The Behavior Pioneers Application: An Intentional Community Prototype Jonah Warren Abstract Quinnipiac University This paper describes a fictional questionnaire intended Hamden, CT 06511, USA to be completed by applicants to an intentional jonah.warren@quinnipiac.edu community devoted to gamifying all aspects of its members’ lives. This format was chosen as a plausible alternative to science fiction tropes that include the population of entire worlds or counties. It was also chosen because the historical motivations for creating intentional communities closely match forces affecting modern populations particularly familiar with and attracted to gamification. Its goal is not to make a specific statement or argument about the nature of gamification, but to let readers come to their own conclusions about the repercussions of creating a community based on the ideals embedded in the application’s questions. Author Keywords . gamification; design fiction; intentional communities. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. Application Form previous experiences you have with measuring, sharing or analyzing data from your everyday life or that of Thank you for your interest in applying to become a others. member of the behavior pioneer community. Please answer all questions as accurately as possible. Unproductive behavior is a design problem. It is the responsibility of the community (and ultimately Name. acting behavior pioneer designers) to create systems Please enter your legal name followed by screen names that encourage behavior that benefits everyone. Design for any online communities or games you regularly failures are healthy and to be encouraged, but should contribute to or are a part of. be considered the result of faulty reward and punishment systems, not faulty citizens. It is essential Behavior pioneers are designers. that all citizens contribute to the process of improving As a behavior pioneer, you will be expected not only to community engagement mechanics. If you were to see participate in regular community activities and events, a fellow behavior pioneer behaving in a way that might but also to help design and balance the feedback be harmful to the community at large, what would you mechanisms that shape community behaviors and do? How might you use the experience to improve our values. While extensive gaming experience is not a community? prerequisite, preference will be given to those with gaming and design experience. Please describe your Influence should be earned. relationship with games, gaming, game development, If an enlightened citizenry is essential for the proper gamified experiences, and behavior modification. If functioning of a democratic society, then each citizen’s applicable, upload screenshots of “hours played” voting power should be directly related to how statistics (e.g. Steam, XBOX, Playstation, etc.), “enlightened” they are (i.e. their contributions to the competitive gaming results, appearances on community and staying educated about the issues it leaderboards, or published games. If your experience is faces). While every citizen has a say in our community, minimal, feel free to explain why you feel qualified to political power is weighted according to a community be part of our community. engagement score. Please explain, as specifically as possible, how you plan on contributing to our Free, captured data is actionable data. community. Explain your thoughts on the relationship No measurable activity should go uncaptured. Creating between voting power and being an engaged data and making it freely accessible benefits everyone. community member. Actionable data is crucial to the design of successful community systems. As a result, creating and Game over. contributing data is expected of every citizen. Please Failure should not only be valued, but also actively share your thoughts on privacy and data, specifically encouraged. In order to support this, the community related to our community. Please also share any will have a six-month life cycle. At the end of each sprint, all experience points will be reset and additional An intentional community was chosen not only because applicants will be considered. While a few designer- of its plausible scale, but also because of how closely approved achievements and power ups may carry over the historical motivations for creating intentional to the next iteration of the community, extreme care societies match modern forces affecting populations must be taken to ensure that they do not overpower potentially attracted to gamification (i.e. technophiles efforts of new community members. Please explain and gamers). These motivations also closely mirror your commitment to the behavior pioneers community. feelings of millennials put off by the modern formal How many life cycles do you plan on being a part of? political process [1], another population largely familiar Explain your thoughts on balancing accumulating power with gamification [3]. In Intentional Community: An to motivate veterans and life cycle resets to motivate Anthropological Perspective, Susan Love Brown noobs. describes common motivations for creating intentional communities [2]: Mission complete. Thank you for submitting an application to become a When people in mass society face difficulties in behavior pioneer! We will be in touch three months making the human connections necessary to before the next iteration begins. sustain them—or when the rules and understandings that once served them well no Discussion longer apply they turn away from their existing The purpose of the following section is to give context communities and toward intentional community to the design fiction presented above. This application with an eye toward setting things right in a form is an attempt to envision what an intentional more intimate setting. community dedicated to fully embracing gamification in all aspects of life might look like. An application form was chosen as the document to present this fiction because of its practical nature. It This fiction is intended to be a starting point for could be imagined that more could be gleaned from an discussion, not to support an agenda or make a specific intentional community’s application form, whose argument about a gamified society. While many of the primary function is finding people to create a functional questions in the application are intended to be society, than its manifesto, whose function is often to provocative, it is left up the reader how to interpret attract attention and state unattainable ideals. them. Through the questions asked and the implied goals, the reader can begin to envision the type of Future Work society proposed and extrapolate potential outcomes, As stated previously, this fiction is intended to be a be they positive, negative or ambiguous. While the starting point for inquiry, to ask questions, and provoke impact of this scenario on society is more modest than discussion. A few possible questions for further study many other science or design fictions, its aim is to be suggested by this design fiction include: more plausible and thus less easily dismissed. • If a society were to be gamified, the behavior of its citizens must be measured. What does this collection of data mean to the individuals, designers, and society as a whole? • In a gamified society where the designer’s ultimate goal of incentivizing positive social behavior is taken very seriously, who is responsible when bad behavior occurs? • How might the measurement of social behavior on a large scale impact existing political structures (e.g. voting power)? References [1] Brown, S. L. (2002). Intentional community: an anthropological perspective. SUNY Press. [2] Kiesa, A., Orlowski, A. P., Levine, P., Both, D., Kirby, E. H., Lopez, M. H., et al. (2007). Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Political Engagement. Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). [3] Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1. On the horizon, 9(5), 1-6.