

Against Gamification - mcantelon
http://www.slate.com/id/2289302

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danneu
_...there are legitimate reasons why people feel they're achieving less. These
include the boring literal truths of jobs shipped overseas, stagnant wages,
and a taxation system that benefits the rich and hurts the middle class and
poor._

The author is trying to make too much of a sociopolitical connection to the
proliferation of gaming. Achieving virtual points directly appeals to reward
pathways in humans because the achievement is objective and directly
gratified. That's really all there is to it. Maybe you can find a correlation
between escapism tendencies and quality of living, but it's tangential to the
discussion.

If eating broccoli instead of Fun Dip increased some numbers on a real-time
nutritional profile HUD on our forearm that we could check for gratification,
we'd eat more greens. But the reality is that humans are incredibly dissonant.
Forgoing dietary fiber for a morning Snickers bar might increase our chances
of anal polyps in the future, but we don't really care. Achieving arbitrary
points (like experience/level-up systems in games) appeals so well to our
fundamental nature that taking successful games and adding this achievement
level on top of it is a business model in itself.

The world would be a different place if you received a +1 on your Recycled
Items counter on your personal profile before you hit the gym to add +2 to
your Fitness Level. It's less about corporate interest doom and gloom, and
more about the nature of humans.

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mindcrime
_And McGonigal, whose games are filled with top-secret missions in which you
get to play the superhero, says "reality is broken" because people don't get
to feel "epic" often enough. This is a child's view of how the world works._

I disagree. There seems to be good reason to believe that the need to "feel
epic" is a basic drive. Look at how an archetypal story like the "hero's
quest" emerges in a wide variety of cultures over the millennia of time[1].

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces>

_Do adults really need to pretend they're superheroes on secret missions to
have meaning in their lives?_

Very likely so. If you accept anything that evolutionary psychology suggests,
then look at one of their fundamental tenets: Technology and culture "evolve"
faster than humans do, and so we are evolutionarily "wired" for life in the
Ancestral Environment... hunter / gatherer society in tribes of around 150 (or
less) people. Modern life removes some of the challenges we are wired to face,
and replaces them with different ones... it does not strike me as unreasonable
to think that adults may actually have some inner drive / motivation that very
naturally maps to the sensations we get from games; and that isn't easily
found in "real life."

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wdewind
I've always thought McGonigal completely misses the point. She's sort of right
and sort of wrong about a lot of things at once:

1) People in general definitely are bored. The industrial revolution led to
the death of a lot of artisanship and concentrated a lot of thinking power
into the upper class. I'm not sure the answer to that is video games though:
that's escapism. Now she uses other values of gaming, but those arguments
don't make sense for the "people need to feel epic" facet of her general
thesis.

2) She confuses gaming with design. This is my real issue: what's she's
ultimately saying is if we use games to help guide people into solving
problems we will be better off. The parts of this that are true can be
attributed to good design in general: industrial, graphic, yes game and other
types too. But gaming is just one small part of this.

------
lowprofile
First, I dislike gamification on a personal level, but from a business level
it makes huge sense. Trading a reinforcer(badges) of no real value for
something of value(data) is smart.

Gamification may be the wrong way to look at this, I believe most of our
behavior has rules and rewards much like most games. Gamification is just an
explicit way of generating a desired behavior, look at the cliched "gold" star
on the top of a students paper, or a badge.

From a business model(using badges as a simple example), what happens when the
reinforcer loses value, ie everyone else has all the same badges? Do you
invent a new set of badges that are more special than the old ones? Or if the
community no longer cares what kind or how many badges a person has?

Disclosure: I do my house chores to avoid an angry spouse.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I do chores when the house is dirty

~~~
lowprofile
Me too, but there are differing definitions of dirty.

