The Game is Life

How the rules and rewards of games are making their way into our daily routines.

Everyone is talking about games, and now these games are getting serious. Some are whimsical while others are channeling Winston Smith from 1984. The debates and discussions about games in our society were triggered by a talk delivered by game designer and Carnegie Mellon professor, Jesse Schell. Schell described a future where our every action and daily decision is motivated by a game.

Schell articulated a vision in which everything has a scorecard, rules, and rewards. He described a world where governments give us points for walking instead of driving, and advertisers track our eyes when we watch television, and give us points when we pay attention to advertisements.

Schell's talk sent murmurs through the forward-thinking crowd, and has been identified by Scientific American as one of the ideas that will change the world. Schell's definition of a game has three components:

1. Clearly identified goals (e.g. brush your teeth with a toothbrush);
2. Rules (e.g. brush your teeth for 1 minute, 30 seconds on the top and 30 seconds on the bottom);
3. Immediate Feedback (e.g. as you brush your teeth a sensor sends a message to a screen in your mirror that adds points to your total score with every extra second, and adds bonus points if you meet the goal).

With this system, five-year-olds and even 20-year-olds would brush their teeth for hours. I guarantee it.

The secret to this formula is the third component: immediate feedback. Our minds love it. So much so that when we take an action and are given direct immediate feedback, our brain is flooded with dopamine. It's the same effect as cocaine but to a lesser degree. Dopamine is addictive. We love how it makes us feel so we keep doing things to keep feeling that way. That is the scary potential of Schell's vision of a gamified future.

The application of games to our daily routines takes the complexity and ambiguity out of many of our day-to-day decisions. Finding the motivation to brush our teeth every night is hard. It's especially hard if you've never had a cavity.

I remember in Kindergarten we performed an experiment – we left one tooth in a cup of milk and another tooth in a cup of Cola for a few days. When we examined the teeth, one was sparkling white and the other was black and rotted. It was a powerful lesson to help us five-year-olds connect action and consequence.

In a gamified future, the consequence of inaction does not matter. The five-year-old brushes her teeth not because she understand the consequence but because she want the points.

This is the theory at least, and it could be applied to almost every aspect of life: exercise, socializing, education, advertising, etc.

Is it such a terrible future? If we can put in place the right protective mechanisms to ensure that games aren't used maliciously, it sounds like Society 2.0 would be one of clean teeth and healthy living. Why struggle with the abstract? Why try to wrap our heads around the long-term consequences of our actions and the complex systems that make up society? What's wrong with using points and flashy rewards to push us toward grander goals?

The reason this notion of the future makes us uncomfortable is because it unhinges the fundamental notion of games. Games are ways to experiment when the stakes are low, to exert control over systems without inherit consequences.

Play is an ancient part of society that evolved as a way to experiment and learn, share and discover. Rules and rewards are the part of play that give it meaning, and vice versa. Attaching the mechanics of play, in the form of rules and rewards, to real life issues that have real world impacts undercuts the inherit joy in play and perhaps would even trigger our adaptive awareness to reject these perverted forms of play.

A gamified life that conditions us to act based on immediate, simple rewards without regard for the complexity of the matter degrades our capacity to relate things unseen, to the abstract and complex. You don't study hard in college just because you want the points; you study hard because you want knowledge and a bright future. Motivation driven by distilled reward is not lasting.

However, the deeper concern over a gamified society is if we get accustomed and addicted to these mechanisms of motivation, how or where do we find the psychological and emotional tools to deal with the complexities of life? Careers, love, death, parenting, nature and the environment – the foundations of human existence – will always be wrapped in uncertainty and complexity, no matter the scoreboards or reward systems.

Games, by their very nature, lack this insecurity; you always know when you are right and wrong when playing a game and if we flood society with games it will erode our capacity to deal with situations when there isn't a leader board or rule book. That is a scary thought.