The reality game is broken

Speaking of crises, I’m trying to clean up my desk. Here’s something easy to pitch out: a letter from Newt Gingrich. According to the envelope he needs my help to send a message to Congress:

Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less.

Strangely, he doesn’t mention that Drilling Here will net a nationally insignificant amount of oil, Drilling Now won’t yield that insignificant amount of oil for 8 or 10 years, and the Less we would be Paying would be about six cents per gallon. He also neglects to mention that we would be drilling in ecologically sensitive areas and all the profit from drilling would go to oil companies. Too bad this isn’t the World Without Oil game, where our hardheaded players put a natural check on unsupported, unsupportable emotional fantasizing.

Rewarding good players

And now I pick up a letter from the CEO of United Airlines, urging me as an airline customer to support efforts to curb oil speculators, whom the airline industries define as people who don’t actually use oil, i.e. people who are not them. I guess I can understand why the airlines would want to get the other bidders in the room out of the room, but would that really lower oil prices? Oil futures are different from other commodities futures: owners can’t sit on oil, to drive up its value; just because you pay more doesn’t mean it’s worth more; when the contracts come due, speculators need to sell their oil futures to someone who actually uses oil. If at that point the speculator paid too much for the oil, they take a loss. (We may see speculators taking such losses later this year, in fact, if oil prices don’t rise again.) Again, too bad this isn’t the World Without Oil game, which naturally invoked collective intelligence to examine claims such as the United Airlines letter for accuracy. But then again, maybe this letter actually supports the World Without Oil results; in the game, the airlines couldn’t adapt to the abrupt rise in oil prices, made bad decisions and went bankrupt.

At this point I am reminded of Jane McGonigal’s keynote at SXSW: Reality Is Broken: Games Can Fix It. In it, she listed four ways in which games do better than reality in generating happiness. I think that World Without Oil adds a fifth point to her roster: Games don’t reward people for sloppy play. Photo by Now and Here via Flickr.