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.
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.
This was an amazing read - I have been thinking about this recently. For example one parallel I was thinking is if you take a linear equation and try to solve for "x" algebraically vs plot the line on a plane and spot the x visually. Basically solving via algebra is "work" - spotting on the plane via geometry is more fun "game". So can we translate work within the constraints that it has - to something like a game. And now I am wondering what the simplest version of this can be - warehouse work ? data entry work ? . And also currently the closest relative of this that I could think of are Captcha - where people play by identifying characters - but that translates to real work in training the model in the backend. Also the famous crowd sourced protein folding model game - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit. But thanks for this awesome article.
Love the concept, but not so sure about the viability. The biggest attraction of gaming is to get immediate feedback on the results of your actions. Great business decisions will usually not yield immediate results, and in fact move the dials in the wrong way for a while as the new activities get up to speed and begin to deliver on their promise. Like the click-fest that is Facebook, running a business via gamification could become a positive feedback loop into an exciting, but ultimately unprofitable, outcome.
What a great read, a lot to unpack here. One thing that came to mind is that there are already some physical jobs that are like (a bit) like games.
Uber is a great example here: A driver basically augments their Car with a HUD (phone) that shows them where to go, who to pick up, etcetera. The more people they pick up, the more points they get. They get incentivized to drive to certain areas to get more points there. If they behave really well they get bonus points (tips) and they can also get bonuses for streaks. Everything is taken care of in that one app, they never need to leave it while driving and it will continuously keep score.
I'm curious whether this actually improves peoples' lives, I notice in games that you can also feel some kind of dread about something not "feeling" real - but I have yet to find any research about that. .
Loved this provocation Packy. My dystopian expectation is a shift to gamification for the underclass, with BiaBs serving as the modern American myth of hope. I don’t expect any truly interesting businesses to become games, for two reasons. 1) business is already an endlessly interesting game in the James Carse definition, 2) the abstractions are aulready leaky and the most interesting business games disrupt around the leaks.
So BiaB is the next LARP for folks who drive Uber and want more from life but don’t know how. BiaBs might replace games but they won’t replace businesses.
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.
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.
This was an amazing read - I have been thinking about this recently. For example one parallel I was thinking is if you take a linear equation and try to solve for "x" algebraically vs plot the line on a plane and spot the x visually. Basically solving via algebra is "work" - spotting on the plane via geometry is more fun "game". So can we translate work within the constraints that it has - to something like a game. And now I am wondering what the simplest version of this can be - warehouse work ? data entry work ? . And also currently the closest relative of this that I could think of are Captcha - where people play by identifying characters - but that translates to real work in training the model in the backend. Also the famous crowd sourced protein folding model game - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit. But thanks for this awesome article.
Love the concept, but not so sure about the viability. The biggest attraction of gaming is to get immediate feedback on the results of your actions. Great business decisions will usually not yield immediate results, and in fact move the dials in the wrong way for a while as the new activities get up to speed and begin to deliver on their promise. Like the click-fest that is Facebook, running a business via gamification could become a positive feedback loop into an exciting, but ultimately unprofitable, outcome.
What a great read, a lot to unpack here. One thing that came to mind is that there are already some physical jobs that are like (a bit) like games.
Uber is a great example here: A driver basically augments their Car with a HUD (phone) that shows them where to go, who to pick up, etcetera. The more people they pick up, the more points they get. They get incentivized to drive to certain areas to get more points there. If they behave really well they get bonus points (tips) and they can also get bonuses for streaks. Everything is taken care of in that one app, they never need to leave it while driving and it will continuously keep score.
I'm curious whether this actually improves peoples' lives, I notice in games that you can also feel some kind of dread about something not "feeling" real - but I have yet to find any research about that. .
Loved this provocation Packy. My dystopian expectation is a shift to gamification for the underclass, with BiaBs serving as the modern American myth of hope. I don’t expect any truly interesting businesses to become games, for two reasons. 1) business is already an endlessly interesting game in the James Carse definition, 2) the abstractions are aulready leaky and the most interesting business games disrupt around the leaks.
So BiaB is the next LARP for folks who drive Uber and want more from life but don’t know how. BiaBs might replace games but they won’t replace businesses.