Why are so many game developers opposed to gamification? - Quora [08Aug11] - 0 views
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John Jainschigg, Virtual event, 3D, web, social media,...
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I've been reading Jane McGonigal's 'Reality is Broken,' and despite my agreeing with much of her thesis, I think she omits confronting a few troublesome ideas about gamification that _some_ (by no means all) game developers find chilling. For example:
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- The emotional complex she wants to evoke through gamification is the same potent combination of intense engagement, flow, esprit-de-corps, loop-reinforced sense of accomplishment (fiero) and surrender to a higher purpose that inflames all True Believers. I'm not sure how you can seriously talk about gamification at world-changing scales without thinking about how scary the present crop of True Believer games can be (e.g., Unbridled Capitalism, Globalization, the Tea Party, Al Quada, etc.)
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- The best practical example we have of enterprise gamification are the incentive systems applied to telesales, which -- bottom line -- turn people into monkey-cogs in a machine, competing for tokens of dubious value in exchange for optimal performance in generating hard revenue for the organization employing them.
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- McGonigal is very fair about acknowledging her precursors, from Ted Castronova to Abraham Maslow. But she doesn't (I don't recall, anyway) mention Lawrence Lessig, whose line 'Code is Law' strikes me as relevant. The idea of moving governance into code is very powerful, but also profound and terrifying.