At the Game Designers Rant, Jane McGonigal held an inspiring rant about the need for game designers to approach real-life experiences with a game design mindset. The real world, she argued, is often boring and/or broken, and there’s a lot that game designers can do to make people more engaged and happy in everyday life.
The broader developer community is probably not that eager to think about such issues yet. Aren’t we still trying to figure out how to make good video games? But as gaming continues on its course of becoming a prominent (perhaps dominant?) means of engagement in the 21st century, I think Jane McGonigal’s message will make more and more sense. See: notes and slides on Jane’s blog, and TerraNova’s transcript.
Reality is broken, and we’re not fixing it, we’re offering alternatives to it. We offer better experiences, better socialization, in virtual experiences. That needs to start changing. If reality is broken, why aren’t game designers trying to fix it? It’s our responsibility to design systems that make us happy and successful and powerful in real life? We have the power and the responsibility.
Jane offered examples of real-life experiences that could benefit from game design, such as running, being on a plane, playing fetch with your dog or commuting. “Why don’t I level up when I go running? Make a Nike iPod MMO!”.
It’s probably no coincidence that Jane mentioned playing fetch with your dog as an activity that game designers could make more interesting. This year’s Game Design Challenge was to come up with an inter-species game, and contestant Brenda Brathwaite suggested an idea for an ARG that could be played by dog owners together with their dogs. Instead of just taking your dog for a walk, you would also be participating in an elaborate community-driven real-life game. Woof.
Applied game design soon emerged as a recurring theme for me at the conference. At a Dutch game developers gathering I had a nice chat with the course leader of the HKU (where I got my master’s degree a few years ago), who is trying to apply game design theory to musea and libraries. Libraries in particular are becoming increasingly irrelevant in today’s society, but what if you were to look at it from an interactivity/gameplay/community point of view? Could game design make libraries more relevant and less, well, boring? I don’t really know, but it’s fun to think about.
Gabe Zichermann’s talk at the Worlds in Motion Summit also dealt with “the use of gaming design in non-gaming contexts”, though he focused on the web instead of real-life. After pointing out different game-like elements in eBay and Facebook, he argued that game design could “fix” various experiences on the web, including shopping, travel, financial services, and so on. “There’s no upper limit. Everything can be made more fun.”
It’s true that even the simplest game elements can add value to certain websites. The progress bar on LinkedIn immediately comes to mind. It makes it more fun to fill out your profile, invite contacts and gather testimonials. There are no rewards whatsoever for filling that progress bar, yet it somehow compells you to ‘play’ the social networking game.
The notion of applied game design was not without some criticism, however. Going back to Jane’s rant, Jonathan Blow offered a response in which he pointed to a game-like system in real-life that did not increase his happiness. He talked about Air Miles and other airline reward programs, which give you points for flying with a certain airline. This unnecessarily complicates things, Jon argued, and probably even increases the average price of tickets. Jane responded that the intentions behind this system (as a marketing device) were different, and that her rant was about game designers approaching mundane everyday activities from a game design perspective.
It’s definitely interesting to think about game design in a real-world context. In what unexpected places could we see game design making a difference in the coming years?
Hey, my name is Marek Bronstring and I'm Head of Content at Sega. You're looking at my rarely-updated game design blog. I think this sidebar needs some more text so let me tell you what my top favorite animals are: 1) meerkats 2) 
There is a certain amount of overlap here between “Redesign Reality’s Games” and “Design for Everywhere”. I think that’s where things get really interesting: don’t just coat reality with games for games sake, but start tying together larger gaming experiences out of things that extend “into reality”. Not just “leveling up the running skill” with a “Nike MMO”, but playing a “World of Warcraft” game where your “running skill” has a physical impact on virtual game play… Even more interesting, what if travel in the virtual world required real walking/running/biking to travel that world?
Microsoft is talking about this sort of thing again recently with Fable 2. Fable 2 will have a set of “jobs” that will be available as an external casual arcade game that will add money to your Fable character’s account.
The interesting thing there is that if you push that last example to its logical extreme: What if I made money for my virtual character while working on my real job? The interesting thing is that you’ve arrived really close to RMT (real money trades). I think some of the arguments against RMT fail to take into account the “boring grind” of most of the jobs in this world.
Max Battcher
February 28th, 2008