The Gamification of Game Playing?

It’s early in the morning and I have yet to have coffee, but I promise I’m not crazy. I know that I have never been a fan of gamification (and I can promise that this isn’t a post about gamification itself, though we’ve done that a lot in the past) but rather a fun little talk about practice. As most of us are at the end of our academic terms around here there has been a lot less of our usual streaming, multiplayer gaming, and general discussion about cool new games. But one thing has definitely been on the rise: bargaining with the devil. And by devil I mean that anthropomorphized love of games that sits on stacks of ungraded papers and blocks keyboards during the last week or two of classes. I imagine that it looks a lot like that little fluffy manifestation of Knowledge that grows bigger and bigger from the old ESPN commercial (but I imagine mine being purple and less intimidating-looking).

My Game Desire (whom I have appropriately named Desiree) has been around constantly lately. And even when I don’t agree to give in to its siren song it does sneaky shit like turn on Twitch so that I can see that Alisha or someone else has caved to their own version of Desiree and is streaming something that I really want to play and then I get sucked into that and lose at least an hour or two of my time. So to avoid this, I have taken to bargaining with Des more and more. Finish this mini-stack of papers and play for an hour. Finish a class and play a multiplayer session with friends. Turn in my grades and buy a new game (for me it’s going to be State of Decay).

This form of gamification (where I earn gameplay time rather than badges or achievements) is nothing new for me. Back in my grad school days it’s how I finally finished my dissertation. As if they were some personal crusade to make sure that I never actually finished my PhD, EA released the original Sims game during the same time that I was writing my dissertation (1999) and it wasn’t until I realized that sitting down at my computer to write usually resulted in more broken relationships and drowned Sims (don’t judge me) than written words that I decided that I needed to be working on more of a reward system. Write a certain number of words and earn an hour of game time. That reward system (and a bit of an obsession with The Sims) was what lead me here today. So for those of you who are none to happy about that, take it up with EA.

When I talk to grad students now who are also gamers I tell them my tale of gaming woe and suggest that they try something similar. How many of you gamify your lives in similar ways? Tell us about it in the comments. Who knows, we may talk about it in a future show or post.