As soon as you gamify something, it ceases to be the same kind of problem it was in its original form. I can't say work was gamified, but it certainly feels closer to that considering the core ideas behind the NFT/crypto gamification craze.
A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
21–30 of 146 posts
Re: A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
#22>A Video Game that Pays Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun, not because I made any money from them. While the job or workplace, for the vast majority of people on this earth, including those in SW development, is mostly an activity done out of necessity of not being homeless and not starving, usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of…
Implying video games are fun.
Jokes aside, video games are first and foremost things I want to spend time with, which is the opposite of most jobs. Catchy title but yeah =/
Re: A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
#23Seems kinda backwards. I would say a video game is like a job but (hopefully) without the bad parts.
I'm making a puzzle game, so the comparison to dev work is pretty obvious. The difference is when you play a puzzle game, you know there is a solution, and the world is crafted to make finding it as fun as possible. The real world is messy. Questions like "should we even do this at all" come up. There are edge cases, and your information is imperfect.
In a puzzle game, you can (generally) see everything, you know what you can see is 100% correct, etc. Games are like an idealised chunk of real life, not the other way around. And IMO that's by design, not some accident.
Re: A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
#24Seems kinda backwards. I would say a video game is like a job but (hopefully) without the bad parts. I'm making a puzzle game, so the comparison to dev work is pretty obvious. The difference is when you play a puzzle game, you know there is a solution, and the world is crafted to make finding it as fun as possible. The real world is messy. Questions like "should we even do this at all" come up. There are edge cases,…
>> when you play a puzzle game, you know there is a solution,
Not in my solitaire game. It actually shuffles the cards, dealing them rather than working backwards from a solution. I have been dealt games with no legal first move, and many more with only one or two dead-end moves. These deals have no possible solutions. Similarly, I have run across more than a few sudokus with more than one solution, meaning there is no actual final answer.
Famously, what made Tetris so different was it's soviet style. There is no end let alone a solution. There is no second chance. Your mistakes just pile up until you fail.
Re: A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
#25So I like considering the parallel of work as a videogame, but personally the way author implies that tickets are the work doesn't align with my experience. In my experience the dealing with managers is inevitably more than half the work (just trying to work around all the churn and uncertainty of the company). NOTE: Shenzen IO is a video-game that lightly emulates a remote job as a hardware designer.
I love Shenzhen I/O, it's perhaps my all-time favourite video game despite having left it uncompleted, in part precisely because it started to feel like hard work.
But you're right that what makes it a fun video game is that the problems are:
- Clearly defined - Well specified - Solvable - Known to be Solvable - Prioritised - Unchanging - Feedback is provided - Contains closure
None of those things applies to real-life, where problems are under-defined, under-specified, sometimes aren't even known whether they have a solution, and are subject to the whims and changing desires of product management.
And even if you navigate all of that and produce a solution, you often get little feedback, or indeed sometimes never get any closure at all. Sometimes the project gets sidelined and it never goes live or it goes live and you don't know if a single customer even interacted with it.
You have to learn to deal with all of that, which can be harder than the actual programming.
Re: A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
#26Games are fun though, work is tedious and 99% of people would quit immediately if they won the lottery (...but I bet they'd still play games even with millions in the bank)
Re: A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
#27>A Video Game that Pays Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun, not because I made any money from them. While the job or workplace, for the vast majority of people on this earth, including those in SW development, is mostly an activity done out of necessity of not being homeless and not starving, usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of…
The article does explain the comparison, and it doesn't mean that it's fun. These are the actual comparisons: > You interact with people from all corners of the world. > You complete tasks on different online platforms (Slack, GitHub, VS Code, Google Docs, etc.). > You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!) > There are also side-quests to take care of (“Hey Damian…
> > You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!)
Wish I've been to a place that gave you only one quest journal. The fewest distinct quest journals I ever got to is four: the mailbox, the blessed Jira/Gitlab Issues/Kanban/Trello/whatever board, the personal list of things to be done that don't belong anywhere else, and the TODO/FIXME comments in the codebase.
That's a minimum. In one places I had like 4 distinct issue boards in active use.
Point being, there's one other major thing other than fun, that games have and work doesn't: videogame UX doesn't suck, and wants to help you do your quests.
Re: A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
#28>A Video Game that Pays Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun, not because I made any money from them. While the job or workplace, for the vast majority of people on this earth, including those in SW development, is mostly an activity done out of necessity of not being homeless and not starving, usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of…
It is a privilege to only have to play video games for fun.
In college, I played World of Warcraft just to farm gold, just to get by.
Re: A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
#29Catchy title. I work from home as an MSP Enterprise Network Engineer - nothing about work feels anything remotely similar to video games.
I think I'm qualified to know, as I spend way too much time playing video games.
Re: A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
#30>A Video Game that Pays Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun, not because I made any money from them. While the job or workplace, for the vast majority of people on this earth, including those in SW development, is mostly an activity done out of necessity of not being homeless and not starving, usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of…
> Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun
What is a game? I would say that a game is an abstract system used to understand our reality (or experiences in life), via a series of interactive actions that alter the system. Generally there is a set of goals (usually just to "win").
I develop software because it's a game. I do watch a lot of progress bars. Aside from that, it's one of my favorite games (to my wife's chagrin). It's fun for me and I'm not the only one. Why does it matter that other people don't enjoy what they do?