Byron Reeves

Professor, Stanford University; Behavioral Scientist, Proponent of Interactive Gaming & Virtual Worlds in the Workplace

BIG IDEAS

• The gamification of work.
  Imagine the value if you could transfer the excitement and focus found in great games to the office. What if employees could solve customer problems, design new software or configure better shipping routes working inside a game environment at work? This isn't just possible, it's inevitable as argued in Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete. As employee productivity and engagement become more critical, the user experiences provided by game technology offer tantalizing solutions for business. This is far more than a quaint metaphor or a twist on e-learning. A new gamer generation is entering the enterprise, expecting that their work experiences will be more like their playful ones. They’re looking for better and more engaging tools to help them collaborate, innovate and lead. Elements of sophisticated games (e.g., feedback, virtual economies, self representation, team play, transparent reputations, ranks and levels) can address a host of business problems with morale, communication, productivity, and alignment of personal and corporate goals. Examples of games at work can now be found in several business sectors including retail sales, customer relations, financial services, software development, energy, transportation and health care.
• Media are more real than you think.
  No one worries when small children wave at someone on TV thinking that people on the screen can actually see them. We’re sure they’ll learn otherwise as they mature and gain experiences with the fantasy world of media. But that’s often wrong. People of all ages often respond to media as if the people, places and objects shown are absolutely real, even if they have no conscious awareness of their responses. Byron has done decades of research, first summarized in The Media Equation but much of it new, showing that media presentations are close enough to reality that the human brain processes the information as real experiences with little if any discount for the fact that words and pictures are mere symbols. His research has shown, for example, that people are polite to computers (in ways similar to real social interactions), people move their avatar back when approached too closely by another avatar (just as they would if approached by someone in real life), and people prepare their bodies for physical action in response to threats and movement on a screen (even though it’s just a picture). There are serious implications of these responses for worrying about media effects and for designing media that maximize engagement.
• You can’t change what you can’t measure.
  Information about our lives is growing exponentially, allowing people to monitor themselves and their world in ways that may promote useful behavior change. Ubiquitous sensors measure moment-by-moment our location, our physical health, how much email we send, where we travel and how fast, how much electricity our homes consume, our levels of physiological excitement, and much more. It’s clear from research that when people are presented with sensor information about their behaviors, they will often change behaviors to their own and community advantages. What’s unclear is how to present sensor information to people so that they are engaged, and ultimately learn, remember and use the information. Intelligent design of interaction experiences is a critical consideration in making the new era of information sensors a benefit rather than a contribution to stifling information overload.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Byron is the Paul C. Edwards Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and is Co-Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the H-STAR Institute (Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research) and its industry program, Media X. He is an expert on the psychological processing of media in the areas of attention, emotions, learning, and physiological responses, and has published over 100 scientific papers about media and psychology.  His research has been the basis for a number of new media products at companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, in the areas of voice interfaces, automated dialogue systems, and business process simulations.  He is currently working on the application of multi-player game technology to behavior change and the conduct of serious work, and is Co-Founder of Seriosity, Inc., a company building enterprise software inspired by game psychology.

A Closer Look at Byron

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Byron's current research agenda?

Virtual worlds and games.  What are the most important ingredients of successful multiplayer games and how can they be applied in the enterprise?  Our research has identified the ten most important ingredients: self-representation with avatars, 3D worlds, narratives, feedback in all time domains, ranks and levels, transparent reputations, synthetic economies, competition under explicit rules, teams, and time pressure.  And the research shows how these ingredients already support complex work in games, and it shows how they can be applied to business collaboration, leadership, and innovation. 

In recent work, Byron has concentrated on two of the ten ingredients outlined in Total Engagement:

Self-representation in media.  People no longer have to sit on one side of the screen.  Now they can jump into the picture.  Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have an avatar that they use inside of a game or virtual world, and thousands of people use avatars at work.  Our research has shown how employees at companies like IBM, Accenture, Cisco, State Farm, Intel, BP and Wells Fargo log into virtual worlds and use avatars to brainstorm with colleagues, recruit employees, sell to customers, attend leadership training, manage programs, direct operation centers, and collaborate with company groups around the world.  Avatars are the most psychologically significant–and downright fun–feature of new media.  Our new research shows that there is primitive engagement behind the fun–the hearts of the people that control avatars beat faster, the areas of people’s brains that regulate social interactions are more engaged, and people care substantially about how their avatars are treated–even though all of the action is in a virtual world.  Avatars create the emotional and social connections necessary for the most valuable business conversations – those where innovations are first cooked up and debated, passions are exposed, and people win, lose or accommodate via personal connections.

