Our World is a Game-World

30 Oct

So much to my delight, yesterday SMCRVA posted an article about the “gamification” of social media. This idea is not new to me, but I’m pleased to see people picking up on it.

A few weeks back, I posted about Tag, You’re It, RVA! as a form of happiness engineering. It, too, is gamification in its own way – it’s an augmented reality game, yes, but it’s also the gamification of acts of kindness.

What SMCRVA is talking about, however, is both more and less obvious. It involves assigning “achievements” to real-world activities, as is done by social media games like Foursquare or SCVNGR, where the user receives points or badges for “checking-in” at certain places a certain number of times. This, too, is a type of ARG. But the question asked by SMCRVA is “Should you play?”

There are any number of reasons why playing is a bad idea – thieves have been known to use people’s “check-ins” to determine whether they are home (so that the thieves can rob them), to say nothing of the fact that not everyone on your Twitter feed needs or wants to know where you’ve eaten dinner. But it can also have positive feedback: people who check in at restaurants, for instance, tend to get coupons for use on their meal; people can also use check-ins as a way to review local businesses, which can lead to increased business and more wide-spread word-of-mouth.

But what I find more interesting is the idea of positive feedback in terms of achievement points. There is dual logic behind the achievement mechanic. First, achievements are addictive (believe me). You want to get them. You want to get more of them than the person sitting next to you. You want to get the harder ones (the one for beating Halo on Legendary, and yes, I have it), the skill-based ones, the ones that other people haven’t managed to get. And you feel good about getting them. Positive feedback. Second, though, they make games addictive. You keep playing because you want those achievements. You don’t sell your game back to GameStop or Play-N-Trade because you might get that one last achievement.

But achievements are – like Tag, You’re It! – a form of happiness engineering. We feel good when we have clear goals and accomplish them, and achievements let us do that. Maybe we need more achievements in life.  And maybe we don’t – after all, what have we really done to earn that achievement for going to the cupcake store, other than promote obesity and tooth decay?