The Rise of the Non-Game Game

I recently purchased a to-do list app for my iPhone. While this may not seem to be a revelation, there was something different about this app. It presented itself as a game.


As some of you have probably guessed by now, the app I'm referring to is the most excellent Epic Win—marketed as a way to "Level-Up Your Life", it takes the lessons learned from Blizzard's World of Warcraft1For those not in the know (do you exist?), World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game known for its addictive qualities and extreme popularity. and attempts to transplant the rewards gained grinding away at meaningless tasks to, well, meaningful tasks.

Essentially, each task is given an 'Epicness' rating by you, a completion date and categorised according to Strength, Stamina, Intelligence, Social or Spiritual. From there, once you complete a task, you gain experience points and your slightly camp avatar progresses on its journey, earning gold and delicious loot along the way. It genuinely works, too, adding that little bit of motivation to hustle through all those things that pile up throughout the day. I've tried so many to-do apps in an effort to get my life organised and all have failed bar Epic Win. And I love it for that.

What interests me, though, is this drive towards inserting 'game' elements into our everyday lives, as though we need to be entertained to get through it all. Additionally, most of what are deemed to be game elements are actually RPG elements, a particular sub-class of games "in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting"2From the ever reliable Wikipedia entry on Role Playing Games.—perfect fodder for online communities, where avatars (another borrowed 'gaming' feature) are already prevalent. Foursquare uses badges as a way to entice people to use its location-based services, granting them for obscure and possibly mind-numbing tasks. Gowalla uses a similar feature for a similar service.

Meta-games are an increasingly popular way of getting a 'long-tail' of participation—a loyal and reliant user base that uses the service simply for the secondary rewards it presents. Xbox Live achievements and Playstation Trophies function in this manner, presenting players with awards for completing challenges in their games. At work here is not gaming3As far as gaming can be defined, it requires goals, rules and interaction, either between players or the game itself.—not even close. This is data visualisation wrapped in a nice package. Yes, its possible to compare 'stats', but there can never be a victor. Unlike, say, Milton Bradley's Game of Life, the choices we make cannot be reduced finite values and quantified to decide who is a winner. Game mechanics require a winner, or a solution. These meta-games, as currently imagined, reduce x activity to y amount of points—and yet there is no actual winner from the meta-game, merely an ever increasing bar graph of how many hours spent using the service.

All of these implementations of progressive 'reward' do not actually reward the user beyond bragging rights—unlike actual games, they do not unlock extra functionality or improve the experience. Many are actually no different to the old Scouts' Badges that we've all received at one point or another throughout our childhood—mildly tacky, transitive rewards for real-world progress. Except Scouts is about learning to do things. Many games, and many meta-games, don't actually reward the player for real-world progress. Yes, you just became the mayor of your favourite bar—does this mean you're a better bartender now? Or does it merely show that you like to go to the same place a lot?

This all begs the question, of course, as to where we are headed with game-mechanics in real life. Tara offers this somewhat joking tweet: "Turns out, my motivation is points based. I think universities should adopt a similar system. Loot instead of HDs."4Permalink While this may be a ridiculous idea, we need be asking how best to use game-mechanics, and where their function can and should be implemented. Dan Hon, from advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, argues that "we're here to create strong, provocative relationships between great companies and their customers. Games and new ways of storytelling are a fantastic and incredibly exciting way of doing that."5Hon, Dan: 'A Short Rant About Games, Play and Storytelling' in Welcome to Optimism, the Wieden + Kennedy blog: August, 2010 Games Games currently have advertising within them, but they are not, with a few possible exceptions, advertising in and of themselves. They are an entertainment medium—we don't watch TV for the ads. We probably won't play adver-games for the ads, either.

The sort of thinking that says that games are the way to reach millions of disaffected youth—a key demographic for advertising—relies on the idea that interactivity immediately makes things better. I'm still not sure that it does. While narrative gaming has held a number of truly potent moments for me, it has yet to match the storytelling power of some of the great films and novels, nor has it matched the interactive joy of pure game mechanics, that feeling of grinding against the play space. Anyway, got sidetracked.

My point is this—gaming is about pure mechanics. Story is a layer placed upon this mechanic, which is why describe gaming categories by what they do (first-person-shooter, third-person-platformer, role-playing-game, puzzle-game) and not necessarily what they're about. Consider Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption—both are third-person sandbox shooters. Both are from the same publisher. Both rely on the playing being both law-abiding and deviant. One is a contemporary gangster story and the other is a Western. And yet, if you enjoyed playing Grand Theft Auto IV, I'd almost guarantee you'll enjoy playing Red Dead Redemption.

Game mechanics, then, are about they way in which we interact with the world, and not the story that surrounds it.

Epic Win succeeds because it understands, at one level or another, that its purpose is to assist in getting mundane tasks done. It takes the standard RPG rewards for completing mundane tasks and bundles them into a functional and fun application. It is the only implementation of this thinking I have come across where the purpose of the meta-game and the base function are inextricably linked—Foursquare, Xbox Live, et al, don't do this. Instead, they provide a reward that in no way matches the experience. Sure, seeing your friends can seem like grinding, but most of the time its fun. The reward is in actually socialising, going to bars, venues and shops, in playing the games—not in the badges. I don't need motivation to do any of these things.

Epic Win is not designed to get users to compete for bragging rights, as the user is in complete control of how many tasks to place in the app and how much those tasks are worth. The reward to the user is tangible, in the sense that they have accomplished 'real-life' tasks. For this reason alone it is excellent.

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