Game Frame: Using Games as a Strategy for Success - Hardcover

Dignan, Aaron

 
9781451611052: Game Frame: Using Games as a Strategy for Success
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1451611056 ISBN 13: 9781451611052
Verlag: Free Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Ever wonder why teens can spend entire weekends playing video games but struggle with just one hour of homework? Why we’re addicted to certain websites and steal glances at our smartphones under the dinner table? Or why some people are able to find joy in difficult or repetitive jobs while others burn out? It’s not the experiences themselves but the way they’re structured that matters.

All our lives we’ve been told that games are distractions—playful pastimes, but unrelated to success. In Game Frame, Aaron Dignan shows us that the opposite is true: games produce peak learning conditions and accelerated achievement. Here, the crucial connection between the games we love to play and the everyday tasks, goals, and dreams we have trouble realizing is illuminated.

Aaron Dignan is the thirty-something founder of a successful digital strategy firm that studies the transformative power of technology in culture. He and his peers were raised on a steady diet of games and gadgets, ultimately priming them to challenge the status quo of the modern workplace. What they learned from games goes deeper than hand-eye coordination; instead, this generation intrinsically understands the value of adding the elements of games into everyday life.

Game Frame is the first prescriptive explanation of what games mean to us, the human psychology behind their magnetic pull, and how we can use the lessons they teach as a framework to achieve our potential in business and beyond.

Games are a powerful way to influence and change behavior in any setting. Here, Dignan outlines why games and play are such important trends in culture today, and how our technology, from our iPhones to our hybrid cars, primes us to be instinctive players. Game Frame tackles the challenging task of defining games and the mechanics that make games work from several perspectives, then explores these ideas through the lens of neuroscience. Finally, Dignan provides practical tips for using basic game mechanics in a variety of settings, such as motivating employees at work or encouraging children at home, giving readers the tools to develop their own games to solve problems in their everyday lives.

Illuminated throughout with a series of real-world examples and hypothetical scenarios, Game Frame promises a crash course in game design and behavioral psychology that will leave the reader—and, by extension, the world itself—more productive. Revolutionary, visionary, practical, and time-tested, Game Frame will change the way you approach life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aaron Dignan dressed up like a superhero for the first 180 days of the first grade, which marked the beginning of his life as an iconoclast, observer, theorist, and performer. He is a founding partner of the digital strategy firm Undercurrent, based in New York, where he advises top executives at global brands like General Electric, PepsiCo, and Ford Motor Company, helping them define their future in an increasingly technophilic world. Aaron's work at Undercurrent has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Vanity Fair, Slate, and AdAge.

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We’re bored. Not all of us, and certainly not all the time, but it does happen a lot. Look into the eyes of the person behind the checkout counter the next time you buy something. Note the expression on the face of an employee in accounts payable who has held that same job for ten years. Observe a classroom of students during a middle school world studies class. Boredom is everywhere, and it’s a by-product of poorly structured systems.

In so many communities and organizations, the lack of interesting and challenging opportunities is apparent. Teenagers with excess free time and hungry minds are forced to choose from a scant menu of options, often resorting to mindless forms of entertainment to pass the time. Adults in the workplace aren’t much better off, but the demands of work and family life keep us busy enough to be complacent with the status quo.

Whether the fault lies with the systems that surround us or the way we’re approaching them, boredom isn’t the only thing holding us back. It’s part of a larger trend of issues preventing us from realizing our potential. Some of us suffer from a lack of motivation. Others have problems with follow-through—eagerly starting new projects with verve only to lose steam over time. Still others feel helpless even to try, discouraged by the apparent difficulty of what lies ahead.

These feelings are all common among people who have become disenchanted with “the system,” whether that system is their company, their school, or even their personal life. Examining these issues and how they relate to each other, I’ve grouped them into two distinct symptoms: lack of volition and lack of faculty. By understanding how they inhibit us, we can attack them head on. Let’s take a closer look.

Lack of Volition. Volition is the will to do something; the motivation and internal drive to see it through. Any kind of proactive or ambitious behavior is evidence of strong volition. People who lack volition feel lost, bored, or disconnected from the task at hand. They can’t see why an activity or behavior is worthwhile. A lack of volition is defined by disinterest, low involvement, and arrested development. An individual lacking volition says, “I’m not going to do that. Why would I? What’s in it for me?”

