

Ask HN - Review My Idea: Make Work More Like Games - jhuckestein
http://thezukunft.com/2010/02/24/business-idea-week-work-games/

======
pvg
If only there were some sort of tokens employers could give employees as an
incentive. The tokens could then be exchanged for goods and services. Perhaps
the production and circulation of tokens could be managed by the government to
prevent abuse.

~~~
patio11
However, empirically we've seen that touching token allocations causes huge
amount of resentment and is very, very difficult to do in an elastic manner.
Demands of the business can arise in hours or days, token allocation tweaks
take years to take effect. We've seen that people will react -- within seconds
-- to non-token incentives to do things that certainly resemble work. Blizzard
can make a database entry with a few purple pixels attached and _wham_ several
million people start doing very repetitive tasks to achieve it. Think of the
business value that could be harnessed if a little alert on my dashboard said
"Hey Patrick, that funky Mersenne Twister re-implementation that has been in
purgatory for the last 12 weeks and is now blocking delivery now is offering
purple pixels for unit testing!"

I know you can game any system for rewards -- it has been a near obsession of
mine since a kid, when I found that 89.5% is still an A- and that meant I
could still miss 3 homework assignments and not suffer any consequences as
long as I did really well on the tests. Like was mentioned in the video posted
yesterday, everyone knows that grades are a game... its just an
unsophisticated game that sucks, but nonetheless seems to converge on
education for many people. Grades as a game have always been Pong in a world
where Pacman exists... now they're Pong in a world where WoW exists. (Or even
where Farmville exists.) Holy cow, we can abuse that better. ("Little Timmy
learned 7 * 8 = 56. Ding, Mathematician Level 14! _Gratz Timmy_!")

~~~
pvg
_token allocation tweaks take years to take effect_

This is mostly a function of a particular method of token allocation, rather
than a property of the tokens. There are entire lines of work where the
allocation is quite elastic - people who work on commission, people who make a
significant part of their income based on performance bonuses, etc. Even at
start-ups, in my experience, bonuses for important milestones are not all that
uncommon, even if they often are, well, token.

------
metamemetics
Also, obligatory-TED-video-exposing-counterintuitive-point:
<http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html>

Providing higher rewards decreases performance.

~~~
ryanelkins
Actually providing rewards decreases performance in creative problem solving.
He actually said that it worked really well ("kicked butt") in getting people
to perform simple mechanical skills based tasks.

Besides, the point isn't about increasing performance in situations where
people are highly engaged regardless, it's about increasing engagement where
motivation can wane, especially in more menial type of tasks/jobs.

------
brown9-2
There is probably a pretty large body of work on employee motivation and
reward systems in the academic literature. I'd suggest familiarizing yourself
pretty closely with all of the research before going anywhere with this idea.

~~~
chrispine
There _is_ a large body of work on this. The short, short version: this is a
Very Bad Idea.

For an intro into the subject, check out "Punished By Rewards" by Alfie Kohn.

------
sshumaker
You have to be very careful that people don't 'game' the system. Metrics like
these are rife for exploitation - especially likely if the metrics and rewards
are designed by people who don't have a deep understanding of rule systems.

"Ding! 10,000 lines of code reached!" \-- A recipe for a very bloated product

~~~
donaq
Well, that's not that difficult. Have negative tokens for bugs filed, similar
to loss of experience for dying in an RPG.

~~~
cousin_it
It seems someone needs to read Joel's article on metrics:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20020715.html> . Relevant quote:

 _Software organizations tend to reward programmers who (a) write lots of code
and (b) fix lots of bugs. The best way to get ahead in an organization like
this is to check in lots of buggy code and fix it all, rather than taking the
extra time to get it right in the first place. When you try to fix this
problem by penalizing programmers for creating bugs, you create a perverse
incentive for them to hide their bugs or not tell the testers about new code
they wrote in hopes that fewer bugs will be found. You can't win._

~~~
donaq
While I find Joel's articles interesting and often enlightening, I don't think
"someone" needs to treat them as the Word From On High of software development
or program management.

Anyway, that's still not impossible to solve. After the design phase, reward
for every module shipped, then deduct points for every bug reported by users.
If the programmer is able to hide bugs such that they _never manifest in
production_ , I say all power to him.

