). I’m hoping to do at least a couple more, but I’m not sure I will get through all of them. I’ve made my peace with this possibility :-)

What I learned
This was not only a 10-week course on social issues and how to make a difference, but also a journey into who I am personally. There are so many big, important problems in the world, and it makes me glad that people have different interests because there’s no way any one person can fully engage with all of them. I learned about local issues — for instance, I didn’t understand the connection between the salmon season and agriculture in the Sacramento River area, and now I have at least a tenuous grasp on how they are related. I learned about global issues and what daily life is like in a lot of other parts of the world. Not that I was clueless, but after reading the stories of people who live in those places I understand a little more than I did before. I also learned about organizations that actually help, and organizations that seem to help but don’t make efficient use of their resources, and organizations that try to help but don’t really look to see what kind of help is needed or wanted.

I learned lots of ways to make a small difference, things that I can do personally. I’m not really the evangelist type, and I know that my particular path is not to try to convince others to change their actions or save the world; EVOKE didn’t change that. But I did learn that I can be more aware and act more responsibly. I also chose to make a year-long commitment to give a small donation each month to an organization that improves the availability of water in places where it is scarce. At this point in my life, it’s not realistic to think that I’m going to go dig wells myself, but I can help in other ways. I also pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone a few times and then wrote about the experience in my EVOKE blog.

And, once again, I bit off more than I could chew. Early in the season I started a project to develop a curriculum guide for teachers who want to use EVOKE-style projects in their classes, either with or without a computer. I still want to develop this, but it was not the four-week project I imagined, or even a 10-week project. (If anyone’s interested in working on this, let me know! Love to have you.)

What I noticed about my own participation
The first five weeks were fantastic. When I was able to engage for a couple of hours a day (yup, I really did replace WoW time with EVOKE time, and it was usually one to two hours an evening, sometimes more), I was so energized and excited about what I was doing and learning. Later, when I had less time to devote and I fell behind a little, it was still important to me to put a real effort into each objective and not to phone it in — which is why some of them are still undone. If I do them at all, I want to do them well. I think if EVOKE had been a six-week course, I would have been able to maintain the momentum that I had in the early weeks. Ten weeks is a lot, and I travel a lot, so that made it tough.

I really enjoyed reading and commenting on other player’s work. There’s a lot of talent out there in the world, and quite a bit of it found its way into EVOKE. The system that supported the game (Ning) was set up in such a way that managing friends was difficult; I basically accepted friendship from anyone who offered, after I checked their blogs to make sure I could get along with them — not that they had to have the same opinions that I do, but that they weren’t spammers or narrow-minded nutcases — and I offered friendship to everyone whose work I liked. I ended up with 144 friends, and at some point, I read or viewed something created by each of them.

And it’s unfashionable to admit it, but I liked the points and the runes. I’m very goal-oriented and possibly slightly competitive. Depends who you ask. Anyway, I enjoyed playing a game while I was learning and I got a huge kick out of my personal epic wins.

Epic wins?
An epic win is something that is amazing and great and that makes the player happy and excited and triumphant. They can vary from player to player, especially in an open-ended game like this. My epic wins for Urgent EVOKE:

1. I started a teacher discussion group, initially just to find people who had interests like mine, and I was awarded 100 power points (Spark) on the spot.
2. My discussion was featured on the topic page for Agent Resources and Utilities, and for a while, on the main discussion page.
3. I was picked as a hero of the week, twice.
4. I was a featured agent — my profile was featured at the top of the agents page. These rotate, so it’s not there any more. But it was!
5. Best epic win of all: Jane McGonigal commented on one of my pieces of evidence. Score! It sparked a fantastic discussion in the comments section. Plus I think I agreed to build a wind-powered sewing machine.

What I noticed about the game itself
The structure of the game was well-designed for self-directed learning. Each week started with a comic to get you interested in the topic. The comic included several references that were framed as questions in an “investigate this episode” blog post, with links to primary sources online where answers could be found. (I really liked that feature.) Each quest invited the player to explore him- or herself, and each mission built a foundation of understanding with the “learn” objective that led into planning and implementation with the “act” objective. The “imagine” objective then invited players to exercise their creativity, both in terms of thinking about the future and also expressing their ideas.

A couple of issues came up during the season that the game runners dealt with very quickly and gracefully. Originally, every piece of evidence submitted for the objectives was to be reviewed by a game runner and approved before the mission rune would light up on the profile page. I can tell you that excitedly completing the first mission and then waiting three days and still not seeing the rune light up was NOT an epic win. The game designers know this as well as I do, though, and by the second week had rolled out a system where players could log their own evidence and light up their own runes. Very cool.

