Notes On A Revolution

The rise of systems under the guise of games

Occasionally, in fact far less frequently than I said I would, I write for Uncluttered White Spaces, an endeavour put on by your friend and mine Ben Rennie, a man with a heart the size of a Texan (who are apparently bigger in Texas).

I had been thinking about what is being termed the “gamification” of the world around us, which is really the design of a thousand tiny reward systems designed to induce behaviours companies find desirable.

Ultimately, we’re talking about incentivising behaviour, be that to collect all the stars in a Mario game, to have a successful farm within Farmville on Facebook, or to have someone share the name of the cafe they visit in the morning by offering them a discount if they do. And amidst all this, we’re unleashing a quantity of game design we have never seen before. Some of it will be properly awful, but over time we are going to get better at building systems that incentivise desired behaviours, be it in the classroom or in the department store.

The full article is now up over at UWS. Head on over and say hi!