The Gamified Life

Video games are a worthwhile leisure experience, something that can have positive effects on the players. If it occupies a certain place in a person's life, gaming can enrich a player in many ways. In fact, I think we've only scratched the surface on the positive effects gaming can have on individuals and communities. Even if it's a means of relaxation that allows one to more fully engage with reality after playing the game, that's a plus.

On the other hand, if gaming occupies another place in a person's life, it can substitute for real-world experiences. Even if gaming doesn't cause people to kill other people in real life (or some such horrible real-world behavioral consequence), I still wonder about what gamers would have done with the time they spend gaming, and how the gaming experience shapes their non-gaming, real world interactions and experiences.

My key interest is in how gaming is disconnected (and disconnects the player) from reality. A good game creates a kind of alternate reality with challenges, goals, and hazards and, increasingly, a social structure. All of that, it would seem, makes it easy to feel immersed in the gaming experience, to at least temporarily forget about the world outside the game and to focus exclusively on achievement and survival within the game.

There is an attempt to bridge the gap between the substitute reality of the game world and the real world: gamification. The point of gamification seems to be to incentivize a certain real-world behavior (exercise, civic engagement, etc.) by linking it to a reward.

The motive is laudable: instead of just getting people to spend time getting a high score or achieving status in a world that is disconnected from reality, you get them to do something good in the real world: learn about the world, become more civically engaged, etc. So, let's assume that gamification works: it gets people to engage in whatever behavior you're trying to get them to engage in when they would not have done so otherwise. Great! But here's what I'm wondering about:

How challenging is the game, or the gamified aspect of real-life, relative to the un-gamified aspects of life? The rules of games are tweaked so that they are challenging but not too frustrating. If a game were too frustrating, the player would stop playing (and likely pick up a less-frustrating-but-still-challenging game). But real life doesn't adapt to the individual in this respect. Even a successful gamification of reality is not all encompassing. Sooner or later, gamers must confront the un-gamified world.

Here are a few possible consequences of this discontinuity.

Gamification could create the perception that life isn't fair. The experience of the un-gamified challenges in their lives failing to adapt to their ability levels will seem increasingly unfair to gamers. To someone who has no experience with a gamified reality, the fact that day-to-day existence (work, interactions with loved ones, local politics) is very often frustrating is simply a part of life; whether or not it is "fair" isn't really an issue. This perception would be easy to measure: do you agree/disagree with the statement "often, life is not fair" (or some variation of this).

Gamification could create the desire to play more games, particularly the kind of games that adapt in some way when they become too frustrating for the user. Gamers would then disengage with any aspect of reality that does not adapt, including relationships and civic involvement. They go further and further into the adaptable world of the games.

But here's the weirdest possible consequence I've been thinking about.

What if the majority of certain people's realities become gamified? When they encounter an aspect of their realities that are frustrating or boring, they gamify it. They keep doing this until their entire realities (how often they exercise, what they eat, how they interact with their spouses, work, volunteering, local politics, etc.) are gamified, so that no aspect of their daily lives becomes too frustrating or not rewarding enough. I can imagine a small group of people doing this, but I can't imagine every human doing this (at least not for awhile, but who knows?). The problems will occur when the gamified society meets the un-gamified society.

Life is a kind of game, with challenges and goals and a "score" (money, happiness, status, righteousness, or whichever metric you want to use). But the key difference is that life lacks a "user experience" designer. It is continuously and simultaneously created by things that are often indifferent to the needs and desires of the individual. One of the worst consequences for the gamer who becomes increasingly frustrated with un-gamified life might be a kind of despondence that, left unchecked, causes them to quit the game of life.

This, of course, wouldn't be the fate of most gamers. So what is it that causes some gamers to eschew reality? And when we gamify another aspect of our lives, how does this change the way we view the rough edges of the world outside the game?

What Future Does Professional Media Content Production Have?

In the Media Literacy class I’m teaching this semester, my students are engaging in a role-playing exercise in which they assume the roles of four groups that, traditionally, play a role in the development of a new medium: governments, advertisers, technology developers, and content producers. First, the students research the role that these groups played in the creation and popularization of print, radio, TV, film, internet, etc. Then, they form new groups comprised of representatives from each of these groups and discuss how to develop a heretofore un-developed medium. The first example I thought of for the un-developed medium is: virtual reality.

Most of us have an idea of what virtual reality could be. And this imagined reality of VR could have government regulation (determining how the content will be distributed, if the roll-out of VR will be subsidized like a utility, how to regulate violent/sexual content, etc.), advertising (product placement in virtual reality? Pretty much an advertiser’s dream!), and technology developers (Apple VR might have a cleaner look than Microsoft’s somewhat cluttered-looking VR), and content producers (custom-made luxury environments for you to relax in). Sounds like a good fit!

I’m going to do this exercise again later in the semester, and I’m having no trouble coming up with several other “media technologies of tomorrow”: augmented reality glasses, superior surveillance technology, a portable instant-fMRI machine, affordable 3D printing. Some of these technologies are already gaining a foothold in the market. It’s easy to see how governments, advertisers, and technology developers would be involved in the creation and development of these technologies. But where would the content producers fit in?

The more I thought about the exciting media technologies of the future, the more trouble I have thinking about how professional content producers (e.g., screenwriters or the equivalent) will fit into the picture. I’m quite confident that there will always be an appetite for well-told stories. People skilled at telling these stories, through words or pictures or sounds, will have a place in our media environment. But I suspect that people will devote less time to consuming those stories than in years past. During the golden age of radio and television, people spent hours every day consuming content created by professionals. Increasingly, we spend more and more time using Facebook, Twitter, and other activities that don’t involve much in the way of content production (yes I know, lots of conversations on FB & Twitter are about content produced by professionals, but still, most of the aggregate value of these sites, I would contend, is generated by the users and the creators of the venue, i.e., the technology developers). In thinking about the media technologies of the future, it’s hard to think of a place for the writers, the producers, the directors. I’m sure there will be a handful of greats who produce content we all talk about, but perhaps a shrinking middle ground, and a shrinking window of attention and time we all spend consuming professionally produced content. 

Aside from making my group role-playing project a bit more difficult to design, its hard to think of a downside to this future. Definitely something I'll come back to in class.