Supernova 2008: “All the World’s A Game” summary
(Visited 10584 times) Game talk
Jun 202008
The UpTake Blog has a great summary of the panel I was on. They missed my opening remarks, which were largely inconsequential: a brief overview of fields outside of games that are relevant to virtual world design, which can be summarized as “all of them.”
Elliot Ng’s summary reads:
- Raph shared about “emergent” play, like endgame raids in World of Warcraft and Everquest (aka Evercrack) not originally envisioned by the game developers but created by the players.
- Raph: “Humans enjoy transgressive play” and will always try to break free from the game constraints.
- Doug’s thesis oversimplified is as follows: Gamers will be more successful in the future workplace than non-gamers, because of five key characteristics of the gamer’s disposition: (1) Gamers have a bottom-line mentality, (2) Gamers understand the value of diversity, (3) Gamers thrive on change, (4) Gamers see learning as fun, (5) Gamers tend to marinate on the edge.
- Dave said that “it freaks him out” that the Web communities he build have the same, fundamental game mechanics as online games like World of Warcraft. Are we destined to create games that follow that pattern and will we live in a flattened world because of it?
- Dave invoked the eerie story of Japanese schoolchildren obsessing over “shiny balls of mud” called dorodango and creating an external evaluative process to allocate status and distinction based on expertise gained through repetitive practice creating these balls of mud. Is this simply the human condition? Do game and Web designers accentuate these hard-wired tendencies? Or do we have freedom to choose the future we want?
- Doug: “what i’m concerned is that kids are being trained to be consumers. In Hello Kitty, Barbie Girls, and Club Penguin, citizenship is being a good consumer.”
I was struck by the fact that so much of the discussion, particularly on Dave’s side, echoed concerns from my Project Horseshoe talk “Influences.” There was much discussion of the social impact of “the grind” as large-scale cultural phenomenon: is it good to indoctrinate kids into a “gamist” mentality?
Image (CC) Elliott Ng, UpTake Travel Search.
11 Responses to “Supernova 2008: “All the World’s A Game” summary”
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Raph, big apologies for showing up late. It was a great panel. I liked your comments on the progressively “transgressive” behavior of gamers, and the example of your son (although I think this speaks for a certain exceptional nature of either your son or your parenting in this dimension).
Perhaps the answer is to design for this “transgressive” behavior in mind. There will always be 0.01% people who aspire to be game developers, but allow them the hooks to do that within the game experience. And then enable some of the 0.01% to teach others to modify and change the experience as well. In WoW, this might be some kind of emergent “Crafting” Construction Set.
Anyway, fascinating points and look forward to hearing more about Metaplace which I suppose is for uber-transgressive play!
You know, I thought about that and the idea of the ‘grind’ is most certainly not limited to games. People who are into the high level raiding end game in things like EverQuest and WoW, and yet who also claim to despise going to work every day crack me up. If you think about it, going to the job has a lot in common with a raid – you have a sizable group of people at a company (guild), each with different roles and responsibilities (classes), who have to act in a highly coordinated fashion (tank, heal) doing something repetitive and unpleasant for a paycheck (loot drops). It seems like young powergamers should be able to translate into corporate climbers pretty well.
[…] Raph Kosters blog today links to The Uptake Blog which has a summary of a panel Raph was on at the Supernova 2008 conference. […]
Elliott – you bring up a good point around the drive to create in games, the leadership and teaching role of creators (a related education term is the ‘zone of proximal development’), and the close relationship between transgression and creation. A physical analog would be the tinkerers ‘transgress’ real world objects by taking them apart, as they are not designed to be taken apart. Of course, that’s acceptable transgression, but some reverse engineering is obviously not. Also in there is distinction between wanting to see things break and test the limits (nearly all of us) vs. see what’s inside things, testing the limits for a more directed purpose (some of us).
