David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Recipe

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We all like feeling rewarded for work that makes things better. Many of us are finding this kind of satisfaction in social benefit games. At the same time, we’re also learning how to bring transformative change into the world by getting some practice first.

Your rewards include feeling good about yourself because of all you’re accomplishing and the abilities you’re developing while doing so. In social games like WeTopia, you reap other rewards too. There is pride in the growing productivity of your community, empowerment from your ability to support those in need, and your own increasing prosperity.

Games like this also bring the best ingredients of the for-profit and non-profit worlds together.

They give you the virtual experience of work where you can do well by doing good. They stir your imagination, and get you thinking about new kinds of work that you could be doing right now in the real world.

On the other hand, it’s disquieting to feel that someone is “behind our screens” watching us and gaining insights about human behavior because of how you, me (and millions like us) are playing these games. These social scientists and marketers are looking at how we respond to different sounds, colors and kinds of movement. They are even changing the variables we encounter in these games while we’re playing them to see if we do things differently or faster or better.

What’s going on here, and where is the upside for us in this kind of scrutiny?

Kristian Segerstrale is an economist and co-founder of a company called Playfish that makes on-line games. In an interview, he described the difficulty social scientists have traditionally had gaining reliable information from behavioral experiments because they can’t control the variables that exist in the real world. By contrast, in virtual worlds:

the data set is perfect. You know every data point with absolute certainty. In social networks you even know who the people are. You can slice and dice by gender, by age, by anything.

Segerstrale gave the following by way of example. If your on-line experience requires buying something, what happens to demand if you add a 5 percent tax to a product? What if you apply a 5 percent tax to one half of a group and a 7 percent tax to the other half? “You can conduct any experiment you want,” he says. “You might discover that women over 35 have a higher tolerance to a tax than males aged 15 to 20—stuff that’s just not possible to discover in the real world.”

What this means is that people who want to sell you things or motivate you to do something are now able to learn more than they have ever been able to learn before about what is likely to influence your behavior.

Being treated like ingredients to be “sliced and diced” has risks for us, but also possibilities.

None of us want to relinquish our freedom and become automatons, manipulated into doing what others want us to do. We do well to remember national experiments in social engineering, like the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution in China and the choreographed death spiral in North Korea.

 

But we also need to recognize the potential in this brave new world for good.

The behavior of millions of men and women whose voices had never been heard before was changed by lessons learned on-line, ultimately producing the Arab Spring.

The behavior of individuals facing repression every day in places like Iran and Syria is fortified by the virtual support of those who are struggling with them.

Your behavior, and the behavior of millions of people who are playing these social games, is being shaped and reinforced in similar ways. It is a training ground for changing the real world with new and better kinds of work.

Social benefit games are giving us a recipe for transformation—and the ingredients are getting better all the time.

Playground, Imaginarium, Laboratory

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You really want to know what it feels like to be rewarded for work that makes the world a better place.

Where’s the job that will pay me “a living wage” for producing social benefits?
Where’s the job that will leave me feeling proud of what I’ve accomplished—both for myself and for others—when my workday is over? 

There’s nowhere you can think of where you can bring your energy and talent to a job and get these kinds of returns.

Sure, there are plenty of opportunities “to give your time away.” Places to volunteer. Worthy causes. You can knock on doors. Call strangers up at dinnertime for donations. Play your guitar in a hospital room. There are many things good people do “after work” in your community.

That is, after they do what they have to do.

Because they’ve got to put food on the table, pay the bills, keep the wolf at the door. They want, and you want your work to have an impact, but how do you “make a living” and also accomplish something worthwhile?

Can you really afford to do work that makes a difference?

You never thought it was possible that your work in the store or office, in your car, on the phone or behind a counter could be about healing the world and, just like any other job, that you’d be paid well for your time, your effort and your talent.

You always thought it was “either/or.”

There was charity and there was business, but not the business of doing good.

The world you can preview in a social benefit game like WeTopia is neither a non-profit nor a for-profit world. It’s a mixture of both.

It’s surprising how fulfilling it can be to see your work combine with your friends’ work to help not just one child, but a whole school full of children. You’re surprised at how satisfying it can be—even in a game—when work that’s this fulfilling also comes with a paycheck, a home, and a happy community.

It’s the virtual experience of a business model for a better world.

