Skinner-boxers vs Dungeon Masters
Gameify’s about making work and learning more betterer and funner with games, toys and play. And a lot of people are thinking about the same thing. Roughly speaking, the gameification people fall into two camps: Skinner-boxers and Dungeon-masters.
"Perhaps I can find new ways to motivate them. . ."
Skinner-boxing
The Skinner-boxers want to use the ideas from Behavioural Economics to motivate people by adding points to everything. This is the realm of designing choice architectures and seeming contradictions like libertarian paternalism. Jesse Schell calls this the Gamepocalypse and it was a major theme of his amazingly popular talk at DICE10 (here’s an excellent round-up of some of the conversations this started). And an extract from a strongly disapproving Jay Bachuber at Wise Gaming:
If implemented on the scale Schell envisions though, games could easily become prison bars, or the walls of a Cretian labyrinth. This would be a world where nearly every waking moment is spent grinding. Even worse, we could live in a world where everyone we meet is an ally, an enemy, or just a game piece.
Skinner-boxing is one of the things that makes games ‘fun’. But, as Jonathan Blow observed in his MIGS 2007 lecture:
There are many ways to make a game “fun”, but we usually pick the easy one, which involves sacrificing the player’s quality of life.
Skinner-boxing can be a lot like McManagement, I suppose.
"So what you're telling me is that each of the kobolds has a Wand of Orcus?"
Dungeon-mastery
The Dungeon-masters want to harness games for good and usher in a new era of co-operation, Total Engagement and Epic Wins.
Jane McGonigal, in addition to observing that there is zero unemployment in World of Warcraft, says gamers are virtuosos at:
urgent optimism (everything is always worth trying right now), social fabric (we like people better after playing a game with them), blissful productivity (we’re happier working hard than relaxing) and epic meaning (we’re attached to awe-inspiring mission and stories).
Commenters have noticed a few problems with this, though. At Massively:
I do admire the idea of taking gamers and “using” them for a greater purpose, but I also think that people often become worse versions of themselves in online games.
And at BoingBoing:
I think her ideas of using collective intelligence via game form is a very interesting idea. Although i have to say she needs to develop better ARGs that are actually fun to get people to play and test this. World Without Oil was all about having people blog and so is Evoke. I dont enjoy blogging about homework assignments a game gives me; thats not fun game play like WoW.
The games are not always fun and their designers are wilfully blind to John Gabriel’s GIFT theory.
Second-lifers, Transmedia Types, Peter Principlists
There are other kinds of gameifiers too, though they’re less common (as gameifiers, not as people).
Second-lifers: they know virtual worlds are not really games but they think everybody should come and play with them anyway.
Transmedia types: they’re interested in games as a medium and enjoy a spot of theorificationising.
Peter Principlists: they’re busy promoting the idea of games to their level of incompetence.
Hmmmm, who have I missed?
This is for the game Empire Avenue, which I’m trying out to find out whether it’s a dungeon or a Skinner-box:
EAVB_KOOMOACJZM