You’re correct that a small number of people naturally take on this creator role. Bradley Horowitz has a good blog post about this, discussing Creators / Synthesizers / Consumers as an escalation of participation in creation and a logarithmic drop off in users. See here: http://www.elatable.com/blog/2006/02/17/creators-synthesizers-and-consumers/
Related to this, also consider the natural dynamic of leadership/creators in communities. You can only have so many creators relative to consumers before our social programming kicks in. In a vacuum of leadership, leaders (creators) arise given demand / interest. In an excess, some pull back. Obviously the ratios are different depending on different contexts, but the 1:10:100 ratio in Bradley’s post is a good starting point.
Related to the ‘grind’ discussion: games are in a really rapid innovation cycle that far outpaces corporate structure and organizational psych, and at the individual experience level, a much brighter spotlight of attention is shining on games. I suspect the more we understand and tweak games, the more we’re going to understand what ‘work’ is, how much grind vs creative vs social we can handle, and how better to design for this. One place to read further on a slight tangent is Seriosity (www.seriosity.com), as they’re experimenting with game mechanics and rewards in the workplace, via an Outlook plugin at first. Many others are doing research here.
One caveat I’d add to Doug’s thesis is that many – if not most – people who play games, and even MMOGs, are not ‘gamers’ by this definition. In the same respect that ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ labels are fairly meaningless beyond surface-level product distinction (not necessarily user habits), those who play MMOGs don’t all optimize and focus on results, or wouldn’t in contexts that didn’t necessitate that of them. There is a generational shift and games are affecting this, but getting too crazy about these loud, internet-enabled ‘gamers’ ignores that they may have had that personality regardless, and lots of others don’t.
Sorry for sounding like a know-it-all or research nerd here, feel free to pick apart at will and vehemently disagree!
Final comment:
A great quote from Einstein: ‘not all that can be measured matters, and not all that matters can be measured’
The grind and ‘gamist’ mentalities are heavily measurement-driven, with rapid feedback. Not all human endeavors that matter give us clear and quick feedback, so we must keep this in mind in evaluating good/bad for this kind of indoctrination. We can see this in action today in how we are compensated at work, quickly for quick results. The cultural shift to frequent job switches (I’ve heard something like 9 in the first 10 years), means a certain amount of institutional memory and long term thinking suffers. Long term work is where a qualitative analysis of someone’s work is valuable, something a ‘gamist’ mentality may have more difficulty with.
To be consultant-y and put it in a 2×2, I’d say:
black / white vs shades of grey
short term vs long term
are the two variables, gamist being b&w and short term, qualitative being grey and long term. Feel free to make up your own terms for the other two conditions! I’m sure this is a simplification of some wisdom of the ages but sometimes it’s good to cart out the obvious 😉
My response arguing this is not true:
https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/20/user-created-content/
Byron Reeves actually did some of his early research into this based on SWG… 🙂
Good points in that post. I conflated two types of creating here – one is socially independent (delicious, flickr, customizing avatars and rooms, fill-in-the-blank) and one that is socially dependent (leadership in forums / online communities / guilds / open source projects, etc). The latter naturally take on a larger creation role, coming up with new things, etc… this is why Bradley’s creator/synthesizer/consumer pyramid still makes sense, at least in the Y!Groups context where it came from.
As your post points out though, getting the user to ‘create’ is much more than that. Creating / customizing for your own purposes is a fairly net neutral thing to others, and tagging in delicious is a net positive thing for others (it adds to the intelligence of recommended tags). Only creation that is net negative to others, such as the forming of a group where one is the leader who creates / owns the conversation and associated creations, leads to a small number of creators due to competitive pressure for the attention and resources of followers. This is of course independent of difficulty which naturally limits who participates.
Yea, Byron’s a cool guy. 🙂
[…] Elliot Ng was there for (almost) the full panel, and has the complete write-up on his blog. Raph has his own take on the panel, and points out the similarities to an earlier talk he gave at Project […]
[…] Supernova 2008: “All the World’s A Game” summary “Humans enjoy transgressive play” and will always try to break free from the game constraints. (tags: play playfulweb web2.0) […]
[…] the World’s a Game” panel at Supernova from a few weeks back. (I previously blogged about a summary written by The UpTake Blog). Now you too can see the arguments over […]
[…] Supernova 2008: “All the World’s A Game” summary “Humans enjoy transgressive play” and will always try to break free from the game constraints. (tags: play playfulweb web2.0) […]