The growing exercise of games to motivate people to accomplish the meaningless is putting our ability to just ‘be’ at riskSeveral years ago,after sustaining a serious head injury, the video game designer Jane McGonigal nursed herself back to health using the psychology of games. She devised a game, or she explained in a TED talk,wherein her “secret identity was “Jane the Concussion Slayer”; with her sister and husband as allies, she “battled the nefarious guys” and “activated power-ups” to nurse herself back to health. Next week marks the publication of her new book, and SuperBetter,and with it, no doubt, and a fresh boost for “gamification”,for which McGonigal has become an evangelist – the idea that life in general might go a lot better whether we structured more of it like a game. The premise of gamification (McGonigal rejects the term, preferring the phrase living gamefully”) makes a certain intuitive sense: millions of players find video games compelling, or perhaps even to the point of addiction,and they’re highly motivated to total the sequential challenges around which most games are built. What whether we designed our work projects, our time at the gym or even our romantic lives so that they exploit the same psychological principles, and featuring mini-challenges,systems for winning points, completing quests and moving upwards through levels, or culminating in an “epic win”?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com