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.

The relative scarcity of tanks and healers in this new system means that they can often afford to be jerks, and unfortunately many are. Something about the combination of being in demand, being anonymous, and in some cases being good at playing the game tends to bring out the worst in some people. I’ve known tanks and healers to quit a group, leaving the other players waiting around for a replacement, because they didn’t like the gear other players were wearing, or the way they talked in chat, or the method they used to move through the dungeon. Some of the ones that don’t quit feel that it’s okay to insult the other players, tell them how to play their toons, or just be generally rude. This behavior isn’t limited to tanks and healers; DPS classes are very easy to replace, though, and tend not to get away with it as much.

And of course not all tanks and healers act like jerks just because they can. I’d say the majority just quietly do the dungeon, and if they are annoyed, they keep it to themselves. The runs usually end in about 20 minutes anyway. But recently I actually met a nice one, which was rare enough that it caught my attention. This person was helpful without being pushy or rude, and when someone in the party made an error, he or she (the toon was female, but I don’t know about the player) was very forgiving and actually tried to make the person feel better. It got me thinking about behavior in a largely anonymous virtual space, especially where there is a different value placed on different players not because of their personal ability to play the game well, but because of the abilities of the class they are playing (tank, healer, or DPS).

It’s not really possible to find out who a player is, unless they have connected their character name with their RL identity elsewhere on the web (as I have by naming some of my toons here on my blog). A player’s identity within the game is persistent — that is, your character always has the same name in the game, short of paying for a name change, which is not common. But you can’t generally find out who someone really is. With the new dungeon system, it’s possible to be in a group with players that you will never encounter again, because the new system pulls people together from different servers, and you can only communicate with people on your own server (outside of random groups like these). You’d have to set up a new character on that player’s server in order to talk to them, and you may never get grouped randomly with that same person again. So the level of anonymity is really high.

The goals of the people in these random dungeon groups are related to moving as quickly as possible through the dungeon and moving on. You get rewards for completing them, and there are penalties for ditching a group in the middle, so there is an incentive to stay even if there are unpleasant people in the party. Most of the groups operate in near or total silence, without text chat (voice chat isn’t really a viable option and no one ever uses it in random groups). Yet there are still a few people who feel compelled to be insulting. It’s interesting to me that in the midst of what must be a cooperative activity — even the best tank or healer isn’t going to be able to solo these instances — some people are still willing to be rude. I’m curious about the characteristics these folks have in common; are they all young, and just don’t know any better? Are they all very good players, or do they all perceive themselves to be good? Is it a personality trait, and they’d be just as annoying if they weren’t anonymous, and were labeled with RL names or were in a face-to-face group? Mostly one gender or the other? Just like having a captive audience?

And in such a system, what personal characteristics make someone behave as well as the tank I met? There’s no special reward for being helpful. It’s easier to just keep quiet. What makes someone go out of their way to be nice to someone they may never run into again? Lucky for me, this tank plays on my server, and is now added to my friends list. But that’s not a “reward” from his or her point of view (especially if s/he doesn’t feel the same about grouping with me!). What makes people be nice in an anonymous environment?

The thing that goes against the grain here for me is the message sent by the university, which sounds a lot like “collaboration will get you thrown out of school.” While I understand the value of each student learning the material, I want to argue here for the equally important value of each student learning how to work with others, forming the kind of reciprocal relationships that foster effective collaboration, and understanding first-hand that many minds are more effective than one. Chris Avenir, the student facing expulsion, took the initiative to bring 146 other students together using a freely-available technology to improve everyone’s learning experience—in a model of collaboration that would be very appropriate many fields of work.

Work in many professions is not about getting an assignment, working on it alone, and getting it right. Work is about a group of people facing a problem, using every resource at their disposal, and working together to solve it. If you personally can only do 80% of the job in the working world, that’s great, you’d get a passing grade; but all 100% still needs to get done. Knowing how to bring others in to help—and having a network of people you can draw on—is a very valuable skill for an employee to have.

I did not see the Facebook group, or the homework assignments. I don’t know whether the exchanges were of a collaborative nature or straight-out answer swapping. But if I were part of the investigation, that would be a key question for me. Because higher education should be more than memorization and working alone. Higher education—heck, I’ll go out on a limb here and say all education—should teach people how to collaborate. Initiative and networking in the service of learning should be rewarded, not punished. Today’s students, who will become tomorrow’s colleagues, will only benefit if the culture of education models effective practices of collaboration.

I hit “reload” to find out what everyone was doing just before I quit for the night.

Nothing.

Blank white page, little spinny Firefox icon. No updates. No avatars. Okay, I thought. I can cope with this. It’s late, and I can just check in the morning. No problem.

Except I can’t. It’s STILL DOWN. I can’t say good morning to the Twitter world. I can’t find out how the class went for @BryanAlexander in San Francisco last night. I don’t know whether @blamb and @cogdog got their morning coffee. How was @mburtis‘s birthday? Is @mapetite still sick? I DON’T KNOW.

Which raises a question for me: why does it matter so much? Obviously Twitter gives me something that, when it’s not there, I miss. I feel unconnected, uninformed, unaware, and, yes, lonely, out here in the California satellite office of the NMC. I know you are all still out there, doing things. Maybe some of you can actually get to Twitter; I got a direct message from @mapetite this morning (it went to my phone), and http://istwitterdown.com gives me a resounding NO (linktribution to CogDog, thank goodness for IM). Great, so now I fear that everyone is happily twittering along without me. This is worse than being the last kid picked for the basketball team.

Twitter, where are you? Come back!

If you DO get Twitter, you should still look at the page because it will blow your mind. Plus, you might find someone you know…

Let’s talk about LinkedIn. I’ve been meaning to get, er, linked in for a while now, but only actually did it this morning after reading Alan’s very appropriately titled post on the topic. The very first thing I did was to send a couple of gauche, uncustomized invitations to co-workers (sorry guys). I hate, repeat hate, that I have to bother someone in order to add them as a contact. Yeah, I see the point; we don’t want unknown losers claiming us as their friends, and we want to be careful about who gets to contact whom. But can’t the email thing happen somewhere else? Like when I actually try to impinge on these people I claim to know by asking for introductions or information? Gah!

I was enticed by the two-degrees thing… I like the mathematics of it. And really, LinkedIn is a cool idea, and may yet prove to be a useful service for me. But I have sent four unsolicited emails to my friends, and it turns out that’s my limit. I just hate spamming people I know. So if all four of them admit to knowing me, I’ll have a little list of four contacts and I can enjoy the mathematics of that. And maybe other people who know me will spam me to become their contact (which is fine; if you know me, consider this an open invitation to add me as a LinkedIn contact). In the meantime I will slink off the site and try to shake off the greasy spammer feeling I got left with.