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2012-11-15 13:29:36
Nov 10th 2012 | from the print edition
DESPITE their reputation for violence, not all video games are about zapping
aliens or shooting zombies. Plenty offer gentler amusements, like tending a
virtual farm or playing a relaxing round of golf. And a few take their
inspiration from business and management. Players can assume the role of a
football-team boss in Championship Manager or an aspiring transport magnate
in Railroad Tycoon . Even the evil overlord in the 1997 classic Dungeon
Keeper must make sure to pay wages to his vampires, dragons and trolls, lest
the workers rebel.
As video games have grown from an obscure hobby to a $67 billion industry,
management theorists have begun to return the favour. Video games now have the
dubious honour of having inspired their own management craze. Called
gamification , it aims to take principles from video games and apply them to
serious tasks. The latest book on the subject, For the Win , comes from Kevin
Werbach and Dan Hunter, from the Wharton Business School and the New York Law
School respectively.
Gamification proceeds from the observation that, to non-players, a lot of what
gamers do looks suspiciously like hard work. Improving a character in World of
Warcraft , an online fantasy game, is a never-ending treadmill. The most
dedicated players sign up for weekly sessions with two dozen other players
which can last for several hours vital if they wish to defeat the toughest
monsters. Jokes about the game being a second job are common. Other gamers will
spend hours trying to shave fractions of a second from a record lap time in a
driving game or chasing a high score in Angry Birds .
All this is fascinating to management gurus, who come from a world in which
people must usually be paid to undertake repetitive tasks. Games not only
subvert that rule, they invert it completely: players will happily fork out
good money for the privilege of being allowed to attempt arbitrary jobs. What
if, say the gamifiers, it were possible to identify the special sauce
responsible for this strange effect, extract it and then slather it onto
business problems? Can the compulsive power of video games be harnessed to
motivate workers?
In For the Win , readers are told of an internal Microsoft competition to hunt
down translation mistakes in its Windows operating system. Points were assigned
for spotting mistakes and totted up on a companywide leaderboard. The mixture
of instant feedback (via the points) and competition (through the leaderboard)
provided a powerful spur. The entire Japan office took a day off from other
work to hunt down mistranslations great for motivation, but perhaps not for
productivity. LiveOps, an American firm whose employees do call-centre work
from home, uses leaderboards and points to boost productivity, while a series
of badges (modelled on video-game achievements , given for completing
certain tasks) denote mastery of certain skills.
Games can be used for enthusing customers, too. Fitocracy, a fitness website,
lets its users set up duels with each other, to see who can get the better
jogging time. An escalating series of levels , a concept invented to measure a
character s power in role-playing games, is a frequent feature of gamification
schemes.
Does gamification merit the hype that has quickly surrounded it? The idea is
only a couple of years old, but it has already spawned a host of breathless
conferences, crowded seminars and (inevitably) TED talks.
Some video-game designers are opposed to the idea on principle, arguing that
gamification is really a cover for cynically exploiting human psychology for
profit. They compare many of the games beloved by the gamifiers, such as World
of Warcraft , to slot machines, with rewards carefully doled out in order to
keep players hooked. Others argue that gamification usually misses the point,
focusing on incidental features of video games such as points, badges and
instant feedback while ignoring the deeper features like being able to explore
freely a virtual world that actually make them fun. And the benefits, the
critics say, are likely to be transient. When a player gets bored of a video
game, it is easy to buy another. When workplace games become dull, they are not
so easy to put aside.
Level-headed management types, meanwhile, say that many of the aspects of
gamification that do work are merely old ideas in trendy new clothes.
High-score lists for sales staff, for example, have been around for decades, as
have employee-of-the-month contests. Airlines were giving points and perks to
loyal customers long before anyone had heard of Farmville .
Game over
Messrs Werbach and Hunter accept much of this criticism. Indeed, they go out of
their way to warn aspiring gamifiers of the many pitfalls they face. Trying to
enliven boring, unskilled work is risky, they say: presenting cutesy badges to
call-centre staff can easily come across as patronising rather than motivating.
Workers already toil for a reward money and will be suspicious of attempts to
introduce a new form of compensation that costs their bosses nothing. The
authors cite psychological experiments suggesting that intrinsic rewards (the
enjoyment of a task for its own sake) are the best motivators, whereas
extrinsic rewards, such as badges, levels, points or even in some circumstances
money, can be counter-productive.
The problem is that, after the authors have finished instructing their readers
in what not to do, the concept of gamification is left looking somewhat
threadbare. That is a shame, because their central idea that the world might be
a better place if work was less of a necessary drudge and more of a rewarding
experience in itself is hard to argue with. But then perhaps it is called work
for a reason.