It takes a lot to rile me up enough to blog about it. I just finished with the Virtual Goods Summit here in San Francisco, and the new buzz word in entrepreneur and venture circles is “gamification”.
This Wikipedia entry sums up for me best what gamification is, and also explains exactly how it’s nothing. I’ve never been so frustrated by something that I wanted to be excited about, and where I wanted to see the light bulbs go off, and just hearing (to my ears) empty, meaningless, self-referential chatter.
The worst part is that I’m probably wrong. These are smart people talking about this subject, smart people that I like and have respect for. I’m 90% sure that I don’t get it somehow and that in 3 years I’ll be bitter and muttering to myself, but there’s also 10% of me that sees a man riding down the street with no clothes, and for some reason that gets me really agitated.
What I’ve heard so far about gamification makes some valid points, but I haven’t heard anything worth making into a business model. At it’s core, the idea seems to be that by providing some kind of incentives/rewards to users/players for doing something that the (Designer? Operator? Service Provider?) wants them to do, they will see better results. Layered on top of that there’s the possibility of using competition, progress feedback, goal hierarchies, etc. to get these users/players really stoked about doing that something even more.
But isn’t this just good marketing, service design or product design? Companies and people have been doing this forever, why is it suddenly something to build an enterprise around? Is Toyota’s philosophy of “Challenge, Continuous Improvement, and Verification” gamification? Certainly it was hugely influential to many types of industry, but that was because it was an extremely well-designed and appropriate methodology, not because they invented the idea of goals, transparency, feedback and progress scoring.
What about Speak and Spell, or Report Cards, or “678 days accident free”? Is this gamification? If we can make a website that replaces or incrementally improves any of those core concepts, is that brilliant or a defensible business plan? I think there’s some opportunity there, but no more than there was 5 years ago if I was pitching an interactive learning website (what genius!).
Scrum is definitely “gamification” (they even have planning poker!), but so what? There are hundreds of services and applications around managing scrum and agile methodology, but why are they suddenly so much sexier than they were in the past?
One huge problem I see for gamification is that most real-world stuff isn’t fair. Life isn’t fair, not even close to it. Imagine a game where we all start with some random assortment of items: playing cards, a bucket of water, a small bag of rice, a few yards of twine, a stack of monopoly money, an army of orcs, a haunted castle, a private jet, an island, x-ray vision, or constant, incurable flatulence. Then we’re told to check in with the people around us to learn the rules… and good luck!
I’ve heard this comment, often from bemused parents or spouses of gamers: “If you spent as much energy on your (homework, job, marriage, business, health) as you do in (WoW, Starcraft, Call of Duty, Second Life), you’d be a (genius, billionaire, superstar)”. This is missing the point entirely. The reason why people spend time on game achievements instead of real-life achievements is because real-life achievements are 1) hard 2) perhaps a lot harder for you than they are for other people 3) might actually not work out. Most people are not up for that level of stress and uncertainty in their lives, and this is why games are so appealing.
With games, it barely matters who you are or what resources/abilities you have… if you put in the time, you’ll be able to “succeed”. The most popular games virtually guarantee success. Take WoW for example: A person with very little ambition, goals, prospects, or resources can become an epic figure who cannot fail. Simply by performing tasks that scale to their ability, the player is able to advance and become fantastically powerful. They’ll get to experience a level of success and accomplishment that they may never feel in their real life, and that feeling is virtually guaranteed.
No amount of gamification is going to provide that kind of incentive and reward around real-world stuff, and more importantly we can’t provide that level of certainty to the outcome.
Some people love to compete, but it’s unlikely they are the people who need much incentive to be successful in their “real lives”.
Gamification of healthcare is talked about a lot, mostly it seems to get people more interested in taking better care of themselves. I agree totally that some amount of rewards and incentives around staying in shape or sticking to a healthy lifestyle can be useful, but I don’t see anything magic here. People and enterprise have been using these tools for years. I think that there is opportunity out there to execute some solid services or products around this, but I don’t see anything particularly unique or novel in that. And I really don’t believe that “gamification” will be the magic bullet that revolutionizes health and fitness, at least not more than it already does, and has been doing for decades.
Wouldn’t it be cool to make an activity that was fun, gave good feedback and scoring, was social, was both cooperative AND competitive, and helped get us in shape? We could sell product and services around those activities, and in fact… there might be other businesses that spring up, simply to help users/players feel vaguely connected or associated with those activities. It could spawn an entire industry! We could call it basketball, athletic apparel and sports drinks.
There are many many more examples of why I think gamification is an empty concept, and maybe I’ll go into them in later blogs. I don’t want this to be a huge endless treatise though, so I’m gonna wrap it up. I hope readers chime in with comments or counter-arguments and that there can be a real discussion about this. It could very well be that there is something of real value here that I’m missing, but my gut is telling me that there could also be a lot of wasted time, energy, and money on something that will never amount to anything unique.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that “gamey” concepts applied to real-life stuff is a bad idea. I think there are some interesting “mash-ups” that are happening, and that will happen around games, social networks, LBS, brands, education and “serious stuff”. There’s no doubt that rewards, incentives, feedback, cooperation and competition are all very useful in any industry, but clever people and businesses already use these techniques, and have probably been using them since the dawn of civilization. I don’t think there’s anything 1) new and 2) unique or defensible to build a truly scalable industry around even if you slap a fancy-pants name on it.
-Phil
