Work and Play
Freud once said: “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” (At least, the internet claims that he did, and that’s good enough for me).
Freud once said: “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” (At least, the internet claims that he did, and that’s good enough for me). People like challenging, satisfying jobs. We like to strive a little to accomplish our tasks. We don’t like exasperatingly hard work, but we don’t like easy work that bores us, either.
Readers of “A theory of fun” (here’s an excerpt) will find this idea familiar. In the book, Raph Koster says: “Real fun comes from challenges that are always at the margin of our ability”. He’s talking about game design, of course, not work.
Two entirely different things? Of course not. The techniques and processes used in building a good game are based on basic human traits. A lot of the things we like in games are things that helped us survive the stone age. Working together? Fun! Having a mission? Fun! Competing without bloodshed? Fun!
A good, modern workplace will feed those needs for fun and challenge – and try to fit in some things that are fun, but not necessarily a job requirement. (At my job, we don’t do much running and jumping while working, for example, but company outings tend to be quite physical.)
The principles used for good game design, then, should be applied to good workplace design – and vice versa. We know how to build online communities; can we transfer those principles to task-oriented groups in the workplace? We know how to make people want to perform well, alone and in groups – can we use that to make a workplace more fun and efficient?
The idea that game design principles can and should be used to make a better reality is not a new one – but it definitely bears repeating. It was the point of Jane McGonigal’s 2008 GDC rant, “Reality is Broken”. If you haven’t seen it, you should. I’ll end this post with her finishing words, one of my favorite quotes:
“We can take what we’ve learned by making games and apply it to reality, to make real life work more like a game – not make our games more realistic and lifelike, but make our real life more game like – so that when people all over the world wake up every morning, they wake up with a mission, with allies, with a sense of being a part of a bigger story, part of a system that wants them to be happy.”