The Gamification of Life – Lab 065

About this Lab

You ever heard the phrase “you play too much” or you "playing games?” Well, despite what society’s told us, life is kind of like a game, because of the many ways different aspects of our day to day have been gamified, i.e given characteristics of gameplay and incentivized. We learn why we game, how we game, and the difference between gaming and gamification.

A lot of things have the capability of being treated like games

• ex: apple watch

  • it tracks your steps and you can share your stats and compete w/ friends

• apps and stuff bring in point systems etc

• Why do we play games?

• What is a game?

  • Games= voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the activity of struggling

    • read Grasshopper: Games Life in Utopia

• The value of the game is not in the end goal but rather in the struggling

• Dr. Nguyen says games are sculpted activities, little worlds that allow us to focus within their contexts temporarily until the game is finished

• There are hella benefit to #summerwalker playing games

Games create intimacy, the artificiality creates a sort of telepathy

• ex: Wordle

• Professor Nguyen wrote a Twitter thread of what made Wordle so successful

• Most folks might not consider themselves gamers BUT we might all be gamers, innately

  • Professor Nguyen argues that games are kind of the meaning of life

• Aristotle argued that the value of human life was not what you made but the good quality activity

  • philosophy scholar HANNAH MONTANA ALSO SAID, “ain’t about how fast I get there, ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side, it’s the climb.” SEE “The Climnb”

  • It’s about autotelic activity

• Games as an Art Form

  • playing a game is participatory art

  • games are dynamic art, designed for players to have their own agency

• Everything isn’t a game but games are the crystallization of everyday activity

• The Making of a Game

  • When game makers make games, they think about behavior and how players might or might not interact with the game depending on scenarios

  • games allow you to explore desire sets

• The Gamification of Life

  • It's any procedure where you take techniques from game design and you export them to ordinary life activities to make those more like a game in some way

  • think metrofied sytems, clear rankings, etc

    • citation rates, clicks, GPA

  • Game v Gamification

    • game has pure set of goals to achieve in time

    • gamification is infinite and sprawling

      • ex: social media likes, reposts, shares, etc

      • read Dr. Nguyen’s How Twitter Gamifies Communication

  • gamification can be used for tracking and monitoring complex situations, using metrics

  • the formula to gamify life

    • you need to do is take a real world activity and orient your motivations around a simple, pre-produced, technologically embedded point system. And then you'll get thrills

    • incentivizing!

• One Thing: Game Edition

  • T: Pandemic board game

  • Z: Farming Simulator 2019
    

Guest Expert

Our guest expert for this lab is Dr. C. Thi Nguyen. He is an associate professor of philosophy at University of Utah, where he teaches outside of conventional issues in epistemology and meta-ethics and breaches subjects like games, twitter, trusts and even porn. Dr. Nguyen explores games as a specific art form in his book Games: Art as Agency.

Transcript

You can read along with this lab here!