
How Game Design Can Revolutionize Everyday Life - peter123
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2009/05/games_wired
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Tiktaalik
It makes sense. For some evolutionary reason our brains find many peculiar
tasks to be very satisfying and in order to "find the fun" games are designed
to tap into those. For example there are a huge amount of "organizing" games,
such as Tetris, that play on the fact that for some reason people love to
assemble things to be perfect and just in the right place. The games industry
has been like a big research experiment to find these obscure things that for
some reason people love to do. Now we can use this knowledge to improve
existing products' usability.

The article already touched on the Nike iPod software, but another similar
example of using a game for self improvement is the RPG bank toy that exists
in Japan. <http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/06/bankquest-bring/> With this
bank/toy the money you put in also exists in a virtual world and so you can
buy new armour for your avatar.

The Sixty One <http://www.thesixtyone.com/> steals quite obviously from some
of the recent developments in games as it will mimic Xbox Live and give you
achievements for doing various music rating tasks on the site.

Myself I've considered a few ideas to use games in my work. When I was writing
a tool to automatically compile help files for our code I considered trying to
build in some sort of leaderboard that would show during a build who had
commented the most in the hope that it would encourage people to comment every
one of their functions. However there were too many technical issues to iron
out at the time and so I didn't proceed with it. I think the overall concept
though was a smart one (unless people started doing useless comments...)

~~~
zby
"A Theory of Fun" convincingly argues that the fun in games is all about
learning. Of course it is tilted towards learning stuff that was useful a few
thousands years ago.

Link: <http://www.theoryoffun.com/>

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zimbabwe
It's curious that this sort of game design is exactly the sort that's getting
railed against in the progressive game design community. Fellows like Jonathan
Blow and Jason Rohrer argue quite convincingly that games' focusing on
artificial rewards are merely masking the lack of meaning that modern games
have to offer.

The face that this solution works as well as it does suggests that there's not
much meaning to the email overload we see today. That means there might exist
a better solution to this problem, something that encourages meaningful
interaction in the place of overloading responses. But this is an interesting
stopgap solution in a lot of ways.

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stcredzero
It's a no-brainer that games can change behavior -- they are disguised
variable reward skinner boxes! I suspect that a part of being a great teacher
involves implementing, as much as possible, an optimized variable-schedule of
reward for each student.

I also suspect that a hobbyist or student who "gets into it" is often one who
has stumbled into the right variable-reward situation.

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pchristensen
This was one of the big motivations behind the design of StackOverflow. Joel
and Jeff talked about it (a lot) in the podcast. Their badges were modeled
very closely on the badge system of XBox Live.

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rajatrocks
Our Nitro platform provides game mechanics as a service that can easily be
integrated into sites/apps/etc. to incent and motivate user behavior. You can
check out the marketing speak here: <http://www.bunchball.com> and the actual
meat here: <http://wiki.bunchball.com>

