An ideal society in which us human folks can thrive and be happy, we’ve been struggling to achieve this since we came from the seas. Can the burgeoning digital communities and virtual worlds give a glimpse, a taste, maybe even a prolonged experience of what utopia looks and feels like? Can we achieve in a digital society an equilibrium what hasn’t been achieved in the real world? It’s early days yet, but I think a good place to start is make people happy and digital worlds and societies make people happy.

“You’ve never had it so good!” they tell us, well they told us that back in the 80s and things have got even better since then. We are told that the standard of living is better than ever, we have more money and cars and property and electronic stuff, modern life is good.

Don’t you get the feeling that despite this continued fiscal success people aren’t happier? Apparently they are not. There was a TV series on BBC last year examining what makes us happy. The programme asked the question, are we happier now we are richer? Unsurprisingly the series came to the conclusion that despite a massive rise in our personal wealth over the last 50 years we aren’t any happier, in fact some of us are less happy.

We are hard to please it would seem, so what makes us demanding, self centred, ungrateful, planet gobbling pests happy? I attended the South by South West interactive festival in Austin this year and a keynote address by game designer, games researcher and future forecaster Jane McGonigal provided some answers to us assembled geeks and nerds. We are cool now by the way, Geek is the new black, Jane said that we make happiness and I believe her.

Jane boiled down a mass of research on happiness to four digestible bullet points, this is what we need to be happy

1. satisfying work to do
2. the experience of being good at something
3. time spent with people we like
4. the chance to be a part of something bigger

Digital worlds can provide us with all of the above, all we need to be happy.

Number one, satisfying work to do. In virtual worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft (WoW) or Oblivion you have satisfying and exciting things (work) to do, may have to collect an artifact from a zombie packed dungeon, or learn/procure new fireball spell to burn some nasty troll dude.

Number two, the experience of being good at something, games are set up for us to succeed, when you die, you come back to life. Games want us to win they are forgiving real life isn’t quite so good at that. As a gamer you feel you are good at the game when you complete a level and completing the whole game feels great, sometimes it feels so good that you complete it again!

Number three, time spent with people we like, in a massively multi-player role playing game (MMORPG) such as WoW you complete tasks with a group of friends, spending time with time them sharing the experience. When playing games online such as Halo 3 or Rainbow Six players are spending time with each other within digital worlds enjoying themselves.

Number four the chance to be part of something bigger, do Xbox live gamers feel part of a fraternity of online gamers? do bloggers feel a sense of community and that they are effecting a fundamental change in opinion leading and communication? do WoW gamers feel part of something bigger? In my experience I’d say to yes to all of the above.

So that just about wraps it up for money and the real world then, it officially sucks, Linden Dollars and binary buddies rule OK! I’m happy, next stop a digital utopia?

Posted by Oliver in Digital Utopia? on May 10, 2008