 All right, so next up at tour camp. We've got swarm intelligence and augmented reality with Pong Pongalyn speaking with us So please welcome her to the tour camp stage Thank you everybody. So any gamers among us today? Awesome Anybody ever play any augmented reality games? Great any ingressers among us today. All right. This is gonna be a great talk all right so Games specifically strategy games had been part of our culture for millennia Here we have a go board and one of the best and oldest known examples of a strategy game The object of the game of course is to capture territory from an opponent signified by the presence of game pieces on the board So games can be fun They definitely should be engaging but they also provide a unique opportunity for simulating real-world problems And that's what we're gonna talk about today So I'm Nancy In this world the world you and I are currently interacting with I'm a systems analyst and web developer I study and develop intelligent systems In the world of augmented reality gaming. I'm agent Pongalyn. You can call me Pongo I'm Pongalyn on Twitter. You can find me there and additionally at the end of this talk You can probably find me elsewhere You might even find me walking around the campsite staring at my phone So the game that I'd like to talk about today is an augmented reality game by the name of Ingress Ingress was created in 2014 by a company called Niantic It's the same company that would later go on to create the immensely popular Pokemon Go So unlike Pokemon Go Ingress is PvP its player versus player Additionally, it also has a very cyberpunk flavor that tends to attract a lot of hackers and tech early adopters Which is more or less by design Ingress is both a collaborative and a competitive game, which we can think of us a lot like capture the flag There are two teams green team blue team if anybody asks. I'm on the green team The object of this game is to capture these portals these sites of interest Generally, they're civic art or public gathering places When you see the game happening in physical space it tends to look a lot like this picture on the right a bunch of nerds staring at their phones So in this game, I'm a champion strategist and raid leader in non-game terms. You'd probably call me a community organizer My area of influence is roughly the Northwestern United States Which comprises depending on who you ask somewhere between several several hundred and over a thousand active players in Washington California British Columbia Montana and Idaho So as you can imagine my daily game is primarily concerned with team building So just a little bit about the game itself in the game The way to score score points is to first capture and then connect three portals of your color to make a triangular field As we have on the left The bigger the field the more points, but here's the catch You can only make a field if there are no crossing links of either color obstructing them So to take down links you have to successfully capture one of the linked portals and additionally friendly links those made by your own teammates require a special item to take down Just to give you an idea of how complicated this can be here's an example of what the game board looks like in Washington right now on the right So you can see a lot of these triangular fields on the map Most of these fields are put up by solo players are very small teams in the course of daily play sometimes on their commute sometimes on day trips So smaller operations can be done solo bigger operations on the other hand require teamwork and organization Operations of this size sometimes called mega fields require anywhere from 20 to maybe over a hundred people to execute Once again, this is a player versus player game Which means that there is always another team that is actively trying to block you from doing this So remember if there's one blocking link anywhere on this lane the operation can't succeed Additionally, many of these portals are actually fairly difficult to access There are portals on islands such as this one. There are portals on top of mountains There are portals inside secure facilities There are portals where they're that exist where there is weak or even zero cell signal Sometimes you have to bring your own internet access such as the satellite modem. We see on the lower right So fields of this size demand that every player in the region act in perfect cooperation Precision and generally secrecy as you've probably guessed if you know about your enemy's plan It becomes much easier to block it. It just takes one link So here's what we can say about these operations. They're difficult. They have a chance of failure They are being opposed at all times by another team They require strategic movement in physical space and they require cooperation Precision and secrecy Has anybody ever tried to get a hundred people to keep a secret? It's not easy So I'm gonna ask you to keep these characteristics of the operation in mind as we move ahead So today I want to talk about a very basic problem exerved in gaming Which is how do we get people to act as a team? Any gamer who's ever played a multiplayer game, especially an online one will be familiar with this problem And even if you're not you've probably heard of a character named Leroy Jenkins Anybody ever played with a Leroy Jenkins? Anybody ever been a Leroy Jenkins? Yeah, it can be fun, but it's a it can under time undermine team play So it's not surprising that this problem happens in the real world as well because well, of course it does I mean how many people here really truly enjoy group projects? Yeah, I don't either If you don't it chances are it's because of that one person on the team who doesn't cooperate or in some cases all of them So in games as in life the best rewards tend to happen when people cooperate difficult tasks require cooperation and sometimes they need organization So enter the cat herders. They're the organizers or executors as we sometimes call them the people who get stuff done If you're here today chances