"gameification"

Hmm, and so the attempted ‘gameification’ of everything continues. From http://wiki.digsby.com/doku.php?id=faq#q32:

I should mention that I don’t want to specifically ‘pick on’ Digsby here; I use their IM client all the time and love it. But they’re not exactly alone, here. I simply have issue with all this use of quote-unquote “game-like” systems, mainly achievements, to make one’s product/service/whatever more ‘sticky’ or ‘addictive’. There are some examples that are much better-executed than others (as with everything, there’s good design, and there’s bad design), and perhaps really, it’s just achievements that I have a problem with in general, even with applied to video games themselves. But I digress. Using a hastily tacked-on achievement system on a website or service seems a bit of a cheap shot really; kind of like using boobs to sell things.

Don’t get me wrong, I am of course all for advocating ‘playful behaviour’ in the things we do in every day life; including making the products & services we use more ‘fun’ and ‘playful’. But what does that even mean, really?

Incidentally, I am right this minute reading ‘Technology as Experience’ by John McCarthy & Peter Wright (okay, not right this minute, as I stopped to write this pseudo-rant). The book explores the “emotional and aesthetic dimensions” of our encounters with technology; in reviewing existing work on technology as enriching people’s lives, they mention that Donald Norman places enjoyment at the centre of his analysis of design. Indeed, I have yet to read ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ myself, though you should check out his TED Talk on design, emotion and happiness.

However, ‘making things playful’ is such a vague and fuzzy, and huge concept, and whilst Norman and others go some way in helping out, I’m not even 100% sure what we should even mean when we say that.

I do know, however, that this example is not it.