The leaderboard was another unexpected issue that was handled well. Originally, it was a list of the top players according to point totals. This led to people gaming the system for more points, not unnaturally. Unfortunately, some of the methods were disruptive, involving spamming other players or creating fake profiles to use them for voting. The game runners could have tried to police the bad behavior, but instead they made the wise choice to remove the incentive and developed the leader cloud instead. This gave exposure to both the top and bottom tiers of point-earners, offered more lists for people to be at the top of, and included some elements of randomness and effort-based recognition so that everyone might have a chance to show up there.

Then there was the drama. Oh, the drama. The game runners didn’t let it get in the way, and I won’t dwell on it, except to note that in any group of 19,000 people, some of them are going to get offended or upset and storm out of the room in a fit of pique. EVOKE was no exception.

What I’m hoping for in Season Two
I wrote a wish list about what I’d like to see in Season Two. There are a few convenience features that I want, like making it easier to find interesting or relevant content and better group management. I’m curious to see what issues come up as missions. I’m thrilled that there’s going to be a Season Two, even if I choose not to play, because I think there’s tremendous potential here for teachers and students. I think EVOKE got noticed this time around and I hope lots more teachers will bring their classes in next time.

Urgent EVOKE: A Crash Course in Saving the World opened on March 3, 2010. It’s a game, a learning experience, a training simulation, and a journey all in one. It was designed and is directed by Jane McGonigal for the World Bank Institute. For more on the game’s background, see this WIRED article or watch the video interview with Jane McGonigal below:

The Hook
EVOKE has been open two days and already has more than 7,500 members. The game will last 10 weeks, concluding on May 12, 2010, with a new quest unlocked each week. The hook or premise for the game is that players are members of the EVOKE network and have been called to respond — or will be called, in 10 years; the game moves back and forth through time fluidly — to an urgent food crisis in Tokyo. The story is presented in graphic novel form on the main page of site and also plays out in a 90-second trailer:

EVOKE trailer (a new online game) from Alchemy on Vimeo.

The Game
Each week, players get a new mission and a new quest, with three objectives (learn, act, and imagine). This week’s quest was very personal. On the surface, the first mission was to answer the standard “introduce yourself” question that many social networks include. But the format and the questions made me want to really think about what to say, and more crucially, made me want to see what other people wrote about themselves. The quest objectives are categorized as learn, act, and imagine; the “learn” one was to read an outside blog post (the hits for that page must be off the charts) that collected insights about social change, pick one of the insights, and respond to it. The “act” objective was to pick a hero to shadow, write about who they are and why you chose them, and then either follow their blog or Twitter stream, read their research or writings, and/or reach out and tell them you chose them as your hero. The “imagine” one was to write about where you would be in 10 years when the call came from EVOKE.

Players can either remain within the scenario — that is, choose heroes and actions that are consistent with the Tokyo food shortage theme — or make their own path, which is what I did. I’m interested in changing the world through gaming and play, especially in education. So I picked Jane McGonigal as my hero, and imagined myself volunteering in schools to help the kids construct and play games, and help the teachers work them into the curriculum. The important thing is that the quest made me think about the kinds of change I really can effect.

my EVOKE profile

Game Design
The game is essentially a challenge-based learning project, deployed on an enormous scale, where participants can pick their own problems. The game provides a framework, but it’s up to us as players to figure out what we want to learn, how to go about it, where to do research, and so on. The only incentives, unless you are going for one of the World Bank Institute grants, are your own motivation to learn and the comments and points awarded by other players or by the game shepherds.

The first quest was designed to push players past their comfort zones, but only a tiny bit. The questions about who we are were personal, but it was up to us how much to say. The suggestion to reach out to a hero of our choosing was brilliant — for some, that requires a great deal of courage. (My hero hasn’t answered yet, but I can only imagine how busy she is, with upwards of 7,500 people suddenly playing her game!)

Technical Aspects
The game platform is essentially a Ning network with some additions. I could even use my existing Ning ID to log on — yay! no new passwords! — and it had my photo in place already. Players can add blog posts, images, videos, and links very easily. It’s easy to find other players and easy to interact with them.

Community
Participating in the game gets you points in different powers (collaboration, creativity, local insight, knowledge share, and so on). You can award power points to others when you look at their posts (“evidence” in the game). There are also game shepherds; originally, they were supposed to review every piece of evidence and approve each one if it satisfied the quest, but they have recently announced that we’ll be able to do that for ourselves beginning next week. The Leaderboard shows the top point earners and is sortable by power, so you can see who has the most collaboration chops, for instance.

There are active discussions and I’ve found that lots of people are willing to comment on others’ posts. The game also has a Twitter stream and makes it very easy to tweet your progress, which I don’t because I’m sure all my followers could care less.