As such, social benefits games like WeTopia give you a glimpse of something that may be difficult to find where you live and work. Games like this fire up your imagination with new possibilities, and get you thinking about blueprints for different and better kinds of work. Work you can do solving real problems that are crying out for solutions right now, all around you, where you live.

Beyond the learning-by-doing discussed in my last post, this is an additional promise of a game like WeTopia.

To imagine your work differently.

It’s a promise that the sponsoring advertisers, the sellers hocking virtual goods, and those IPO-hungry Facebook investors are all helping to bring to your interactive screen. And in the final analysis, that’s not such a bad thing. Because when all is said and done, the merchandising is really pretty benign. It won’t impair your enjoyment or diminish the game’s virtuous effects, and it’s easy to navigate around (if you want to) on your way to having fun.

No, all the selling and buying is not where we’ll find the greatest danger, or the greatest promise for that matter, in this brave new world.

Think for a minute of that showstopper in The Wizard of Oz where (of all things) it’s Dorothy’s little dog Toto who triggers an at-first thundering but-then almost conversational:

“Don’t pay any attention to that man behind the curtain.”


(That’s Toto down there in the lower right. Yes it required lots of dog biscuits, but it produced his biggest scene.)

And just like it was in Emerald City, there is a man behind the curtain in most of these social benefit games.

Of course there is. We couldn’t live in this age and not suspect. But who is he exactly, and what is he doing there?

He’s a social scientist who has never had more real time information about how and why people behave in the ways that they do (not ever) than he can gather today by watching hundreds, sometimes even millions of us play these kinds of social games.

Why you did one thing and not another. What activities attracted you and which ones didn’t. What set of circumstances got you to use your credit card, or to ask your friends to give you a hand, or to play for 10 hours instead of just 10 minutes.

There’s a lot for that man to learn because, quite frankly, we never act more naturally or in more revealing ways than when we’re at play.

(“We’re not in Kansas anymore.”)

So what could possibly be in it for you, for me, for any of the lab rats?

It’s certainly not the thrill of being analyzed when we’re at our most unsuspecting.

At play and under a microscope.

(“Run Toto, run!”)

(Well not just yet.)

We’ll take a brief look at the downside, and then try to find the real upside together—next time around.

Game Changer?

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I spent a morning this weekend in a virtual world that promised to teach me (along with each of my 440,000 fellow players) how to become a more productive and generous person.

The experience percolated my thinking about how to change good inclinations into good behaviors, and then make those good behaviors a more natural part of my life through repeated use.

But wait, there was more! Somewhere in the sweaty little palms of all these players, the unremittingly sunny experience also gave me a glimpse of what might be a whole new way “to get ready for” the kind of work where your personal rewards are bound up with the benefits that you bring to the world.

The repetitive activities in this virtual world didn’t feel like rote learning because the over-and-over-again was embedded in the diversions of what was, at least at the front end, only a game. Playing it came with surprises (blinking “opportunities” and “limited time offers”), cheerful reminders (to water my “giving tree” or harvest my carrots), and rewardsfrom all of the “work” I was doing (the “energy,” “experience,” and “good will” credits I kept racking up by remembering to restock Almanzo’s store or to grow my soccer-playing community of friends).

The social benefits game I was playing was WeTopia.

Where once we had to practice our altruism in the real world, it now seems possible for us to do so with a couple of mouse clicks.

(Yes, every one of those yellow, smiley-faced balloons is really a benefit you’ve earned, or are about to earn at your home, farm or factory!)

Can this kind of playful learning really help us to become more productive for ourselves, and more productive for others, in the real world?

That’s certainly WeTopia’s back-end—where the obligations I’d met, and the yields I’d obtained, were taken from this virtual world of chubby multicultural tikes and lite-calypso music and delivered to what looked a lot like their equivalents in the real one.

For example, watering my “giving tree” produces a “special seed” that (once planted) promises to “grow into a hot meal that I can send to the real world to help kids!” The credits I’ve earned from harvesting fields, building houses, or replenishing the bakery all are conglomerated into “Joy!” that is exchanged, by virtual magic, for real dollars and cents when I send it in a hot air balloon to real world charities. Whitney Food Pantry or Haiti Hot Meals 2 for hungry kids!, something called Homeless Children’s Care for kids needing a place to stay!: these were three of the places where I could share my Joy!—that is, after I’d “earned” enough of it to share.

(The exclamation points embedded in the total experience, along with endearing faces like these, help to ensure that it would be difficult for anyone to miss the relentlessly positive, and not entirely unpleasant, rush of generosity in all of this.)

