Gaming as Means of Engagement
Via Om Malik at GigaOm: a fantastic video of a Dice 2010 presentation by Jesse Schell, founder of Schell games and a former Disney Imagineer.
You should watch this for two reasons:
- Schell is an incredible speaker.
- He makes some very interesting points about how people engage with technology, namely that technology convergence is a myth. He adds that if real life were more like a game (do stuff and accrue points!), it would be easy to influence how people behave.
Given the success of socially networked games like FourSquare, I think Schell is pretty much right on.
In FourSquare, users “check in” to places like bars and theaters in order to earn badges, and the people with the most check-ins for a given location are anointed “mayor” of that place. Even though there aren’t necessarily real-world payoffs for this behavior, the players can get very competitive.
Where Schell’s hypothesis might fall apart is in the case of people like me: I’m not a gamer. I joined Dodgeball, FourSquare’s Google-owned precursor, but I failed to engage with it. I stopped checking in. I don’t play any other video games, either, so I doubt that Schell’s system of awarding points for behavior would hold much appeal for me.
It would be interesting to research the proportion of gamers to non-gamers in the general population. I wonder what the split is, percentage-wise, and which is more common? At what point does it make sense to apply a gaming metaphor in order to shape real-world behavior?
Wow, what an incredible video. It is frightening and awesome all at once.
With regard to your personal feelings around games and competitive behavior, you raise an interesting point. I notice similar tendencies in my wife. I’m definitely a gamer, and she’s decidedly not. Outside of the work place, she regards competition as being anything but fun, and is largely turned off by video games.
I suspect the research into gamer versus non gamer types is happening somewhere, precisely because of forward thinking people like Mr. Schell recognizing the shape of things to come.
A final thought – do you think your behavior would change if, as he says in the video, there were very real world rewards for your participation? I’m guessing my wife definitely would if the results were tax relief, significant discounts on things, and the like!
Hi Chris! I’m not sure my behavior would change, honestly. I’m one of those people who never wants to get a discount card at CVS, and I don’t clip coupons or troll for discount codes, either. Maybe a truly significant (as in “free”) discount on a big-ticket item would change my behavior? I don’t know.