61–70 of 84 posts
Really good article! I guess that the key is to turn things that I hate to do into a game! Also, is this also why people go through schools and university because of the system has grades as a scoring system and the "promise" of a good career and life at the end of it?
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It might be up there but it's all that an overly analytical and literal population can get their heads around. They literally can't think of any other way of making decisions. If they don't stick numbers on things they become essentially blind to it.
Are there other ways? Like sure there's other systems that assign numbers differently and have different ceremonies but is there any way that works that doesn't involve assigning numbers to stuff? The basic premise of people being simultaneously really good at estimating work and at the same time absolutely garbage at it when you make them use real dates naturally evolves a number system. Make up an arbitrary unit, h…
Still, the GP wants to know if there are ways of working without assigning “arbitrary” points to stuff, i.e. systematization for its own sake. You can certainly quantify things in a meaningful way for your problem.
While scrum and SAFe may be the right approach when working to find a technical fit to a customer problem, where estimates of “complexity” linearly map to some unit of time (conversation factor). These agile implementations fail completely whenever there are non-trivial, system level, non-functional requirements to satisfy. If you don’t have a platform supporting your work, and you’re in the act of building it, you’re no longer doing programming, you’re doing engineering.
In this case, the “systematization” that can be adopted are knowledge based approaches. DoD systems engineering has adopted “knowledge points” as an approach, which ties work to capabilities, which can be utilized at a program level. Which capabilities you have achieved is a metric that demonstrates work, and ties to things you actually want, as opposed to made up metrics, like points, which really tell you how good you are at estimating, but nothing else.
Other approaches are priority based. If you’re in a more service based environment, where work capacity is constant and goals change, a kanban board can be used to limit work in progress and prioritization can be set by either a risk based approach or a using cost of delay.
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Assassin’s Creed. Go play the latest ones and tell me that Ubisoft doesn’t have a team devoted to “retention”. It’s game on top of game on top of game. The main missions are spaced out in a way that they are not too close or too far apart. The “collectables” (an insult to the word) are spaced between “oh look at that” and “wtf, this region isn’t 100% yet, where the hell is that thing!?”, achievements are an absolute…
I actually think 'playtime' is a great metric for game developers to optimize for. It incentives a lot of good design decisions. But like you said, also incentives a lot of bad ones, especially if your decisions are made by suits, like Ubisoft, who doesn't have any respect or faith in people.
Your farmer’s market stall gets big enough and you eventually get a suit telling you to “run lean” and “net30, we can push that to net60”, etc
I think conditioned reinforcers can actually be beneficial for pursing long-term goals. Let's say someone's purpose in life is to have a positive impact on the world, metrics such as audience reached provide a tangible interface for this abstract goal. Similar to using your credit card, gamification mechanisms like chasing metrics lets you experience the rewards of your efforts prematurely, which motivates you to wor…
I think a huge part of gamification in the modern age is quite often a large number of the goal are not being chosen for your benefit, but to your detriment instead. This becomes problematic when gamification is part of a system that you can't opt out of and/or may not understand the metrics of well.
Think back the the early to middle facebook days. They gamified getting other people to sign up for facebook/facebook games by making a meta game where you get useful items in game by sending out those invites.
We're always taught 'actual' games are fun and have little side effects. Dangerous games were we sell our soul to the devil or some other negative consequence have been relegated to fairy tales. And because of this general line of thought that games are harmless we've been pushing more and more potentially dangerous actions into games, such as mass information gathering by companies, and what is effectively gambling in kids games.
So, yea, we play games in the first place because they give us positive feelings, but just blindingly accepting any game as good is dangerous because it will bypass our internal safety checks on if doing something is a bad idea.
The article title promises to reveal how everything is becoming a game. Spoiler alert: turns out that is just clickbait. It's not everything. Just ... you know, apps. Mostly multi-user, social ones. Maybe the author really has his head so far up his apps that they look like everything.
I felt like the stuff about Kaczynski, while interesting, was a diversion. The meat is the beginning and the end: Skinner, how conditioning led to gamification which led to the addiction economy, and then strategies for turning the tables and take charge by choosing what games to play and how to play them. An evolved and condensed version of the closing with practical examples and practice exercises should be taught…
> which led to the addiction economy... If people had fulfilling lives, consumed by work, family, community, and culture, there'd be little room for such addiction. The real story is a loss of meaning; it's a crisis of nihilism, more than gamification.
Humanity is a history of addiction. Most often when you see parts of history that were not, it's because humans spending there energy in staying alive. Whenever humans start having excess capability to live you start seeing all forms of addition return. And yes, building your church 10 feet taller than the other one in town is a form of addiction that feeds egos and the sense of self. There was no great meaning behind doing it.
I don't agree with the positive feedback loop being THE thing about games. It's the fact that games offer a sense of progress that life does not. The skinner box implies animalistic pleasure associations that we just want to keep hitting. The progress wanting is simply desiring structure and context to your effort. They're similar but not the same.
I think it's really about some of our biological processes which helps keep us alive. I mean, our brains are hardwired to try and keep us alive. Seeking out old information you already know is not beneficial to improving your survival. New, particularly beneficial information can be. Thus, in order to help us survive, our brains evolved a reward system to motivate us to seek new information... to learn essentially. I…
The information bit seems irrelevant to this imo.
> This strange quirk of human behavior can even cost lives. In South Korea, a young couple became so addicted to raising a virtual baby that they let their real baby starve to death. The parents prioritized what they could quantify — levelling up their virtual baby — over that which they couldn’t — the life of their real one. This is so sad. Such incident indeed confirms technology is pursuing people into forgetting…
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I feel similarly with gardening. Try growing a food forest -- it expands your mind's time horizon to try picturing your six inch tall hazelnut seedling as a 20 foot tall tree. Each year is a new feeling of progress as everything starts to bear fruit!
I love this idea but I hate gardening. It just seems like such a grind to keep the weeds down and whatnot. I do forget that planting things is like an investment in your own satisfaction.
Heh, you need to level up your mulching skills.
Especially in growing non-vegetable plants your choice of species and spacing can quite often self manage the weeds. Watching someone really good at growing is the same as watching a really good programmer to me. Little choices they make early on handle error conditions months later with little effort.
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I agree. I stopped at the Kaczynski worship. I don’t understand why people are so fascinated with talking about the ideals of insane serial killers. There are plenty of other highly intelligent individuals with the same ideologies to discuss. Why glorify a murderer?
The blog doesn't condone the bombings or the violence. It talks about Kaczynski writings. For you, this is equivalent to glorifying a murderer. Wow, this is some poor comprehension. I listen to all sorts of music and I love them. More often than not the artists are degenerates and drug addicts. I hate it but I can still enjoy the genius of their music. For example, Nirvana. Kurt committed suicide but his music is gen…
I think this might be a part of what Ted was talking about.
Ted was actually a very interesting thinker, very underrated in my opinion, and definitely misrepresented.