Knowing that nearly 2 billion dollars of virtual goods are purchased on-line in the U.S each year, and that advertising is more tied up than ever with my Facebook experience, put me on the lookout for the funding sources that were helping me to convert all this Joy! into food and shelter for smiling, needy kids.

I didn’t have to look very hard.

While you can power the exchange between virtual to real giving by your hard work and growing skill at the game, you can also do so by buying “building blocks” or other virtual things with your (or your parent’s) credit card. Even when you decline to do so, I noticed that upon delivering my Joy! to the pictures of those smiling kids in Haiti, my currency visually merged with the contributions of the game’s sponsoring advertisers to put actual food on actual tables.

Whether “my” charitable giving came from my hard work, my credit card or one of my advertising partners, I received new goodwill and energy tokens “to do more good later on” in the increasingly complex and engrossing cycle of working and harvesting, giving and receiving.

WeTopia’s platform was interactive across my network. (Sending “gifts” to my Facebook friends would build my inventory of credits, while hopefully turning my connections into good-deed-doers as well.) Its format also tantalized by promising future fun, full of expectancy. (When you pick your strawberries in only 7.3 minutes, or 3.1 hours from now when your fountain starts spouting, all of these additional benefits will be yours!)

What I’m wondering is whether this kind of immersive on-line experience can change real world behavior.

We assume that the proverbial rat in this maze will learn how to press the buzzer with his little paw when the pellets keep coming.

Will he (or she) become even more motivated if he can see that a fellow rat, outside his maze, also gets pellets every time he presses his buzzer?

And what happens when he leaves the maze?

Is this really a way to prepare the shock troops needed to change the world?

Dance Card

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Sitting here at the collision of two startling streams of information got me thinking about being inspired by powerful individuals, and how their inspiration can affect our work and our lives.

A high school reunion in October revived a network of old friends, as well as some new ones I never really knew back in the day. This connectivity has been unleashing a torrent of lines and images about missed classmates, things we have forgotten, and how great it is to remember. The other night I tossed a “whatever happened to my most memorable teacher?” into the stream of recollection.

She taught English. I had her for only a quarter of my junior year, but her class and all she brought to it had left its mark. In the volley that followed, I explained her with these words:

I had never met a woman like that before. I can still feel the longing so many students had for her (like moths trying to merge with a flame), and how almost abandoned I felt when she did not return my last year. But I never thought our school was enough to contain or sustain her. She was too far ahead. Like a comet. I have a soundtrack in my head with the Sixties in it, but she in many ways was its personification. I don’t remember much about the class I took with her or what I read. It hardly mattered. It was really just about her. A whole new world burning through her eyes.

I expected to hear that she had gone on to conquer new mountains, to stir up dust in bigger corners, and change more lives. An old friend who knew the story better dissolved this simple future with a couple of quick sentences.

I know a good bit about Portia and her somewhat tragic life after leaving Branford. She and her husband Tom owned beautiful land in Massachusetts. They had a daughter, who was named Shelburne after the land, and Portia was expecting their second child. Tragically, while ice skating and sledding on a pond, Tom was pulling Shelburne on a sled and the rope snapped. The sled skidded onto thin ice and it broke through, taking the child beneath it. When Tom attempted to rescue her, they both ended up dying in the freezing water. Two weeks later, Portia gave birth to Lucia.

My friend knew that another relationship and daughter eventually followed, and that Portia had stayed with the memory on that beautiful land, but little more. I learned that in the intervening years she has also been farming and selling her harvest, has written a children’s book and edited multiple volumes of literary criticism with Harold Bloom and made jewelry. But the fulfillment of her promise cannot be so easily framed.

Your work and your life have gone on courageously, but how could the heat of your comet not have changed when so many cold mountains had come into your heart?

Answers are less important (how much can we ever know, how much do we need to know?) than the energy that the thought of her still throws off.

She is felling trees up there to the thunder of Romantic music—how could it be otherwise?—her mane of unruly hair still catching the light, but perhaps with more minor notes and intervals of shadow now, more summoning up of both brass and wind than once would have been necessary before striding forward to claim new destinations.

It was also the stab of unexpected tragedy that brought me back into the story of Steve Appleton.

Until last Friday, when Appleton (51) died after his single engine airplane crashed in flames following a mechanical failure, he had been the chairman and chief executive officer of Micron Technologies, a company I knew for years as the last American competitor in the semiconductor industry. It was a distinction the company enjoyed largely because of him.

