New Scientist has made the reading of the article below into a game. Find out how to play here.
The realms of space invaders and spreadsheets are merging: are you ready to play your entire life as a game?
It’s 6.30 am. Yellow alert! Your forces are under attack. You stumble to the bathroom and consult your command screen. It exposes an infestation of aliens. You dispatch them quickly with your ray gun and collect their gold credits. Your screen lays out today’s quest. You will ride a space cruiser into battle and, with the help of your squad, attack the central alien hive.
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OK, you are not really a space soldier. You are actually brushing your teeth rather than fighting aliens, your mirror is the command screen displaying your daily schedule, courtesy of the internet, and the space cruiser is your bus to the office.
Welcome to your entire life as a game, where everything you do can be played. The point-scoring, treasure-collecting and fantastical elements of video games are no longer restricted to the virtual world of consoles and computers: they are leaping out of the screen and into the physical world, thanks to smartphones, cameras, sensors and the increasingly ubiquitous internet.
The signs of “gamification” will be all around you in the next few years, in some form or another. Already, the skills we acquire by playing video games are making us better at real-world tasks, such as playing music (see “Virtual to reality”). At the same time, game designers, researchers and even companies like , and Nike are staging a broad effort to gamify parts of our lives that previously have been impossible to play. Gamifying your life, they say, could help you learn new skills, connect with others, and become fitter, happier and healthier. Work and play would unite. Their critics counter that we are headed for a dystopia in which our sense of fun could be used to manipulate us. Whatever the case, the boundary between reality and video games is poised to vanish forever.
“I think it’s going to happen, and I think we’re seeing it now,” says , a video game designer and researcher at in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The use of games to motivate people is at least as old as the collectible stamps given out with purchases from the late 1890s onwards. Stamps could be redeemed for prizes. They worked because of the obvious economic motivation, but also relied on the urge to collect and complete a set of items – a feature seen in many games.
The use of points, badges and leaderboards has exploded on the internet. Auction site eBay rewards buyers and sellers with stars and status. Foursquare encourages people to “check in” at places they visit using their smartphones. Users earn badges and race to have the most check-ins in a given place, so that they can become the virtual “mayor” of their local pub, for instance.
Golden Kew
More recently, fantastical gaming elements have come to housework and chores. Reporting that you have done the vacuuming on the website allows you to upgrade your chosen persona on the website – a wizard or a demon, perhaps – and further advances you in a quest. And smartphone apps such as have turned buying a birthday present for your mother, say, into a hunt for treasure across a fantasy land: you roleplay as a dwarf or a warrior, and win virtual gold and other rewards for completing your daily to-do list.
Now video game elements are poised to burst fully into the physical realm. Last year, Schell presented a vision of what’s just around the corner in gamification at the DICE Summit 2010, a design and technology conference in Las Vegas. It has created quite a buzz among researchers, game designers and several multinational companies.
Schell argues that almost every aspect of our lives could soon be turned into a game – powered by the flood of data generated by sensors such as accelerometers, cameras, GPS and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. All of these inexpensive sensors are now found inside the gadgets in our pockets and homes. “The fact that we can sense all of these things is suddenly here. Anything you can sense you can make a game out of.”
“The fact that we can sense all these things is suddenly here. Anything you can sense you can make a game out of”
Some examples already exist. For example, the wearable device uses an accelerometer to track a person’s daily physical activity, and awards “” that can be redeemed for discounts on health insurance plans. A similar device for kids, called , lets players unlock new characters in the popular video game Pokemon by getting exercise.
Game researchers are now exploring how sensor-powered gadgets could turn all sorts of tasks into play – , and to name a few – and improve our performance too. Yu-Chen Chang of National Taiwan University in Taipei gave kindergarten children a sensor-enabled and gamified toothbrush. Cameras in the bathroom tracked the position of the brush and calculated how effective the brushing was. A mirror-mounted screen showed virtual teeth, suggesting an optimal brushing order. As the child brushed, the game teeth went from discoloured to squeaky clean. The game the time the kids spent brushing with a normal toothbrush, and doubled their cleaning effectiveness.
Sensor world
In the near future, tiny sensors are set to become embedded into objects in the world around us, from buildings to trash cans. Internet coverage will also be ubiquitous soon. All of this means that no matter where we go, we will be able to plug into a local game via a gadget, smartphone or portable computer. Consider a paper coffee cup that contains an RFID tag. Lob it into a recycling bin with sensors, and the bin will communicate with your smartphone, adding credits that give you a discount off your next cappuccino while helping you compete with your friends in an online recycling game.
Schell envisions game-like interfaces for every measurable part of life – a status console, for instance, that shows if you are sleeping enough, spending time with your family, or eating enough healthy food. “All of us can pretend we are on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, but the ship is our daily lives,” he says. Later this month, specific plans for an increasingly gamified world will be laid out by game researchers, marketers and businesspeople at the world’s first in San Francisco.
Will we want to play though? All the evidence about why we enjoy games suggests this world will be hard to resist. Studies of the brains of people playing video games show that it is associated with the release of , a neurotransmitter involved in many pleasurable experiences, including eating and sex. Functional MRI brain scans have also shown that playing games is associated with activity in parts of the striatum, one of the brain’s reward centres. Moreover, “virtual” rewards, like positive social feedback and recognition of status the same regions of the striatum as monetary rewards.