Synthetic currencies and virtual goods.   Research shows that trading a synthetic currency from a game or virtual world (whether it’s fake dollars, gold pieces or pieces of fruit) activates the same brain centers as winning or losing real money.  This means that virtual economies can provide the motivational benefits of real money, but they can be used more broadly to price things not easily traded in the marketplace.  We are doing research on the use of synthetic currencies to price the attention people wish to receive for email (and thereby decrease the amount of useless information that fills our inboxes) or to price ideas that people propose for company groups to execute (and thereby increase the amount of time that people spend working on things that others think are important).  Check out this study we did about using a synthetic currency to change how people use email to get the attention of their colleagues (http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2100/1963).

Game psychology and energy efficiency.  In addition to applying game psychology to enterprise problems, we are interested in applications to intractable behavior change problems and have a significant project underway in the area of energy.  Utilities and governments have spent billions of dollars to create a sensing infrastructure for home energy use with the promise that energy information will change energy behaviors.  The information reported by devices like new smartmeters, however, can be stunningly dull to most people, negating the significant investment to bring them online.  We are conducting new research, funded by the Department of Energy and in cooperation with utilities and Google, Inc., to test how best to nudge people toward energy efficient behaviors.  Check out this movie as an example of how people might be engaged in a multiplayer game that uses data from home smart meters (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDR0-QgqiEk).

ENGAGEMENTS
How have other organizations utilized Byron's expertise, and what's ahead on his schedule?

Byron’s presentations about games, virtual worlds, and social media span a wide audience from universities to corporations to government and non-profit organizations. 

Byron has spoken recently at Stanford University, University of Southern California, Emory University, MIT, Auburn University, UC Santa Barbara, University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Corporate presentations include engagements at Accenture, Facebook, Intel, IBM, State Farm, Visa, Intel, Cisco, HP, Konica Minolta, Microsoft, and Pearson Education.

Other recent presentations include the LOGIN Conference, Virtual Edge Summit, National Science Foundation, BECC (Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference), GDC (Game Developers Conference), Serious Game Summit, and Virtual Goods Summit.

In addition to speeches, Byron and colleague Leighton Read run smaller discussion sessions aimed at brainstorming, product reviews, and business strategy, and participate in executive and board presentations at small and large companies.

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Who shapes Byron's thinking and inspires his work?

Several people doing excellent new research about games and virtual worlds influence Byron including:  Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford University), Nick Yee (PARC), Ted Castronova (Indiana University), Dimitri Williams (USC), Jane McGonigal (Institute for the Future), and James Blascovitch (UC Santa Barbara).

Those who bridge the gap, with engaging writing and compelling real-world examples, between the sciences and applications to business and social change, including Dan Ariely (Preditably Irrational), Richard Thaier and Cass Sunstein (Nudge), and Daniel Pink (Drive).

RECOMMENDED READING
What's on Byron's must-read list?

On games and virtual worlds, book favorites are:

Exodus to the Virtual World:  How Online Fun is Changing Reality by Edward Castronova (St. Martin’s Press, 2007)

Got Game:  How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever by John Beck and Mitchell Wade  (Harvard Business School Press, 2004)

A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster (Paraglyph Press, 2005)

On information technology more generally:

The Future of Work by Thomas Malone (Harvard Business Press, 2004)

From Counterculture to Cyberculture:  Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain (Caravan Books, 2008)

And on totally different topics:  Hemingway, Steinbeck and Patrick O’Brian

MIND FUEL
Which blogs, web sites, and industry events does Byron tap into to feed his mind and fuel his creativity?

The world of games changes quickly and the web is a great place to keep pace. Some good sites include:

Terra Nova, a weblog about virtual worlds and games:
http://terranova.blogs.com/

Water Cooler Games, a site about games with an agenda:
http://www.bogost.com/watercoolergames/

Serious Games Initiative, focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges:
http://www.seriousgames.org/

Inside Social Games, tracking the convergence of games and social platforms:
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/

Influential conferences about games, virtual worlds and serious applications:

Game Developers Conference (including Serious Games Summit)
http://www.gdconf.com/

LOGIN Conference
http://www.2010.loginconference.com/

Virtual Goods Summit
http://www.mediabistro.com/virtualgoodssummit/

Metanomics, a website about serious uses of virtual worlds produced at the Cornell University Business School
http://www.metanomics.net

OUTREACH
What are Byron's pressing questions, and on which topics does he seek your feedback?

How many employees in your company play multiplayer games?  And among those that do, what ideas do they have about how to change the design of work to make your company more competitive?

We know that people work best when they have a sense of purpose and can see how their small efforts contribute to a greater good.  How can we use information technology to give people “micro credits” for the “macro good”?