One buzzword in tech journalism
gaining popularity over the past several years is “gamification,” the concept
of applying game design practices to make every day or boring tasks more
enticing. I don’t want to be the one who
has to vacuum the Stute office, but if I’m awarded a badge or experience points
which I can rub in the faces of the rest of the staff, I will.
Experience points, or “XP” are a
concept originating with Dungeons and Dragons.
D&D was created by Gary Gygax and David Arneson in the early
1970’s. Both were active in the wargaming
scene, where model soldiers and other units are moved around a battlefield in a
combat simulation. Dungeons and Dragons
presented a shift away from massive armies of Civil War soldiers or Orcs, instead
focusing on smaller groups of fantasy heroes.
With less units (eventually being reduced to one per player in later
editions), it became practical to track their individual attributes. Heroes would gain experience points
(abbreviated as XP) for completing objectives (slaying monsters, exploring
tombs) and after reaching a threshold, they would increase in level, gaining
and improving abilities. This experience
point model is used by most gamification systems, with the user as a ‘hero’.
When we feel a sense of
accomplishment, it comes from the brain releasing a neurotransmitter called
dopamine. Making numbers go up (our
XP/level in a video game, or in other gamified systems) releases dopamine and,
for lack of a better term, makes us feel good.
Gamification provides both short term gratification (A ding combined
with a flashing +100xp feels great) and the promise of greater reward to strive
for (‘When I fill up the experience bar, my level will increase, it will play a
cool song, and then I’ll do it again!’)
It can also be used to drive competition (‘I did twice as many math
problems as Scott did last night. I’m
going to catch up to his level in a few days’).
Of course, there are several
downsides to the technology. Not even
getting into the many questions about why we enjoy gamification, and if we
should (Does an action lose its meaning if it’s performed for a reward? Is exploiting the way we feel achievement
ethical?) , there are immediate real world issues manifesting themselves. Take a look at this article about Disney’s
use of gamification for their hotel employees:
TL;DR: Disney hung monitors in laundry rooms,
comparing workers’ productivity rates.
Workers below the expected rate have their names highlighted in
red. Workers are scared of the increased
monitoring and what will happen when they stay below expected productivity, and
what will happen when Disney increases the expected work rates.
This raises the ethical questions
of an employer’s right to know how his or her employees work. Surveillance based gamification systems allow
much more insight into a worker’s effectiveness. While it’s not feasible to have a manager
follow around each employee, measuring the volume of laundry folded is a much
easier task. Does an employee have a
reasonable expectation that their work output is private? Group projects can breed animosity between
team members without any monitoring. Is
it better to turn them into competitors, trying to outdo each other? I don’t have the answer; I’m not sure there
is a definite one.
In my future posts, I intend to
explore more gamification concepts, as well as other fields.
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