I took a class on organizational behavior, and the most important thing that I took away from it was that human beings are best motivated intrinsically. In short, desire for something must come from somewhere deep inside the human psyche. Money or promises or threats just won't do the trick in comparison to plain old intrinsic motivation, but I may have found something that will.
It's called gamification and, as you may have guessed, borrows its principles from games. Gamification operates on the idea that deep down all of us are really trying to win that high score on Galaga or 100% every game in our Steam Library simply because it is satisfying to us to see those numbers go up. Remember how you wasted hours playing Flappy Bird last year just to get your score from 9 to 10? Yeah, that.
If you're still skeptical of gamification's power, think about how we interact with social media. We often rank our best Facebook posts by how many likes they've garnered. Twitter will email you a weekly report consisting only of numbers- how many times your profile was viewed, how many favorites your most successful tweets accrued. Computers have turned our interactions with each other into a game, and our only hope is to get the highest score we can.
Customer loyalty plans work the same way. Buy more things. Rack up points. Use those points to get discounts the next time you buy more things. Take a look at the Starbucks app next time you open it up. That image of the cup filling with stars as you spend more money is exactly what I'm talking about. It's a glorified progress bar, and in this age of loading and downloading we've been trained to yearn for the completion of that bar.
But enough about evil. There are ways gamification can be used for good! Pedometers are the most basic example. The number goes higher the more steps we take. The higher the number, the more satisfied we are with ourselves. But pedometers have been around for a while, and the machines attached to our hips are growing more sophisticated by the day. Why stop at the number of steps we take? Let's gamify everything!
Let's gamify the way we learn how to speak another language or the way we exercise! Let's gamify our writing process or the way we keep our mind sharp and poised for success.
Incentivizing everything works wonders for me. The consistent approbation from meeting a goal, no matter how small, is enough to keep me going. I took 20,000 steps today? Awesome! I checked everything off my Small Chores to-do list? Neat-o. My score on DuoLingo went up by 200 points? Progress!
Sometimes I feel a little guilty, like I'm tricking myself. Am I really so shallow that I care more about completing the task and making that achievement than I do about what that achievement actually means in real life? Is there any way for me to be motivated to move mountains without having to pat myself on the back for every piece of dirt my hands displaced? I'm not so sure anymore, and that's unsettling. I'm not quite ready to put my Life Score on my tombstone.
I find that Gamification of tasks helps me get things done. I feel like if i had no grades in school i would probably not try as hard. Even if i knew no one would ever see my grades they help me justify to myself that accomplished something. I love how you take a trait that can seem like a character flaw in us and show how we can design our lives so the trait becomes a benefit to us.
ReplyDelete