Transcriber: Maria Pericleous Reviewer: Denise RQ
So we all know
that the values of our community affect the way we think,
or that the rules of the road affect the way we drive;
we all understand that the laws of our country
dictate how we act.
But I am here to talk to you about a different kind of influence,
the influence of the web services that you use every day;
how they play into your life,
and how the tiny decisions in their design can have ramifications in the real world.
It's easy to think of web services as being super-human.
Something like Facebook or Google is so big and complicated
that there's just no way you can understand
what's going on there.
And there's no way to draw any human assumptions or motivations
that went into their design.
But I'm going to propose a short, little thought experiment.
What if your favorite social network started ranking your friends?
Not friends' posts, not based on how much it inferred that you like them
but on how much you disagree with them.
Would that make your experience a little different?
Would that make your world a little different?
What if your search engine suddenly took on a Icelandic viewpoint?
Would that be a different experience for you
when you started looking into a new topic that fascinated you?
Or if your music store suddenly decided
that you needed to listen to country music.
That could really change the way that you look at music.
In any of these cases, would you really notice
that the service had changed,
or would you think that something about the world had changed?
To understand this,
you need to understand how the services get created,
how the rules get built, and how decisions get made.
So we could think of this as spontaneous inspiration:
geeks in coffee shops coming up with ideas and putting them out on the web,
but the truth is any savvy company worth its salt relies on measurement.
They look at patterns of how people use their site,
they change things, and they see if that drives them to use it more.
If they find success, these methods get published somewhere,
and they spread across the Internet very, very quickly.
And so, measurement is at the core of decision-making.
The next logical question is: what are they measuring?
And the answer is this loosely-defined term
called "engagement."
Engagement is any time you click on something on the web,
any time you link to something, any time you tweet about it,
any time that you do anything that can be measured
is called engagement.
That has some odd properties.
A long, nasty argument, something bitter and fiery
that can be very engaging by any objective measure;
an Internet flame war, highly engaging.
But a short love note that can make two people's lives much better,
that is not very engaging;
and so the data is wrong.
A hot piece of gossip is more important than a health advisory?
I don' think that's true.
So what happens
when the best thing for us isn't very engaging?
We are going to look at three examples
of how driving engagement can be bad for users.
it's important to note these aren't the work of evil villains,
these aren't people trying to manipulate the populace.
These are things happening all over the Internet.
These are examples of the next big thing.
Companies are investing millions of dollars to get better at this
without really looking at any of the costs.
So the first problem is
that really engaging sites know you too well.
Personalization is the holy grail of the modern web.
You want an experience that is totally tailored to the user
that knows what they want before they do.
So for example, when I go to Google, and I search for Apple, I get this.
But when a farmer goes to Google, and they search for Apple,
they might get this, and that's great.
That's clearly is giving people what they want,
and it cost no one anything.
So let's dig into how a system like this works.
Probably one of the most advanced
is the the Netflix recommendation algorithm.
Netflix takes a look at all the movies you've watched,
and all the movies you've rated, and puts you into a bucket.
And then, it looks at what other people in the bucket like
that you haven't seen, or watched, or rated,
and it recommends that to you.
60% of Netflix is 16 million users, so10 million people, give or take,
use this to watch their movies, to make their choices.
And once again, this doesn't sound so harmful.
It's clearly a popular service, and it's recommending good movies.
I mean, really, this all sounds pretty good,
but nobody asks which bucket you really belong in,
which bucket you aspire to be in.
Movies are a pretty small portion of your life.
You're not making life-and-death decisions based on this system,
it's just choosing
how you're going to spend two or three hours of your evening.
What about matters of fact?
Let's imagine the same system ten years down the road:
it's even better, it's truly personalized,
and you're looking for information about ancient history.
For 42% of Canadians, this is what you get as the result.
These 42% of Canadians believe
that dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time.
Am I the only one who finds this a little scary?
That as the system gets better,
it's just reinforcing people's existing biases?
Because there's no way that if you are in that 42%,
you are not going to click on this, you are not going to blog about it,
you are not going to tweet about it;
you are going to drive every measure of engagement
to tell that service this piece of content is authoritative.
What if you are wrong?
What if there's a way to find truth that is being ignored?
It's scary because it's happening already; you can see right there:
Google news -- you go there today, and you get recommended news stories,
but it's news stories recommended based on what you were interested in before,
which means that it's picking up all your biases
every time you click on the trashy news article,
it's telling the system that you like trash.
This system isn't designed to improve your news reading,
it's designed to get short term engagement,
just get people to click on the box.
So the next problem with really engaging sites
is that they're very fun.
And I say this half-jokingly,
but making something a lot of fun can make people addicted to it
not necessarily because of the value it delivers
but just because of the compulsion,
the loops that they have designed into the system
to make it really, really sticky.
And sticky isn't the same as rewarding.
Just how sticky something can become:
World of Warcraft had 6 million man-years invested in it.
6 million years of of someone's time went into World of Warcraft.
