He even has a name for a future in which this kind of motivational backfiring becomes common: “the gamepocalypse.” The best insurance against it, he says, is to build bridges between talented game designers and technology leaders outside the entertainment field. Yet games that work well in theory can quickly turn frustrating and counterproductive, Schnell admits. “Games do a good job of tapping into the intrinsic motivation that's built into us by evolution.” According to psychologists, tapping those intrinsic incentives makes us feel as though we're in control and that our actions have understandable consequences. “Human beings are curious animals with a natural drive to play and master their environments,” Ryan observes. Points, for example, aren't rewards as much as a method of supplying real-time feedback for building competence. Effective games “harness basic human motivational tendencies in elegant ways,” points out clinical psychologist Richard Ryan. “Game-ifying” a real-world system still requires more than just adding avatars and points.
“We can see what motivates and engages people in great detail and apply that knowledge to things that people don't often find engaging, like remembering to take medication or keeping track of energy use.” “All of this personalized data lets us start measuring behaviors that we could only measure in games or virtual worlds before,” says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “These are problems that many of us can't or don't want to engage with, but games can change that because, by definition, any successful interactive system will make people want to engage.”Īn essential ingredient of this new game of life is the proliferation of real-time data from GPS-enabled mobile devices, cheap networked sensors and other technologies. “If the game is designed well enough, any problem can go in there,” from changing your diet or learning a new language to understanding Middle East conflicts or reducing your carbon footprint. “We think of games as trivial, but they're really just a way of rapidly engaging our problem-solving abilities,” Schell says. He and a bevy of game designers and psychologists are convinced that the key to a society of healthier, more productive and more engaged citizens lies in bringing gaming into daily life. It's going to be a great day.Ī future in which almost every aspect of your life includes a gamelike experience is all but inevitable, says video-game designer and Carnegie Mellon University researcher Jesse Schell. And ever since arbitrary sales quotas were replaced with personalized “life meters” (which swell on-screen to reflect real-time, positive feedback from your clients), you've felt more purpose and ownership over your daily tasks. Now that you and your co-workers appear on-screen as personalized avatars, you can answer your e-mail during meetings without appearing rude.
You take a shower (a brief one, so as not to jeopardize your family's enviable energy-consumption score and the tax benefits it confers), get dressed and log in at your home-office computer for the morning meeting. Your electric toothbrush will beep to notify you that dutiful brushing twice a day every day for the past six months has earned you enough points for a 10 percent discount on your next checkup. ONE DAY SOON, as you stand in front of the bathroom mirror brushing your teeth, you may see, alongside the morning headlines, a scoreboard that ranks your household's current carbon footprint versus your neighbors'.