Gamification

[Clinamenic]

"Turn anything your team needs to know into deceptively simple, highly effective mobile games proven to level up workers quickly."

 

[Clinamenic]

Now observe the gamificational complexity of some of the leading video games, such as Fallout and Borderlands, to prognose where we may be moving. And I'm pretty sure that the video game industry is bigger than that of sports, and bigger than that of film/television, but I could be wrong.

 

[luka]

Playing Batman Arkham City, just smashed Mr Freeze's face in

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Fallout is dire

 

[luka]

what didn't you like about it? It's Stan's favourite.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Looks drab, boring gameplay, cringeworthy cultural references, gash dialogue.

Tbf I don't play games any more and that was about five years ago.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah fallout doesn't have the best story / writing in general, it caters more to players who like open-world gameplay and collecting rare items. The last one is especially grindy and addicting, and I finally burnt out around two months ago. But it did reveal a lot about gamification and incentivizing players to spent hours doing the same tasks over again to receive certain rewards.

 

[sus]

Brother talked about how much fun it was using an excavator to dig a trench. The controls, the clear goal.

Of course, do it everyday it's no longer fun and games, it's just a drag.

This is why I think there's no difference between games and life. Just different levels of complexity (in goals, affordances, structure).

 

[sus]

I think a lot of what is called gamification could be called "making the reward function more salient/prominent over the course of an activity" (not delayed til weeks later when you get a paycheck, e.g.).

I support this thread, mind you, it's a good discussion, and it's fine if we call "making the reward function more salient" gamification, but I think that people sometimes think about this as a major, discrete, qualitative shift—from "reality" to "game." And my model is that it's just cranking up a knob or two

 

[sus]

Virtual reality games, especially those that mimic real life activities like fishing, chopping wood, etc make this connection clearer by blurring the boundary of game and life

If you can imagine X as a VR game people would enjoy playing well...

I want to make a VR game where you play a poet on the Thames. And GPT-3 grades your poem based on coherence + surprisal. It's an aesthetic theory and a simulator bundled into one

 

[sus]

Tom Sawyer is a great example—where he's bored by whitewashing a fence, so he pretends it's a game/play, and tricks some other kids into doing it for him

Because it shows that the line between work and play is largely conceptual. It's about framing. Mentality

When you're forced to do something everyday to keep a roof over your head, it obviously is very tough to keep that mentality going. And boredom sets in even for the best of games, after too many iterations. But this basic point, that almost any task can become a game with the proper psychological switch-flip, very important I think

E.g. "boring" becomes "meditative" and "relaxing"; "stressful" becomes "stimulating" and "gripping" etc etc

 

[sus]

Or how the first kid in Tom's gang is playing at operating a steamboat, being a conductor. Kids love playing dress-up, playing doctor, etc etc.

 

[Clinamenic]

I think a lot of what is called gamification could be called "making the reward function more salient/prominent over the course of an activity" (not delayed til weeks later when you get a paycheck, e.g.).

I support this thread, mind you, it's a good discussion, and it's fine if we call "making the reward function more salient" gamification, but I think that people sometimes think about this as a major, discrete, qualitative shift—from "reality" to "game." And my model is that it's just cranking up a knob or two

Yeah I see your point about the term gamification, and how it evokes a sense of leisure and play that most people don't associate with work-like tasks, even though they do, as you say, share these essential aspects of parameterized rewards.

I think of gamification most generally as the process of engineering an experience to incentivize certain behaviors, and in that sense it pertains to complex video games and workplace dynamics alike. But again the term itself may lose/confuse people.

 

[Clinamenic]

So a game in this general sense is any experience wherein certain behaviors are incentivized over others, as opposed to some hypothetical experience wherein no given behavior is advantageous over any other given behavior, which strikes me as non-existent, i.e. all experiences can be considered games according to this definition.

I think this may fit in with some of your theories @suspended.

 

[sus]

I think of gamification most generally as the process of engineering an experience to incentivize certain behaviors, and in that sense it pertains to complex video games and workplace dynamics alike. But again the term itself may lose/confuse people.

The question becomes, "How is this different than organizational psych, normal functioning of business, micro-economics, etc"

I mean, "designing a system to incentivize desired behaviors" is foundational to how society works, or any organization.

There's a reason jobs pay you. If they didn't pay you, you wouldn't be incentivized to work for them

 

[sus]

So a game in this general sense is any experience wherein certain behaviors are incentivized over others, as opposed to some hypothetical experience wherein no given behavior is advantageous over any other given behavior, which strikes me as non-existent, i.e. all experiences can be considered games according to this definition.

I think this may fit in with some of your theories @suspended.

Yes!

That is, merely by being agents in the world, agents who have preferences—would prefer food/shelter/company, at the very least—we exist in a game situation of trying to fulfill these desired.

And in our pursuit, we gamify the environment, such that it becomes a series of affordances and obstacles—this tree helps me build a house, that tree blocks the road so I can't pass.

 

[sus]

OK I'm on board now sorry to lag behind there

 

[Clinamenic]

A non-gamelike experience would only pertain to a situation of thermal equilibrium, a cosmos-without-organs, at which point there would be no organ to have the experience to begin with. According to this definition, that is.

 

[william_kent]

"The game is so realistic, I feel like I am still on the overtime shift when playing it, mentally exhausted"

a popular game in China simulates a grocery internet startup where the winning strategy is to overwork the programmers

“At some point the players themselves will find out that other approaches are not as efficient as making employees work overtime,” Fang said. “But overusing this function will lead to some key staff dying, which hastens the company’s failure.”

The surprising thing to me is how one of the players quoted in the article says that the "values embedded in the game are good"