are you're one of them and you're facing a hard problem How do you get intelligent free-willed individuals to cooperate? So the leaders that get things done people this is usually this first system that we try to build it's a pyramid So we have our founders at the top calling the shots and to be perfectly honest. That's usually us We have our middle management in the middle in the game These are usually veteran players and they serve as sort of gatekeepers for the people above them And mentors for the people below them They assume some of the management and organizational duties that the executors don't have the bandwidth to address So they delegate, but they still maintain their authority And then at the bottom of the pyramid we have the so-called rank and file In gaming these are usually the new players Sometimes they're the casual players In non-game terms these could be entry-level employees. They could be volunteers You could think of maybe if the people at the top or the strategist figuring out what needs to be done The people on the bottom actually tend to be the people who actually get the work done and Our information in this model flows from the top down So this approach it has some strengths It's very easy to understand. It's very intuitive There's that trope about the triangle being the strongest shape And in many ad hoc situations particularly emergency situations It's incredibly useful for someone to know who's in charge But let's take a moment to think about this model from a security perspective Since most of us are hackers and we're used to approaching things in rather unorthodox ways When we're thinking about attack vectors and how a system might this might be compromised This is one thing we might do. We look at it this way Suddenly it doesn't seem so stable Systems analysts describe this as a brittle system That is to say it lacks flexibility. It is very strong, but it is rigid It lacks the ability to adapt to changing needs when it encounters and challenges outside its wheelhouse. It breaks This problem only gets more pronounced at scale So what we know about these brittle systems is that they're vulnerable to attack So a hacker would see the system with a giant target painted on it that says attack here and the whole system comes crashing down So if you happen to be someone on offense, this is just great. It's very convenient There are many many strategies built around attacking this model If anybody is familiar with social engineering the concept of spearfishing or whaling is it sometimes called? One part of the system is directly targeted the most important one Now those of us playing on the blue team the defenders of the system. This is kind of a concern It forces us to think a little bit more creatively about how we organize things. So what if we could do something? like this So this is swarm intelligence at first glance this probably looks like an unintelligent mob But in actuality there's some crazy teamwork going on here if for no other reason then gosh, how do they not all run into each other? I mean these are birds, right? So this is not a new concept in fact these behaviors are patterns on behaviors in the animal kingdom Army ants starlings any kind of flocking behaviors. This is these are starlings The group is called a murmuration So from a security standpoint, this is pretty interesting because intact attacking one part of the system does absolutely nothing It's practically self-healing. So it's swarm intelligence It's defined as the collective behavior of individuals operating autonomously There's still leaders in this structure and organization as well However, it tends to look a lot different than that traditional pyramid. We were looking at a moment ago It is a decentralized approach, which means it sort of breaks down that pyramid in favor of a more dynamic structure So what a swarm does in effect is it leverages and empowers those people at the bottom of the pyramid in addition to the leaders executors mentors and gatekeepers as It happens it offers many solutions for many of the vulnerabilities. We just talked about with the pyramid It's flexible. It's robust and when it's done. Well, it's frighteningly efficient Swarm intelligence in human systems is not really a new concept either Maybe the simplest example would be a flash mob. We see a pillow fight here Many of these flash mobs look totally spontaneous and disorganized when in actuality They're following some very specific and basic rules that allow these individuals to function as sort of a hive mind So the Swedish Pirate Party founded by Rick Falkving describes itself as a swarm In fact, Falkving wrote an excellent book on it, which I highly recommend. We'll have the link at the end of this talk It shouldn't be surprising that video games have also had some successful examples of swarm as well If anybody's familiar with the game Eve online, there was a famous or infamous group called the Goon Swarm Which was noted for sort of steamrolling their opposition opposition with basically an army of new players So these systems all leverage swarms and they all have one thing in common They tend to crush their competition through numbers and sheer enthusiasm So once again just going back to the qualities of a swarm. It's flexible. How is it flexible? Well swarm methodology is reduced reaction time by basically eliminating bureaucratic overhead. You're not going through a central authority for every decision that you're making It's also robust as we talked about before It reduces surface area for potential attacks it enables self-repair and it over wells the Competition with greater resources whether that's time money or enthusiasm It's also efficient again. It leverages the skill set of the entire swarm not just the people on top So I want to go back to Ingress for a second Just to give an example of this decentralized advantage So this image is from a global tournament in 2017 As in Portland there were probably about 300 players on each team The object of this particular game was to create as many