The video above is Dan Hon of Weiden+Kennedy London, speaking at the PSFK Conference London last month on the state of gaming and the spread of game mechanics.
To paraphrase, Dan notes that we're at a point where we've stumbled onto game mechanics as a way to potentially motivate behavior, and there's a lot of people rushing to implement them as the next layer over reality. But it's not necessarily game mechanics that make a game - what makes something a game is that it is playful and moreover it's fun. Game mechanics layered on top of anything else is gimmicky at best, and distracting/cluttering/dull otherwise.
In the following, I posit that for as many people are rushing to turn everything into a game, there aren't nearly enough who are comfortable with what it requires to make something playful and fun.
Let me being with a couple thoughts on play. The first is a classic definition crafted by Mark Twain, as he explains Tom Sawyer's memorable fence-painting episode:
"If [Tom] had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign."
The second is a thought brought up by Matt Jones at another PSFK Conference London talk, speaking on his experience with interaction design firm BERG and their involvement in projects like Making Future Magic below:
Matt noted simply that the goal of many of their projects is merely to explore. Just to tinker around with ideas and see what happens. This thought resonates with me as an excellent way to think of play. Taking the thoughts we have so far, we arrive at the conclusion that:
1) Games can indeed be motivating
2) Motivating games are characterized by playfulness
3) Play is the freedom from obligation - the freedom to explore without any set goal in mind
This prospect requires the ability to act without being able to intuitively measure the value of your action, and this is not a talent suited to everyone. Indeed, it's a method many actively oppose. It's easy enough to think of how this applies on the individual level - many people advocate the idea that if you're not actively working towards a goal, then you're wasting your time.
But it's even more pervasive on the organizational level - how often do you hear of money budgeted to a project with no measurable metrics of success, just because? Organizations like BERG are rare indeed.
Measurement is obviously a valuable tool, but it's important to note that it necessarily obligates you to short-term success. I say short-term because measurement is by necessity defined by our ability to intuitively perceive meaningful change, which humans are notoriously unequipped to do.
In other words, by calculating interest I can easily measure the effect of putting $50 into the bank for 10 years, and say that taking that action was good for me by pointing to those numbers. However, I have a limited cognitive capacity for understanding how using that $50 to buy an insightful book seeds many ideas over 10 years, so I can't say that I can measure the "goodness" of that action. I can look back in retrospect and say that I created groundbreaking change because of being inspired by ideas in that book, but I can't intuitively measure the value of that original $50 purchase.
If reading a book seems more "playful" than putting money into a bank, it's because it is. Just as institutions of higher education help us understand that reading books that seem to have no practical use do indeed deliver long-term, nebulous value (what we call "education"), games are helping us understand that wonder and exploration unlock goods that are uncovered only in the unmeasurable long-term as well.
IBM, Jane McGonigal, and plenty of others are helping to bring these ideas to the public mind, as well as a recent favorite: Jessie Schell on The Long Now, talking first on his idea of the Gamepocalypse but later getting into great thoughts on creativity and innovation.
Hopefully it's clear that measurement and obligation can be very useful tools. And hopefully it's also clear that gaming, play, and undirected, exploratory behavior can be very useful tools as well. Hopefully with this understanding you're better equipped to think about which is more valuable to you, and when.