We have played throughout our evolution. , an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, spent a decade studying the behaviour of coyotes and other mammals and found that play was an important part of daily life. “If they don’t play, they don’t develop social bonds. They don’t develop the ability to be flexible in a changing environment,” he says. Bekoff argues that human play is no different. Play gives individuals the opportunity to practise behaviours that would be useful in other contexts, from physical skills like wrestling, which might help on the hunt, to mental skills such as the ability to figure out where your friend is hiding in a game of “hide and seek”. “It feels good for a reason,” he says.
The most powerful games satisfy core psychological needs, such as our need to feel competent and socially connected, says Scott Rigby, a game researcher and head of game-design consultancy , based in Celebration, Florida. The idea that triggering such needs can motivate us into action is called . In , Rigby found that measures of mastery and autonomy within a game are stronger predictors of positive game outcomes – such as the desire to keep playing.
Given the power of gaming to push our buttons, a gamified world also has the potential to be an unpleasant one. “There are aspects through some of these marketing plans that can definitely make our lives worse,” says Schell.
For one thing, a lot of real-world gamification in its present form is based on simple points and badges, but these can actually be , says , who is studying the motivational effects of games at the Research Centre Media and Communication at Hamburg University, Germany. In one , young schoolchildren were given the opportunity to draw with markers and paper. If they did, they were given either a predictable reward, an unexpected reward, or no reward. When the children were subsequently given free time to choose a task, those who had been given an expected reward spent the least amount of time drawing (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 28, p 129). Similar phenomena have since been replicated in over 120 other studies.
Deterding says those who think points alone encourage people to play their games are misguided. “I enjoy a video game because I beat the boss monster, not because beating the boss monster gives me 10,000 points,” he says. “The core motivation is intrinsic.”
“I enjoy a video game because I beat the boss monster, not because beating the boss monster gives me 10,000 points”
Worse, marketers, advertisers and even governments may be lured by the idea of using gamification to change our behaviour. , a games researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, says that if games hid their true true intentions from the player, they would cross an ethical line. “When a person doesn’t have full knowledge, then you can’t really call it persuasion. You can call it influence I suppose, but we usually call it manipulation,” he says.
Creepy future
Imagine smart breakfast cereal boxes equipped with cheap cameras and playable screens that pit you against your friends in competition for brand loyalty, TV-mounted eye-tracking cameras that offer rewards for watching ads, a government that gives tax breaks if your child “wins” good marks at school. Schell calls this potential future the ““.
The possibility of a creepy, game-fuelled surveillance state is clear. If there were no escape from all the sensors and games surrounding us, we may end up feeling more like lab rats inside a maze working for treats.
Still, on balance, Schell believes a gamified world will be more positive than negative. Nicole Lazzaro, founder of XEODesign, a game design consultancy based in Oakland, California, is also optimistic. Done thoughtfully and ethically, she says, the gamification effort could ultimately help us triumph over the biggest boss monster of all, that heinous antithesis of play: hard work.
You could be forgiven for scepticism about this suggestion. Yet consider that games and work are already beginning to mix in a number of ways. uses the virtual world to help dispersed teams collaborate. An application called , designed by of Stanford University in California, mixes a virtual currency system into office email to cut down on the tedium of sifting through the daily email barrage. Before sending an email, players can attach a certain amount of currency to a message, based on how urgent it is. That currency is won by the addressee if they read and respond to the email promptly.
Things get even stranger when we move into virtual payments for real work. , an online labour supply company, or crowd-sourcer, now pays some of its workers in virtual currencies redeemable in applications like the Facebook-based game, .
“It’s not written in stone that we have to work the way we have for the last 200 years,” says , a psychologist at Claremont Graduate University in California. Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow – a state of focus attained during a difficult challenge – is widely acknowledged as one of the key goals for all game designers. “Unfortunately, through most of school and work and much of our life, we don’t have a chance to experience it that much,” he says.
“We don’t have to be this cubicle-farm factory anymore,” says Lazzaro. “Wouldn’t it be great if by the year 2020 we go to work with the expectation of play?”
After an exhausting 8-hour battle, the alien hive finally falls. And that was despite the fact that Dave the intern called in sick. Your team has made enough sales to unlock the coveted prize: “Spreadsheet of a Thousand Truths”. A smile breaks across your face. You just might make squadron leader by the end of the year.
(Reveal the answers to the Play This Page puzzle).
(Video credits: Click here for full list)
Virtual to reality
Playing computer games can hone your skills in the real world.
The latest version of the video game Rock Band, for example, comes with instrument controllers, and the guitar-based controller has nearly as many fret positions as a real one, albeit with no strings. One mode of the game teaches performance skills that can then be transferred to proper instruments. The guitar, drums and keyboard-based controllers can even .
Action games can also improve . Renjie Li at the University of Rochester in New York tested people’s ability to resolve contrast – the difference between light and dark areas in an image. They found not only that gamers performed better than non-gamers, but people who played an action game for 50 hours over a nine-week period had substantially better contrast sensitivity than a group who played a slower simulation game.
Games have even improved the performance of surgeons. James Rosser of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York found that surgeons who played a simulated surgery video game subsequently made one-third on a test of real suturing skills.
Some game researchers are also trying to recruit gamers for worthier real-world goals. One example of these “serious games“, called , challenges players to work together to solve a problem such as food security or sustainable energy.