small fields as possible in downtown Portland So this is a snapshot of what the game board looked like just a few minutes before the score met The score was measured. So my team the green team used a swarming strategy for this particular game And that's what it looked like 90 seconds later So using swarm intelligence we were able to steamroll the competition in record time We ended up replicating this at several other tournaments as well, and they all ended up like this So by now you may be wondering how did we do it? So in programming the swarm there are some very basic steps to follow The first one is you have to establish your win condition all games have this This is sometimes called a vision or a purpose when we did this in the Portland tournament. It was make small triangles Second you break it down You have to break it down as far as possible to first principles things that can be mastered and this is important They have to be able to be mastered autonomously in other words You want the members of your swarm to be able to break down and accomplish these tasks without you telling them what to do We call this doing the right thing by default Now Ingress as with most games is not really a difficult game It more or less amounts to showing up on time and pressing buttons on your phone So when we did this in Portland, what did we say we said? Okay, if you have a blue portal, we need you to make it green if we have a green portal We need you to make it linkable if you have a linkable portal We need you to link it make the triangle and move on And the third thing that you have to do is you have to establish communication with the nearest neighbors in the swarm So it's not really enough to make sure that you give them all the information that they need and then just turn them loose If you're trying to steer a swarm, you have to get people talking to each other not to you This is where the real efficiency of the swarm comes in It's fairly common to have instructions for events like the Portland tournament Relayed by an operator or dispatcher of some sort What we actually did this time was we removed them from the equation and we had people just speaking to each other on the ground This enabled us to basically Wipe the board in 90 seconds So to catalyze swarm intelligence in a game setting When a swarm has strong purpose Mastery and communication with its neighbors collective intelligent behaviors will emerge And we can actually break this down even further. It's that simple Play the game So you got to break skills down as far as possible to their first principles that can be mastered autonomously Unconscious competence is the minimum condition necessary for swarm intelligence The more we can do autonomously the more mental mental bandwidth we all have for focusing on sort of higher level tasks and Then talk to each other So communication basically needs to be effortless seamless and a fast and efficient way of supporting the team Again, it is not enough to tell the swarm everything that they need to know you need to get people talking to each other Ultimately what they have to do is establish trust So a lot of times this can mean using a common language to optimize your communication If you've ever listened to a group of hackers speak to one another you probably notice that we have our own language sometimes several This is how we identify each other Language is a very powerful tool for efficiency Inclusion sometimes exclusion and social engineering So talk to each other also means that you have to establish a healthy environment for feedback and be utterly fearless of criticism This can be scary to some traditionalists After every one of these operations success or failure Our team tends to do a thorough debrief with the entire team If anybody wants to talk about what went well what to do better next time or just wanted to get something off their chest That happened in the heat of things they had a safe space to do so anybody could criticize anybody and We set aside specific time and space time in place for them to do so this feedback loop is absolutely critical It is literally the only way to know that you are continuously improving your game whatever game that might be So swarm intelligence doesn't mean that we can't or should not have leadership or organization But the role of leadership in a swarm is clear The first role of a leader in a swarm is to reinforce the wind conditions This is all also called maintaining the vision The next thing that a leader should be doing is motivating that skills mastery You're basically just teaching people to play the game and the last thing is you need to facilitate Communication you need to remove any obstacle to communication that is happening This basically goes back to talk to each other once again not just you talking to them and them talking to you Everybody needs to be speaking to each other So the thing is if you're doing this and you're really striving to be successful at these things What you're really doing once again is you're building trust and this is of course what social engineering is all about So building trust whether that's to persuade people to act for or against their own self-interests So there are many good resources for how to establish this trust many leaders in the industry I'm going to show you a framework that has been used by tribal structures for centuries to establish trust If you want to leave a swarm your job is to be a party cat The best party cat you can be When it really comes down to it the lifeblood of a swarm is recruiting and retention and the best way to Do that is to deliver a worthwhile experience to everybody involved. This is the party Now party is a metaphor. It doesn't have to be a literal party. It could be some other kind of worthwhile experience and Each swarms definition and individuals within the swarm may have their own particular idea of what's a worthwhile experience Once you've identified your swarms definition of a party. It's your job to keep it rolling Your goals are to build trust and identify