~~~
cousin_it
Now the programmer has an incentive to make their subsystem hard to use, so
users don't go there and report bugs. C'mon, add some more epicycles.

~~~
donaq
Why would the bug reporting mechanism be in a subsystem? Unless every
subsystem had its own bug reporting mechanism, which makes zero sense.

[Edit]

Oh ok, I think I see what you mean. Well, firstly, if a subsystem weren't
integral to the app, why develop it in the first place? Secondly, you could
always track the usage of the subsystem and provide additional incentives for
its success. Lastly, who says subsystems have to be directly accessible to the
user? If tasked to write a module that runs in the background, one can hardly
make it deliberately obtuse.

------
csallen
There was a time when I played WoW religiously, and actually had my own guild.
This was back in the day, when guilds spent 30+ hours a week clearing dungeons
that required 40 people to memorize and execute intricate strategies. Even
though my guild was relatively successful, motivating people to show up to
these raids was _always_ a chore. Many players consistently left dungeons
early, or avoided them altogether. Interestingly enough, these same players
didn't mind spending hours grinding or fishing or hanging out in the city,
doing nothing in particular. They did this despite the fact that raiding
dungeons was more productive, stimulating, exciting, challenging, and
potentially rewarding.

I suspect one of the appeals of doing repetitive, mindless things like fishing
or grinding in games is because... they're repetitive and mindless. There are
real-life equivalents: clicking around on Hacker News, slumping on a couch for
hours watching television, etc. These activities are much less mentally
exhausting, much less stressful than doing actual work.

Anyway, I think your idea is a great one, but there are some hurdles. If you
reward people for menial activities, then they'll waste tons of time on it
because it's mindless and easy. Chances are this type of work is not what any
company would want its employees doing. If you only reward people for actual
demanding work, then chances are you won't really be adding anything.

~~~
jhuckestein
Unfortunately, there are a lot of jobs that are pretty mindless. Let's help
these people out :)

------
jmtame
it's too difficult to build a "one size fits all" application. as an example,
target has one goal with their cashiers: a fast checkout process. so they
start a timer when the first item is scanned, and that timer only stops once
the receipt has been printed. i was just at a target last week and the cashier
told me she had to pause the transaction while someone found something i had
asked to be put on hold; she was actually worried about receiving a low score.
the score looks like this: 92% A, or 85% B, etc.

so target's "reward" mechanism is partially built into their POS machines,
while the other part is driven by their management. if you sell more than 3
target cards in a day, you can pick out anything in the store <$20 for free.
that could be built, but it'd have to be tied into target's hardware to work.
and how are you going to give those badges away in that case?

i guess i'm not sold on the idea because i don't see any specific examples of
where it would be compelling. maybe web-based companies, at that point your
main goals are things like code written or commits. so you could monitor all
employee's github accounts (as an example) and send out a company e-mail with
badges based on that. just an example.

~~~
jhuckestein
I think the most appealing market are government agencies and large
corporations with lots of paperwork, such as insurances.

The process of managing a customer request in an insurance company goes like
this: file the request, create a template mail, press "send", have it printed.
Why not stir that up a little?

------
vyrotek
This is a great idea and has crossed my mind many times. In fact, it was one
of the motivations behind our current startup. (<http://blog.iactionable.com/>
& <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126780>)

I think (and hope) the achievement/badge trend will continue to grow and show
up in all sorts of new places. The biggest hurdle we are facing is finding
ways to 'hook' into the events which get tracked and converted into badges.
Its pretty simple for websites, but for a company to setup or modify existing
systems to automatically ping events is no small undertaking for that company.
Maybe there's an opportunity for consulting here too?

Then there's trying to decide what things are valuable for company X to track
and award badges for. All this takes time and money. With a little backing
info from research studies I could see companies giving this a shot. There are
existing services which allow employees to give 'kudos' points to each other
for things they do. This would be taking that to the next level and fully
automating it.

~~~
jhuckestein
Have you looked into workflow engines at all? If a company had any of those
deployed, tracking the metrics would be easy.

I don't think the problem lies in tracking the metrics. It lies in managing
and organizing the "game".

------
awa
I have tried doing this repeatedly for me individually and every time it has
failed. The reasons:

1\. Hard to define measurable goals: How many points for a bug fix. What if a
bug fix requires 5 mins other requires 4hrs. Its hard to assign points to each
individual work item and track 'em.

2\. How to set good milestones.

3\. Avoiding Karma whoring: How to stop from racking companionship points by
having extended lunches

In a company scenario it would be hard to sell this idea to all employees and
might deter some prospective employee to join as it might set the
corporation's image as childish in the outside world.

------
andr
My favorite talk from TED2010 was by Jane McGonical and her theory was that
kids around the world spend enormous amounts of time and effort playing games.
They should not be considered losers for gaming so much, everyone else is the
loser for not knowing how to tap their energy.

Her idea is not so much applying game dynamics to real life, but changing
existing games slightly so that people solve more important problems (think
ending world hunger by leveling up).