Lack of Faculty. Faculty is the belief that we have the skills and tools to handle the challenges we’re facing; that we know how to begin and have the confidence to pursue our goals. People who lack faculty in a particular situation may feel that it’s too hard, or that it’s unclear what they need to do to succeed. A lack of faculty is defined by anxiety, submission, and ultimately, despair. An individual lacking faculty says, “I can’t do this. I’m not prepared. I don’t know how.”

We can’t bribe our way out of these issues. But that’s exactly what we try to do. Faced with an unmotivated employee or student, our first instinct is to dangle a carrot (an incentive). If that doesn’t work, we threaten him. In either case, we’re missing the point. Tackling a lack of volition or faculty with blunt instruments like rewards and punishments simply ignores the fact that the activities and experiences causing these symptoms aren’t any fun.

The Proof Is in the Pudding

Fortunately for us, one medium is designed to address these issues systemically: games. They do this through a structured and challenging system that makes the process of learning rewarding, enables deep engagement, provides a sense of autonomy, and asks us to be heroes in our own stories.

Games, in contrast to shallow rewards systems, are made up of activities that we genuinely like. They manage to pull us in and hold our attention almost effortlessly. This is no accident. Games are created with our enjoyment in mind. Josh Knowles, a software developer and designer, drives this point home on his website: “Games are engagement engines. To design a game is to take some thing—some basic enjoyable and/or satisfying interaction—and carefully apply rules to help players maximize the enjoyment and/or satisfaction they have with that interaction.”

The point is that playing games is satisfying in and of itself. If we aim to overcome the lack of volition and faculty that we’re facing, it follows that our experiences—be they at work, school, or at home—need to be enjoyable and satisfying in their own right. Layering a rewards system over an existing experience doesn’t make us like it any better, it just encourages us to tolerate it.

And yet, game-like rewards systems have become quite popular. From loyalty cards to points systems to badges for achievement, organizations are beginning to see the value of game mechanics applied to everything from software to staff meetings. But while simply pasting game mechanics—the ingredients that make games work—onto an existing system is great for short-term engagement, it will almost certainly lead to diminishing returns down the road. The core experience of an activity matters, and a veneer of gameplay isn’t going to change that.

If deeper engagement and performance are what we seek, we need to change our systems from the inside out. And in places where we can’t, we must pay close attention to the way we apply a game layer to our lives. Because using play to influence behavior is more complicated than we think.

Learning Machines

Human beings are learning machines. Our brains are always hunting for patterns—exploring and experimenting—in order to increase our chance of survival. We learn in order to thrive, and it’s our main method of interaction with the world around us. So it’s not surprising that learning is often accompanied by enjoyment.

A game, at its core, is a kind of structured learning environment. In games, we learn two important things: new skills and new information. Game designers spend a lot of time thinking about skills in particular, because they are the basic framework of interaction with the game system itself. In the classic Nintendo game Super Mario Bros., learning how to run and jump are skills that are fundamental to completing the game. Much of our engagement comes from the trial and error learning process of running and jumping with abandon, slowly turning clumsiness into precision. Once you’ve acquired those skills, you’re able to move through subsequent levels far more freely. And of course, knowledge of each level—the location of every enemy and reward that lies in wait for you—is the other half of mastering the game.

That Learning Feeling

It’s hard to tell exactly when we’re learning. We have a sense that it’s happening, but it’s not a conscious process. We encounter something new, turn it over and over in our minds (or hands), and somehow, in the handling, it becomes our own. Mental connections are made, and we now possess something we didn’t before. Along the way, while we’re not aware of these connections being formed, we are aware of how we feel during this process. We feel riveted. We feel as if we’re “getting it.” We feel a sense of deep satisfaction.

To describe this process, game designer Raph Koster borrowed a wonderful term from the world of science fiction: grok. To grok something means to understand it so thoroughly that it becomes a part of you. Our brains love grokking new information, so we feel good when it happens. In fact, neuroscientists have shown that when we figure something out, our brains release a flood of chemicals known as opioids (nature’s “pleasure...

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Verlag
Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1451611056
ISBN 13 
9781451611052
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
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