making democracy fun?

I was talking yesterday to my dear friend Orna, a gorgeous and mischievous Israeli police officer, about my interest in democracy and human behavior when she tipped me off to a new theory on how to solve the world's problems: the Fun Theory.

A quick google search this morning showed the theory is primarily a campaign of Volkswagen. You may be familiar with their viral video of Stockholm residents bouncing up a subway staircase that's been converted into a piano keyboard. As their website explains, the Fun Theory is "the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better."

I've long been curious about the power of fun. I first got thinking about how you can motivate people to do what you want (learn, participate, work, etc) by turning an activity into a game when I heard about how Google tags photos for its image search. You can imagine the feat of labeling the billions of images on the web. Google does so through free labor. The Google Image Labeler is a game (that you can play too) in which teams of players win points when they type in the same word to identify a picture. The brainchild of Luis von Ahn, who has pioneered other "Games with a Purpose," the Labeler is pretty ingenious. It's an addictive game which taps our competitive spirit and simultaneously creates more relevant tags for Google search (two people agreeing on a tag increases that tag's accuracy).

How many other tasks could we collectively tackle using the Fun Theory? And, more to my interest, how could we use the principle of fun to improve our democracy?

A first step may be to better define what "fun" is. I'm certain there's been real research in this area, but let me toss out an initial guess. Fun can tap into any of three drives we all share: a natural curiosity and desire to figure things out; competitiveness; and self-expression. The last two are similar in that they rely on our social instinct to look good/smart/talented in front of others, but the first is a purely private desire and explains the hours we whittle away on Solitaire and Tetrus.

Once we get a better handle on fun the next question is how we could use it to strengthen our democracy. Could we get citizens more informed about candidates' policy preferences, motivate them to vote, encourage them to hold politicians to account and spur them to get more involved in community efforts? Those are questions that'll take a lot of work answering - but are certainly worth the effort. My sincerest gratitude to Orna for asking them in the first place.