In the wake of Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, I participated this week in a round table at Zócalo Public Square on the subject of “How Will Video Games Change the Way We Work?” The other participants were Mark Deuze, Paul Dourish, Nick Yee, and David Rejeski.
Here is my contribution.
Games can be a huge help—but have huge limitations
Reality is Broken makes a strong case for applying the lessons of video games to work, and to the rest of the world. While I am very sympathetic to this idea, I would like to add a caveat: Games work well in part because they provide clear goals and feedback, but the application of clear goals and feedback to work environments has in many cases proved disastrous. The employees of (for example) Washington Mutual have explained how they were being measured exclusively on the number of loans they were approving (clear goals), and how they were threatened with sanctions if they asked too many questions about a customer’s ability to pay (feedback). In fact, much of the financial crisis was due to the application of game-like design principles to work, where employees were forced to work toward short-term goals that were detrimental to the health of their company and the economy at large. In the Eastern Bloc, Polish furniture factories used to be rewarded on the basis of the weight of their total output, and consequently made the heaviest furniture in the world.
The key is to recognize that it is fine to set up goals and feedback in work environments only as long as everybody – from CEO to temp employee – understands that performance measures only give a partial image of reality. Clear goals and feedback are only inspiring in work situations when we have the discretion to decide how seriously we want to take them, and as long as there is no higher-level manager that takes the performance measure literally anyway. Games are also enjoyable because they give us wiggle room. If we are to use game design principles outside games, we need to make sure that the wiggle room is still there; we need to make sure that we are still allowed to use our sound judgment when faced with a performance goal.
I am probably coming out as a skeptic of gamification here, but the point really is that game conventions should not be blindly applied everywhere.
My argument is more fully developed in the book on Failure that I am currently working on.
This is extremely well articulated. I’d like to see a parallel argument made to throw a little cold water on the application of game conventions to education. On the other hand, maybe the key here is that work is ‘real’ in a way that games and perhaps education are not.
Very well written.
I think that your example of the Polish furniture factory is an excellent illustration of some of the conflicting goals of game design and business management. One of the ways in which game designers make gameplay more rewarding for the player is to add more options and interactivity to the game, giving the player more options to achieve success. In most cases, increased complexity allows for more player freedom, often approaching the illusive goal of “emergent gameplay.” In the analog world, however, increasing complexity does not usually grant increased freedom to the employee and “emergent work practices,” such as finding unorthodox ways to increase the weight of your furniture outputs, is usually somewhat undesirable.
As you point out: Gamification, in any form, crashes into the problem that with real effects the rules and solidity of the game system is ever more important.
If you apply gamification to a bank, rules that can be cheated will have dramatic consequences.
I’ve just started out on Reality is Broken, but your post does highlight a key issue regarding the perils of inappropriately applied game principles.
I use game dynamics in education in the form of locative games for language learning, and while I structure the rules to facilitate specific outcomes at certain points in the games, it is the overall experience of the gameplay itself that is centrally important.
When you strip gaming conventions from the context of play and apply carrot-and-stick styled performance objectives you risk demoralizing your workforce and, as you say, encouraging cheating when those goals become more important than the game itself.
To be clear, I am not at all against using game principles elsewhere – including education – it’s just that attention needs to be paid to how goals are defined, and what happens as a result of failure.
Yesterday I heard about a program to “gamify” the graduate program of a US university (Columbia). In this case it amounted to giving students clear feedback about the requirements and expectations that were taken for granted, but never had been explicitly stated. In such a case it can work very well.
It’s not an either/or question.
Yes I think you were clear on that and I agree with you.
You really have to be careful what you wish for when you attempt to “gamify” as what often appear to be simple game rules can often lead to unintended behaviours and consequences.
As a teacher I feel I don’t yet know nearly enough about how game dynamics map to non-game scenarios and so I have to be very careful in how I apply them and in what contexts. Looking forward to you book.
Great article!
I agree with the side effect of using the “goals” and “feedback” to the letter and you gave great examples.
However, when applied to team management, I believe this would give good results.
Regarding results of failure, they should be analysed to understand why it was considered a failure and see how to behave the next time the scenario arises…
Like any other principle or theory, common sense has to rule or it will lead to problems as the one you’ve mentioned.
@Gael What kinds of team management are you thinking of?
Excellent commentary. A post from behavioural economist Dan Ariely’s confirms your words when he compares strict rules (contracts) and informal agreements (handshakes) (http://danariely.com/2011/02/20/in-praise-of-the-handshake/). I think as soon we have very defined rules in place a large number of people will be tempted to game the system, bending the rules looking for personal gain. As you said, measures are only part of the solution.
@vasconcellos Interesting angle. I guess the problem simply lies in assuming that you can remove trust and personal judgment from the equation entirely – but that inevitably leads to mistrust, bureaucracy and gaming the sytem.
@jesper I agree with you, there aren’t procedural rules which can substitute personal judgment and good sense, so no contractual norms can single-handedly address these problems. I think we see some related phenomenon on MMORPGs, when players pay more attention to theorycraft rules than mere enjoyment of the game. Like the saying about failing to see the forest for the trees.
I work in one of the most important Brazilian public health institutions and also see patterns like these in health communication strategies, where a lot of media campaigns fail because people become to attached to the normative do’s and don’t’s and really don’t grasp what the health guidelines really mean to their well-being.
@vasconcellos Interesting connection with public health messages. I see something similar in Denmark too where everybody by now has heard of “good” and “bad” cooking oil, which health food stores exploit by selling _extra_ oil that people are supposed to take as supplements. I wonder if it’s a type of cognitive problem with humans, that we always assume that if something is good, it must mean that we can never have too much of it …
@jesper I think this cognitive “bug” of oversimplification is very common and definitely plays a role in these situations. Speaking of Brazilian health field (the field I have more information about) I think this problem is aggravated by our tradition in public health communication (and communication in general): it’s normative, centralized and unidirectional, so people receive these norms but don’t really incorporate them in their minds. It’s easier to think about “good” and “bad”.
I’m currently doing in my PhD and in it I’ll try to propose video games as a viable and efficient alternative to public health communication in Brazilian context, particularly to the younger population. I think games’ interactivity can sidestep some of older media’ limitations, but I’m also worried about these “gaming the system” tendency. It would be very sad to have a lot of enthusiastic players in health-related games only to discover they don’t translate game information to their offline behavior.