A follow-up to my last article on the gamification of work:
And to some extent, “pointsification” is just quantification – something enterprises should be doing anyway. In fact, most the principals of a good game should apply in the workplace.:
Quantification: Tracking sales, average customer support response time, server uptime and other metrics that identify success.
Recognition and Reward: Raises, bonuses, promotions.
Autonomy: Robertson notes that for a game to be truly engaging players must be able to make decisions that “meaningfully impact on the world of the game.” Autonomy has been identified by Daniel Pink and others as a requirement for motivation and job satisfaction.
Challenge: I think this should be self-explanatory.
Looked at this way, is there any difference between “gamification” and “good management”?
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/cn778HqiCjc/
I wrote a follow-up of sorts to my post here The Problem with Gamification:
With all this in mind, is it possible to effectively apply game mechanics to work-related applications? The jury’s still out on Rypple and Moxie’s implementation of badges, but I’m hopeful about both. Meanwhile, Pietro Polsinelli has written an essay on game mechanics and how he applied game design to his social bookmarking/task management web app Licorize. Polsinelli considered how certain common game activities correlate to activities in the application and added points and scoring to those activities. The essay is well worth reading for anyone interested in game mechanics in work related applications.
ReadWriteWeb: Buzzword Watch: The Gamification of Work
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/y10nrRQ-_SY/
Margaret Robertson gets to the core of the problem I’ve had with my thinking on how to apply game mechanics effectively to non-game situations:
That problem being that gamification isn’t gamification at all. What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience. Points and badges have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards. They’re great tools for communicating progress and acknowledging effort, but neither points nor badges in any way constitute a game. Games just use them – as primary school teachers, military hierarchies and coffee shops have for centuries – to help people visualise things they might otherwise lose track of. They are the least important bit of a game, the bit that has the least to do with all of the rich cognitive, emotional and social drivers which gamifiers are intending to connect with.
She’s not completely pessimistic about it, and neither am I:
Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither.
It’s important that we make the distinction between the two undertakings because, amidst all this confusion, we’re losing sight of the question of what would happen if we really did apply the deeper powers of game design to more everyday things – if we really did gamify them – and that question is a fascinating, exciting and troubling one. I really hope we get a chance to explore it properly.
Hide & Seek: Can’t play, won’t play
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/WF3VYCfTJSE/
Grinding interviews cyborg anthropologist, and one of the most influential women in tech, Amber Case:
Reality is boring. Waiting in line at the DMV suck. Real life takes time. Digital life is more instantaneous. In real life, the time and space between goals and accomplishments is often large. For some, it is physically impossible to achieve certain things, like purchasing a Ferrari or rising above middle management in their career path. Online gaming, especially sites like Farmville step in to take care of that void. Whereas one doesn’t have the money, time or room for a real garden, Farmville provides one without the back aching labor. All reality is replaced by small icons, and time is compressed so that goals and accomplishments are right next to one another. Everything has a point value and a reward. When real life takes so long to reward someone, online gaming is often a better and more enjoyable alternative.
In the future, hybrid reality, or life which is both a game and real, might blot out the mild dystopia that we all live in. Or it will make us more intolerable of the space between reality. And for those who spend a lot of time in reality, Foursquare is a good add-on for making the mundane exciting. To be crass, one might say that Foursquare is kind of like dogs pissing on fire hydrants and having other dogs come along and sniff them to see who’s been there. The dog with the most potent urine is mayor of the fire hydrant.
Grinding: Talking with Amber Case
See also:
Here’s my interview with Amber
Here’s our conversation on hypersigils
John Robb’s response to Jane McGonigal’s TED talk
New Hearing Aid Uses Your Tooth To Transmit Sound
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/bzKI0zqUISg/