I’m very interested to see what happens as time goes on. I imagine that some participation will fall off after a while, and I’m curious to see who sticks it out to the end.

cute little lava-breather

aww, he wants a lava biscuit!

Narila, the pup, and my fighting pet, Warborn

Holy cow, what a great conversation. I’ll just leap right in the middle, shall I? As Mike points out, the griefing issue is a big deal in virtual worlds, and it will always be there, as it always is in any social gathering other than a private party. That’s just people; if you don’t take tickets at the door, you’ll get all kinds of folks, and some of them have the agenda of messing up whatever you are trying to do. In the real world we use laws and police and peer pressure to limit this, but those tactics are less effective in virtual worlds, where laws don’t work and no one can afford to pay the policemen. The peer pressure angle doesn’t work for at least two reasons: first, too many people feel that their avatar is somehow a wholly other entity who can adhere to any moral code (or lack thereof) without consequence; and second, because it’s hard to figure out what exactly constitutes appropriate behavior in a world where you can drop in on a conversation out of the sky, copy and paste other people’s words without their knowing, or represent yourself as something entirely other than what you are. Note that I’m not saying any of these acts are necessarily bad; just that the moral code is still under development, and peer pressure depends on having a lot of people who all agree on the basics of interaction.

I don’t think you can have an unwalled garden without any weeds. It’s true that some MMOGs have gone a long way toward solving that problem, but they are not unwalled by any means, and they have access to tactics similar to the real world ones. In World of Warcraft, for instance, the game is built in such a way as to prevent most griefing from being possible, but that goes hand in hand with the fact that the players can’t fundamentally change the world in any way. For the situations where it is still possible to get in someone’s way, they have police: there are invisible game masters who could be anywhere, and who can take away your account permanently (think of it as being incarcerated, it’s basically the same; you have to start from scratch to rebuild yourself if you still want to play). Second Life, and the Third Life vision we’re talking about here, can’t resort to those methods. It’s too limiting and restrictive to forbid people from changing the world, and it goes against the purpose of the world in the first place.

This is one of the tougher problems that will need to be worked out. If we create invitation-only spaces, we are missing out on one of the best features of massively multiplayer worlds: the masses of players (or people, if you object to the term “player”). If you have a world where only 30 people have the keys to the door, you’ll spend a lot of time waiting for people to show up, and the serendipitous aspect of discovering what’s happened in your absence will be greatly diminished. You can’t lock out the griefers without also locking out a whole lot of smart, creative people who would contribute to the world in meaningful ways.

With respect to Bryan’s comparisons between virtual worlds and text-based social spaces, I want to point out that the difference between meeting people on a wiki and meeting them in a virtual world is a lot like the difference between seeing fox tracks in the snow and seeing the actual fox. The tracks are great—someone’s been here, they were here a few minutes ago, maybe they are still somewhere nearby—but it’s a different experience to be right there with the fox, see how it behaves, maybe chat with it a little and feel the connection of being in the same place at the same time. (Okay, I transmogrified the fox into the online person there, but you get the point.) I’m not sure yet whether there is direct benefit for education in the second kind of interaction, but I think there is. I think it might turn out to justify the effort.

Owen’s comment about the incongruity of holding a professional conversation with someone representing as Flighty Moonsparks or something similar is right on the money. I think LL made an error in assigning a limited number of surnames, and I think our Third Life will have to be a little more flexible. There’s a very real feeling of identity that comes from customizing one’s online presence—from name to appearance—and if virtual worlds are to be successful, that needs to be as flexible as possible. On the other hand, we also need to be willing to accept that someone may choose to be (to pick an entirely random example) Ninmah while online even if her real name is, say, Rachel. Names are just convention, after all.

I have to disagree with Alan a little about how easy it was to make web pages in the beginning. It was technically simple to create a web page, yes, but it was conceptually incredibly difficult for many people, much in the way that it’s really easy to set up a Second Life account but it’s conceptually very hard to work out what to do next. I do think that virtual worlds are going to become easier to access, prettier to look at, and more common to be in. I think there are huge obstacles to work out before they are everything we want them to be, but I think that we’re on the road to get there, just by playing around with the ones that we have now, and by having conversations like these.

The name’s gotta go, though. “Second Life” is bad enough—you only get one life, period. Spend it online, offline, or both, it’s the same life.

Fair warning: the rest of this post contains spoilers about the movie, so go watch it first if you prefer. (Now would be a good time. Go on, I'll wait.) It's worth the time it takes to download. Use headphones if you share an office.

There are some remarkable qualities of this piece that you might not notice if you don't play MMOs. The movie was made by capturing what was going on on the screen while playing the game, so everything you see is happening within the constraints of the game world.