You can find several games she created on <http://www.avantgame.com/>

The talk is not yet online, but I"ll post it on HN when it comes out.

------
richcollins
If your job is like fishing in WoW, it should be automated so that you can
actually do something of value with your time.

A better approach: <http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html>

------
chaosmachine
I used to work in a tech support call center. They tracked every metric you
can imagine. A large percentage of the tech support staff were WoW addicts, so
I could definitely see this working.

~~~
vyrotek
Ha! I seriously laughed when I read your comment. Only because I actually work
for a company that sells SaaS Call Center software and this has DEFINITELY
been on my mind. ;)

------
ryanelkins
A company spanning system is a pretty lofty goal. Perhaps you should look into
something smaller, say something at the application level. A good example
would be Ribbon Hero for MS Office.

------
coffeeaddicted
Your mind always knows if it's working or having fun. Every way to trick the
mind in confusing the two fools it at most for a short time, then it catches
up. I guess that's because your mind is about as clever as you are yourself
(and it knows what you're trying to do!).

Also there are already reward systems which are real. I like to be proud of
what I do. I like to be rewarded with fair payment. I think stuff like that
works better for me than an artificially added point-system.

------
iron_ball
I like it. I've worked at a few big corporations where you'd get special
plaques or pins for years of service, good ideas, attending certain training
courses, and so on, and although I personally didn't understand the appeal --
I'd rather have challenging and meaningful work -- the people who earned those
awards seemed to display them proudly. I always wondered why that kind of "rep
grinding" wasn't more prevalent than the usual winner-take-all "employee of
the month" stuff.

------
Lorin
Can't believe this wasn't posted, I believe the following video was a heavy
source of inspiration for that blog post...
[http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-
Bo...](http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-
Presentation) Brilliant 30 minute talk by Jesse Schell (funny too), I was
looking for it before everyone started posting billions of comments but
Chrome's history acted up in a funky way. Oops :)

~~~
Lorin
If you want to find out more about this guy, I'd recommend checking out his
website: <http://artofgamedesign.com/>

~~~
IsaacL
His book is also excellent:
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0123694965?ie=UTF8&ta...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0123694965?ie=UTF8&tag=nohao-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0123694965)
\- I checked it out of the library recently and it really is a bible for game
design. It literally covers everything you'd want to know about making high-
quality games.

------
rajatrocks
There was a recent VentureBeat article by the authors of Total Engagement:
[http://games.venturebeat.com/2010/01/15/the-lesson-of-
gaming...](http://games.venturebeat.com/2010/01/15/the-lesson-of-gaming-why-
do-we-have-to-pay-people-to-work/)

We're working with several companies to implement game mechanics for both
training and job performance: <http://www.bunchball.com>

------
csomar
I don't think this will work in the tech world. Don't you think developers
will try to game the system just to make more points?

Joel already discussed this kind of renumeration, he gave an example of bugs.
If you pay your developers more money if they produce bug-free code, they
won't report bugs and it'll result in a worse result.

~~~
jhuckestein
Point taken. But the market of lowly routine workers is much bigger anyway,
right? :)

------
emilam
There is a HBS Press book that goes into this in detail.
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/142214657X?ie=UTF8&tag=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/142214657X?ie=UTF8&tag=emilam0e-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=142214657X)

------
NathanKP
I think a better solution would be to find an innovative way to add
interaction like "The Fun Theory" people:

[http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/11/fun-theory-
how-...](http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/11/fun-theory-how-
entertainment-increases.html)

------
TrevorBurnham
This idea is similar to:

<http://chorewars.com>

------
kbrower
Tangent: This reminds me of a free book I downloaded on the kindle: Metagame
<http://www.amazon.com/MetaGame-ebook/dp/B002AJ88LC>

------
metamemetics
I think a far better idea for the hypothetical Bor Ingsurance is to hire only
WoW addicts, skip the ball-point-pens\star-stickers, and reward them with in-
game items and gold.

------
hernan7
Too Dilbertesque for my tastes, sorry.

~~~
klipt
Just what I was thinking: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD4-EON1RhI>

------
sahaj
you forgot one thing: not everyone likes to play games.

------
tkahn6
I believe that this would only be really beneficial for a McJob-like work
environment where the employees believe their work has very little importance
or impact.

I would imagine that working at a start-up or at Google or at some other fast-
paced innovative company would negate the need such a system and would
possibly devalue (within the employee's mind) the importance of their work.

~~~
vyrotek
Probably true, but that doesn't mean there isn't a market for such a idea.
What do you think the ratio of McJobs to Startups/Google jobs is?

~~~
wlievens
Exactly. The overwhelming majority of all jobs in any sector probably suck.