And it's clearly very sticky, and it's very engaging.
People spend 3 billion hours a week inside virtual worlds in general.
They are spending billions of dollars on property that only exists in a database
so this is something that people really buy into.
And I'd like to dig into why;
maybe we can draw some conclusions that can be useful elsewhere.
So I think the first reason people spend so much time in these worlds
is because game designers take fun seriously.
They optimize for it, they test it,
they are basically reverse engineering the fun center of the brain.
And they tell us something about ourselves
from what games become successful and what games are boring.
So evolutionary biologists tell us
that people feel pleasure after completing a collection or a set.
So for example, if you collect stamps,
and you get the last of the Mongolian 1956 train series,
you're going to feel pretty good.
But you didn't need to tell that to the Parker Brothers.
They managed to figure that out all on their own.
B.F. Skinner spent years studying rats,
and their reaction to various reward schedules.
What he did was he constructed a box, and he added a lever and a food dispenser,
and he toyed around
with the ratio of how many presses of the lever delivered how much food.
And what he found was that if you vary the size of the prize
and the frequency that it's doled out, the rats are more likely to keep trying.
But of course,
you could've just looked at a slots player who is showing the exact same behavior.
And I think this applies to a lot more than games.
The best example of this in the offline world
is really Weight Watchers.
They use game mechanics brilliantly to make a diet regime harder to quit.
Players keep track of points, they get rewarded
if they stay within a certain range of points in their week;
and it works.
It's been around for 40 years, and people are stuck on the system.
But today, the most successful use of game mechanics has been
to get people to reach out and connect with one another.
I am talking about social games like Farmville or Mafia Wars.
They're growing very quickly,
they have hundreds and millions of players.
How do they do it, and why are people stuck there?
Why do people spend hours of their day in these worlds?
I think it comes down to the fact
that we crave a feeling of connection with others.
When we can't find it, we become lonely and then depressed.
These games provide an easy way to escape these feelings,
to be constantly connected with other people,
and they are perfectly designed
to give you safe, little interactions with one another,
"You got this free gift."
No one has to think about the phrasing of the message.
It's all provided for you,
and so it's very, very easy to stay connected.
I mean, these are really a place to hang out.
But what kind of a place is it?
It's a place where who you know matters more than what you know.
That's built right into the logic of the game.
You can't move onto the next level
until you've brought in a certain number of friends.
Status is everything.
Status comes from spending lots of time in this system and lots of money.
It's definitely a place where yelling is better than talking.
If you look at your Facebook news feed,
you see people just yelling about these various social games.
So I think the kind of place this is is really a loud night club.
I mean Zynga makes money
by selling virtual items to players for real cash,
but it only works if players buy in
just in the same way that you have to buy in
when a nightclub says that they are cool;
that's not enough.
You have to really believe them
if you want to stand outside for half an hour in the cold
knowing that the place is empty on the inside.
The status that the items hold will be valued
by the people who care about them.
Every time you join the game, every time you invite a friend,
you make the game more valuable.
You are one more person saying,
"This world is real, everything is OK, come and join me!"
And if a shallow relationship is what's needed
just to get people into this world, to get people to commit,
then they're going to design the game around facilitating shallow relationships.
But it doesn't have to be like this.
We don't have to spend our time in cheesy night clubs.
All of these tools that I have been talking about
can be used to motivate people to do just about anything.
It can make people happier, fitter, healthier, even tidier.
One of my favorite examples is Nike Plus.
They do everything in their power to get people excited about running,
and it works.
Nike Plus runners run more than if they didn't use the system.
It's just a little tracking chip they put in your shoe,
and then you run, and you log your progress online,
and they get to use all these levers and all these tricks
to make running lots of fun.
ReMission is a game for kids with cancer.
The way the game works is you move around the human body,
and you are learning about cancer as you are fighting it with a ray gun.
There was an independent study,
and it found that kids who played this game
actually handle treatment better;
they are calmer, and more comfortable, and they do proactive things
that are taught in the game to improve their situation.
Chore Wars is a game for roommates
(Laughter)
and it makes a game out of doing housework.
It takes these really tedious tasks,
something that can be divisive between people who live together,
and it makes it into something fun and cooperative.
And suddenly, you're playing the game and building your profile,
you are gaining points, and you don't even notice
that you are sweeping the floor or scrubbing the toilet.
Right now, I am working on a game called Save My Life
with some people in this audience,
and the goal is really to lower people's risk of dying from cancer.
I think one of the ways we're going to do that
is to throw out a lot of this standard matrix,
the way that we look at online services
and only focus on healthy actions in the real world.
If that's the end goal, if that's all we're really thinking about,
I think we have a chance of succeeding.
I think there's lots of people out here in the audience
who are building services for the web,
who are building things online that have people's attention,
and I hope that you guys all take a moment
and start to think about what else you could be measuring,
how else you could be making decisions,
and If there's a better way
to make the world a better place through your service.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)
(Applause)