The significance of the dress. Each piece of armor in the game has a certain "look" that players can't change. Mages (the main character in the movie is a mage) can only wear cloth armor. At high levels, if you want a piece of cloth armor that gives good protection and also, say, gives you a bonus when you use fire spells, you pick the Robe of Flaming Might or something (I made that one up). It looks a particular way and that's that. Most high-level cloth armor looks like robes, so you're pretty much stuck wearing one. The point is underscored in the movie by letting the amount of damage this guy is doing show (i.e., the yellow numbers that appear over the heads of the characters he hits) — 1300+ per hit is a healthy amount of damage, so this is a pretty powerful character. The other on-screen information is turned off, so the numbers stand out more to someone who is used to playing the game.

The music-video quality. All animations are pre-scripted in-game, and players can't change them. The dancing gnomes, for instance, are animated by typing a dance command, at which point the gnome starts dancing. All gnomes dance alike and you can't change that. To get the synchronized dancing, those three players all started the command at the same time, after carefully lining up their characters in the right spots. The way the characters seem to sing happens because of another command that animates the mouth, so they had to throw that one in at the right time, too. Some care went into this, in terms of timing and getting the best command to make the gestures look appropriate for the song. Oh yeah, and the guy's actually singing, and he edited the footage and the soundtrack to make a coherent video. I'm impressed.

The camera angles. You can zoom in and out, set the position of the camera, and so forth, but it requires some preplanning and mousework. The angles are used in the video to great effect, framing the tight shots and panning past the character while he's walking or riding.

Like all fan art, the movies you might find will vary widely in artistic merit and taste. My point is that the game world can make people want to be creative, to bring some part of it out of the game and into the rest of their world. We make art about stuff that inspires us, among other things. I think that's pretty cool.

And I’m here to tell you, they’ve nerfed the quests. There’s one quest in Wetlands where you have to recover a bag that a lady dropped when she was chased by some oozes (hey, if you are without weird hobbies, you may cast stones. Otherwise, play it before you point and laugh.). The first time I did this quest, it took HOURS. My friend Caradoc and I must have killed 70 or 80 oozes before the stupid bag dropped. When I did it again with my second character, it took… hours. Again. This is a grinding quest, and no question.

So how do you explain what happened last night? I was helping some lowbie friends in Wetlands, and they needed the ooze bag. Oh boy, I thought. Here we go. At least Doc was with us, in all his level 60 glory (I was playing a 32 alt), so the level 26 oozes would be no problem. We’d still have to get through dozens of them, but they’d go down fast.

Alas, I failed to factor in (a) the nerfing of quests and (b) the presence in our party of the Luckiest Man Alice. In terms of (a), all old-timers are aware that the gamers you get nowadays just don’t have the grit that we had in our day. All the quests are easier. The flight paths are more plentiful. None of this “fight your way through a bunch of mobs only to find a bugged NPC who won’t talk to you” questing anymore. In our day, back in early 2005, questing built character. Now, not so much. Anyway, Blizz has made the drop rate of the bag higher. Now you only have to kill a couple dozen oozes before it drops.

Unless, of course, you are under the influence of (b) the Luckiest Man Alice. (This is his nickname, not his character name. It’s a typo that stuck.) The guy who always finds a parking spot in San Francisco right outside the restaurant he wants to go to. Always. The guy who gets the ooze-covered quest drop after three, count ‘em, three oozes. Ventrilo echoed with my and Caradoc’s outraged protests.

What happened to the good old days? No grit, I tell you. And the next time I’m grinding a quest with a lowbie alt, I want the Luckiest Man Alice in my group, dangit.

Edited to make up for WordPress’s inability to print 19 words in a row that are separated by hyphens.

If you game, and you don't mind being a research subject, visit Daedalus and participate in some of the ongoing surveys. If you're interested in MMOs and how people interact inside them, check out the research results.

My toon, Ninmah, hit level six last night. Woo hoo! She’s well on her way to raising that 10g guild fee, too — I think she’s got more than two silver pieces! Oh yeah! So if you haven’t got your toon started yet, get in there and level up!

P.S. This slayed me. (Warning: Sluggy Freelance is addictive)

Okay, first we’ll have to get to sixty, but that’s doable. Look for Ninmah on Runetotem (Alliance side) where I will be slowly building up the 10g guild startup fee. My main is on Khadgar, which is one of the closed realms, but I’m willing to start from scratch for a good cause.

Post your name here and I’ll keep an eye out for you. We can’t start the guild until we have ten, and so far we have two (I’m holding you to your word, Bryan, dialup or no). Roll call! Who’s in?