May 13, 2011
My colleagues Debbie, Austin, Brian and Mike demonstrating MMOTW.
This week I had the first opportunity to report back to my colleagues about my experience at the South by Southwest Interactive conference held in Austin in March. Looking back at it from a distance it’s interesting what sticks in my mind.
Working for HopeLab I am, naturally, games-focused, and much of what stays with me has a games dimension. In particular I’m still struck by Jane McGonigal’s presentation on her new book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Her talk explored the real-world impact games can have, something we are familiar with at HopeLab from our experience with the Re-Mission game. Games can change the way the participants feel, think and interact with the world around them, making them smarter, more confident and more resilient.
Although her talk was inspiring (read more about it here) it was not just her words that stick with me. As she began she announced that as her “talk was about games we’re going to play a game” and introduced us all to Massively Multiplayer Offline Thumb-Wrestling (MMOTW). This incredible game is like thumb-wrestling only, well, massively multiplayer.
In a ballroom of a couple of thousand people each person had to participate in two games, one with each hand, simultaneously. Each game had to have a minimum of three players but could go much larger, with battles of six, eight, ten or more hands. As we all formed these nodes the entire room became connected and at her command hundreds of furious thumb wars began.
I am pleased to report that I represented HopeLab well, managing to win battles with both hands.
After she congratulated us on our successes McGonigal asked us to sit down and revealed that she had really been doing some “crazy brain science on [us]”. When you hold someone’s hand for six seconds a chemical – oxytocin – is released that enhances the feelings of trust and connectedness between people. But how would you get a room of strangers to hold hands for six seconds? Awkward, right? A game however provides a comfortable excuse for us to touch and interact, literally changing on a chemical level how we were feeling about each other.
It was a fun and powerful demonstration of exactly what McGonigal would go on to talk about, how games alter us in ways both subtle and profound, and an incredibly memorable way to demonstrate rather than simply describe this effect.
At our staff meeting this week I ran a game of Massively Multiplayer Thumb Wrestling with everyone and appreciated again the laughter and sense of connection it generated. I highly recommend it for your next team meeting or family gathering!
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The theme of this year’s 
