Is it time to uprez your game?
Well-designed games, more than any other form of entertainment, directly hack into our motivational substructures. They play into our desire to achieve status, collect things, complete tasks, explore the unknown, solve mysteries, be powerful, and make tangible progress (otherwise known as “leveling up”).
Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker
Video game theorist Ian Bogost explores and satirizes this aspect of games with his Facebook metagame Cow Clicker. The game is maximally minimalistic; all you do is click on a virtual cow at regular intervals (the game that Cow Clicker satirizes, Farmville, is a mass social networking game phenomena with more users than Twitter, netting hundreds of millions in revenue for its creators). Bogost states that his game “distills the social game genre down to its essence.” His point is that game architecture can be distilled into simple psychological tricks the designer uses to engage the player. In a well designed game, these tricks are used with brutal (or in some cases, subtle) effectiveness, and the game is hard to stop playing. Some game designers have even been accused of making their games too addictive.
A good game cleverly manipulates us, playing on our various urges (competition, avarice, curiosity, desire for completion or closure). In the context of the game, our skills are a good match for the tasks at hand, and rewards are frequent and well-timed. Real life, on the other hand, is messier. Our skills are often a poor match for the tasks at hand; what we need to do is often too easy (and therefore boring) or too hard (and therefore intimidating). Rewards come unevenly and sometimes apparently randomly; we can work diligently for years or even decades and the world will basically shrug at us. At other times, we can’t believe our good luck, and don’t feel worthy of the good fortune life bestows upon us.
Are there ways we can apply the motivational energy (or dirty tricks, depending on how you look at it) used by video games to our real lives? This is one area where I completely agree with game designer/theorist Jane McGonigal (I discussed her recent thesis in my last post); I think we can. McGonigal gives a brilliant example of this technique when she describes how she recovered from a debilitating concussion. What else can we do to “reverse hack” the tricks video games play on our minds?