reward This is the fuel for the party machine and once again you have to keep that party machine rolling So when we're chasing trust and reward, there's sort of a bio Biological component to this there are several chemicals in the brain that we're seeking to activate to in particular The first is oxytocin, which is fundamental to trust and bonding. This is where the party comes in The other is dopamine Which controls our reward systems and defines what we think of as worthwhile experiences So as human beings we've actually discovered a few very reliable ways to activate dopamine reward centers in the brain And it's not the one you're thinking of and it's not money either It's gaming so games have a built-in win condition. That's what games are Games remove obstacles for communication by providing opportunities to take risks and show vulnerabilities Games have been shown in many cases to be more reliable than money or Many other things to get people to act for against their own self-interests So when we create games that promote mastery of these skills We're also reinforcing the swarms win conditions. We're promoting communication by establishing meaningful connections between people We're building trust So what makes a good game? So going back to what we said in the beginning This is a game that is difficult It has a chance of failure and it's maybe adversarial there might be somebody who is trying to stop you from doing this thing It requires strategic movement in physical space now the physical space component is actually pretty important I mean most of us are used to living a good deal of our lives on the internet or through technology There's a certain secret sauce and physical proximity There's an old saying that space is what makes this human and again This requires cooperation precision and secrecy. These are all things that will help us build trust Going back to the party cat because it's still very important So in Ingress we often refer to Tournament play as a process of planning a wedding as well as a war That is you have to take care of the strategy. You got to fast the war You have to win the game and do the things to win the game But your first job in in winning that war is to make sure the army shows up. That's the wedding so In Ingress as well as I believe many other augmented reality games tournaments are run largely by the players They don't get paid Generally, they just doing it because they want to win There's a very important lesson in here about crowdsourcing So hotels after-party parties emergent gameplay This is all organization for the purposes of getting people to do to the place to do the thing So you can win the game and it's very important to remember that swarms particularly in any kind of volunteer situation Will always always gravitate toward the people who are visibly having the most fun They will go out of their way to avoid the people who are not Now swarm intelligent airs on the side of trust and inclusion and access to information The main reason for this is because a tool that is not shared cannot actually be benefited Enemies are expensive Bad actors are also expensive You may think you have a Leroy Jenkins and it turns out you have an Edward Snowden These are hard problems If you're in a swarm and You have a specific goal in mind you will often find yourself making decisions that will make you uncomfortable or appear to compromise your control over the situation Choosing trust is difficult. It's generally worthwhile Back to party cat Here's where we start to see how we can use games as a way not just to teach skills mastery but to cultivate and validate trust We start small with small projects small numbers as We deliver worthwhile experiences We plan parties we gain trust That trust can become a kind of social capital that we can reinvest into larger adventures So you continue reinforcing your win conditions building skills mastery and helping people create meaningful connections with each other This is how your swarm will become a tribe So by now I hope you are probably already thinking about how to apply swarm intelligence to your own projects It's been a pleasure to hear to present here at tour camp and I hope to speak with you all again very soon Anybody have any questions? You want to play a game pretty much? There's this idea that a swarm gravitates around a win condition. It's an idea. It's a goal and It could be a spit. It could be a literal game But it could be some sort of any sort of goal. Let's go to Mars So in general when you are recruiting for a swarm you're looking for people who are Interested in this goal and that they're going to be committed to this goal games are a very easy way of Getting that win condition and getting people involved But generally speaking it's hey, we're doing this cool thing. Do you want it? Do you want to be a part of it? Absolutely. Yes. Yes, actually Let's see here. This wasn't me personally, but a friend of mine had recently been to a Sort of a grassroots political organization Recently and reported that this was actually how many of these Many of the organizers were using to activate new cells Basically using a decentralized approach and saying here are the tools that you need to do this and letting them loose so Really any sort of volunteer organization? Once again the the Swedish pirate party is also describes itself as a swarm But yeah, just about it any sort of situation where you have volunteers who are Free-willed individuals who may all have slightly different ideas about how to do things Of course, yeah That's an excellent question, how do you avoid becoming a pyramid for me personally I think it has always come back to the other members of the swarm I think the feedback loop is a very important way of making sure that you stay honest If somebody doesn't like what you're doing certainly they can walk away But if you have a healthy swarm with a good feedback loop, then a lot of times you'll be able to catch these problems before they become problems Any other questions? Excellent. Thank you so much