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Trevor Reddick's avatar

As long as equitable resource allocation isn't a reality the gamification of business represents a clear and present danger of amplifying things that businesses already do poorly - namely accounting for external offsets and addressing the ethical questions of capital allocation.

The part about warfare seems emblematic here - the goal of war isn't, and shouldn't be, to hit kill metrics or make bombing fun. The goal of war is to win. But the current drone warfare paradigm can't lead to a "win" because it's ameliorative not decisive - its targeted nature against suspected terrorists keep US criticism of the effort to a minimum while ensuring its use as a policing tactic. Because it is less visible for American citizens the abstraction of war into its constituent parts reduces awareness of its costs economically, politically, and socially. The result: 20 years after 9/11 the US has bases all over the Middle East and North Africa deploying drone bombings against suspected terrorists every day. Abstracting the process of war-making into its constituent parts has led us to abdicate the more fundamental question: what the hell are we doing here and what are we trying to achieve?

My point: To continue the analogy, you're going to need two games, the game of the business and the game of the leader, whose domain must be substantially larger than that of the business. Look at how the oil market is going - in the real world you can hit all of the metrics in your game, and still lose. The leader's role is to look at the metrics being used at the business level and assess them against their broader implications for the goals, health, and direction of a business. The leader's role isn't to hit metrics, it's to endlessly create and optimize the businesses metrics while answering to the demands of the shareholders and broader society. Two social impacts of import seem immediately apparent - fair labor and climate impact.

If you turn J Crew into a clothing company simulator, for instance, you ratchet up abstraction of business processes to the point you might lose the map of where your corporation exists within the social milieu entirely. Conventional financial models ostensibly make this game exclusively about producing clothes, shipping them to retailers, and marketing them effectively. What are the odds that such a game can answer questions like: Who's making the clothes, where, and for how much money? What's the climate impact of product lifecycle? Where do the clothes go when consumers are done with them? If your focus is on maximizing profitability within the conventional financial model your business risks adverse effect from unintentional offsets and stringent regulation.

In the end, businesses must play two games to avoid abstracting away social responsibility - anything less will be at the cost of all stakeholders. The viability of the biggest game, the economic game we play to ensure everyone an equitable distribution of resources in the first place, is at stake.

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TW's avatar

Inevitably, responses to a post like this turn into a hobbyhorse. I'll try not to.

My background is in user research, including how people interact with systems, and I'm also an expert on game design: not video, but tabletop, including a lot of economic, conflict, and "serious" modeling sims. The main problem with "business as game," by no means a new idea, is that games of the type you propose here are finite, not infinite; discrete, not continuous. They are interfaces that are contiguous with models. This is an excellent way to understand a problem space, but not to engage with or transform a problem space. Put another way, it's suicide to run a business AS a model. You use biz models to UNDERSTAND the business. If your business is contiguous with its model, it's trivially easy to copy or, increasingly, to automate away. So in this regard, yes, you could put together a (really unfun) "game" of your glued-together martech and newsletter and IFTT stack. The reason nobody copies it is that it's too small-time, until you get the brilliant idea to sell it to other people via an online course and becomes the industry SOP overnight, incidentally destroying the (small) value of your initial newsletter-guy-stack advantage and ensuring your course will quickly become free. So it goes.

Larger spaces, actual corporations, are intractable to this kind of modeling for hundreds of reasons. The main reason, hard to talk about in our supposedly egalitarian age, is that if you can actually put this kind of thing together--it is nontrivially difficult if you want nontrivial results--"business" is probably the last place you want to be. Actual game companies, think tanks, university research centers, your own unicorn...vs. trying to automate the bureaucracy of people who are indifferent or actively hostile to your efforts, for trivial sums of money. The career of Jim Dunnigan is especially enlightening in this regard.

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