Grit and sheer life force had enabled Appleton to rise from Micron production worker at 22 to its front office less than ten years later. He also was notorious for pushing the envelope of life outside of work. A qualified stunt pilot, he flew in air shows performing loops and rolls at altitudes that were often below 100 feet. He surfed. He raced. When asked a couple of years back about the high energy levels he brought to everything he did, he said: “it is kind of a cliché, but I’d rather die living than die dying.”

Many analysts predict that Micron will continue to thrive because of the strong organization he has built and the competitive advantage it still retains in the industry. Maybe the success he had in business came because he knew not only how to rev things up, but also how to slow them down: a range that was as useful for dodging bullets as it was for seizing opportunities. Appleton told a reporter in 2011: “For me, it is something like the movie ‘The Matrix.’ The [memory chip] business is in slow motion in comparison to all the other things I do.”

So I wonder, in your dance with life and death, when the music finally stopped, did you reaffirm the bargain you had struck? Did you have second thoughts?

Again, it hardly matters that this final lesson from his life is one his on-lookers and admirers can never learn from. But the other take-aways are more than enough.

You had been fully awake since you were a child. You said it was sticks in grade school, knives in junior high and guns in high school that made you face death but claim life. The music I hear is an anthem reverberating through the last fire.

We remember those who have inspired us through the gauzy lenses of time, the fragmented updates we have of them, and the suddenness of breaking news. In the remembering, we fast-forward their found energy into our lives and into our work. They encourage us to accept the invitation, to get up, and to dance.

Source Code

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Another comment from the ether about my prior January posts noted that morality is largely a public matter, and that public views had not sufficiently evolved 30 years ago to judge parental action and inaction when it came to child abuse. In this reader’s opinion, it was unfair to bring 20/20 hindsight from a more enlightened time to pass judgment on these individuals.

“Judging” is part of “learning from terrible mistakes,” because the latter requires acknowledging that “terrible mistakes” have been made. Since we are often reluctant to draw any kind of conclusion from someone else’s behavior—“Who are we to try and stand in their shoes anyway?”—it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to think in a reasonable manner about how things might have gone differently. Because this kind of caution leaves us in a muddle, it makes some judgments necessary.

The intended aim on this page will always be to “learn from” in order to “maybe do better” the next time around. On the other hand, whenever you detect the smugness of a judgment’s moral superiority in these posts, I will count on you to call me out.

There is no question that the extraordinary publicity around the abuse of children over the past 15 years has led to an evolution of public thinking about what Society accepts and what it condemns. In much the same way, the soul-searching after the Holocaust’s horrors were revealed and the Nuremburg trials transfixed the world led to more evolved societal thinking about prejudice, and how one of the paths where prejudice can lead is ethnic cleansing.

There is also no question that a more primitive public morality in a sense “permitted” those who preyed on children or Jews for centuries to follow their demons without interference. Maybe it was because children were viewed as less than fully human or as mere property that they could be secretly exploited. Maybe it was because the Jews had killed Jesus and therefore were “evil” that these societies encouraged or tolerated inquisitions and pogroms and a million acts of violence against them. But whatever Society had to say about such matters at the time, what do we think individual hearts were saying?

Do we really think that individuals in less evolved times failed to appreciate that sexual and ethnic violence against other individuals –family members, neighbors, your seven-year old daughter, the man you bought your bread from—was unacceptable?

On an individual level, did Society have to get around to confirming that certain kinds of violent and predatory behavior were wrong before individual conscience could reach this conclusion on its own?

Hasn’t it always been what your heart is telling you at such times that truly matters?

In this regard, did the Philadelphia parents 30 years ago need Society’s blessing to shine a light into the shadowy corners where a child molester was doing his dirty work? Did they really need to know what all the psychologists and other authorities would be saying 30 years later about the damage he was inflicting on those children to put a stop to it?

At what point does Society’s un-evolved state become just another excuse for not doing what you know in your heart needs to be done?

Nowhere in the West today is ignorance so deep, lives so brutish and short, that hearts have gone cold. There are pockets of alienation, but this is not where most of us live. In addition, most moral decision-making ends up happening in areas where Society has never gotten around to providing us with anything approaching clear guidance.

On basic moral issues, I’m proposing that we have the confidence to look within ourselves, instead of simply looking at what those around us are doing or, more commonly, not doing. That is where the source code for moral decision-making can be found.

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