Marketers are spending more and more time trying to figure out how to gamify their brands, but employees haven’t wasted any time gamifying their working day!
The American Anthropological Association recently held its 109th annual meeting in Montreal’s Palais des Congrès. Among the 5,000 speakers was David Hakken, an anthropologist from Indiana University, who discussed the role of computerisation on how we work, why we work and what qualifies as work.
He discussed how the now defunct game by Google, ESP, got everyday web users to virtually compete against each other and label Google’s gazillion images into categories. The game transformed an intensive, repetitive and costly archiving chore into a fun (addictive) activity resulting in better service, and all this thanks to free labour. Although a rather long talk, the Human Computation video gives an interesting overview of how the obsolete Google game worked and how it was designed (pay close attention from 6’49 to 25’11).
Hakken goes on to question if the production of added value directly by customers, through activities like free bug reports, open source projects or fun Google tags, should be considered ‘computer feudalism’? Could the future of the most efficient companies lie in playbour (the space where play and labour collide)?
Whatever one may think from a moral standpoint about this potential development, this anthropological survey makes it clear that the workers of the future will act more like players. It isn’t entirely unlikely that Wall Street traders already sell, buy, negotiate and think in a similar fashion to the questing, grinding, adventure-seeking avatars in the online fantasy game World of Warcraft. Both are just as removed from the impact of their labour on the ‘real’ world but getting the addictive high of success that feudalism most likely never provided.
“The cooler your character looks in World of Warcraft, the sadder your real life is.” WoW player testimonial
Perhaps the greatest challenge (and responsibility?) of future employers will be to incite gaming behaviours while providing their employees with a sense that their actions impact reality.
Working on the ethnography of digital gaming to try and understand what motivates humans to focus — and commit hours of their lives to a task that doesn’t pertain to their immediate reality — doesn’t seem so farfetched!
