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Bold words, but I try to deliver..
That's a topic I had in mind for a while, how video games play an important role in the ongoing numeric revolution. Gamification, which is putting gaming elements in non gaming apps, has shown its merits and is now rapidly growing. At this rate we may end up with some kind of mmo to represent human organisation and activity, thus numerising all data thanks to user input and connected objects. And I wish for this to happen sooner than later.
Of course, security would be a mjaor concern, but I believe that thanks to technologies like blockchain (especially ethereum), we could have a secured and democracy driven system.
Your character sheet would describe your past life and experiences, jobs, formations, granting you skills, unlocking classes.
Those classes would loosely match the jobs we have now (or rather the ones we'll have left once robotisation has done its job), allowing access to particular missions. For exemple managing fleets of harvester bots would probably require less formation and job experience than designing the next moon habitat.
Changing the ruleset would pretty much means what is now changing the law, and this could be done as simply as a server-wide survey. This particular job should be paid more because we just discovered it strains the body more than average ? Survey to change a variable in the system, and it's done, world-wide, pretty much instantly.
Is this science fiction ? Sure. But it can happen, and I'd even say it's damn well on its way.
I can't be too specific without pretty much revealing who I am at this point (only to those looking, I'm not famous in any way and intend to stay that way), and I'm not quite sure I want that considering the... aggressive tone of my last post. But still, access to key mechanics in today's society are given to collectives of regular people, and numerisation (and gamification) are the way followed so far.
Everyone can play a part in this movement. There are tons of initiative like mine, and they all can use some help. No one has a perfect solution for everything, it's still a mess of pieces that can hardly be called a puzzle. But the opportunity is here, and it is up to each to decide to take it or not.
Including you TL. Yes, you too, you can help save the world.
  
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You can never truly gameify life, because part of what it means for something to be a game is that the consequences are not real. That's what StarCraft stops feeling like a game and more just like a job for progamers. Once losing has weight, and succeeding is a necessity, it's stressful.
You may want to seek help regarding the rest of the stuff you said...
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This particular job should be paid more because we just discovered it strains the body more than average
:D
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On February 06 2016 02:49 Chef wrote:
You can never truly gameify life, because part of what it means for something to be a game is that the consequences are not real. That's what StarCraft stops feeling like a game and more just like a job for progamers. Once losing has weight, and succeeding is a necessity, it's stressful.
You may want to seek help regarding the rest of the stuff you said...
Gamification is more about rewarding progress than putting the concept of winning/losing in real life.
Now I would understand why my borderline paranoiac sentence would seem crazy, but everything else ? Wow dude :D Please explain yourself ! As I understand from the answer above, there may be some langage barrier thing that is going on, like me using the wrong words or something...
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Isn't progress already rewarded in life? Also, I don't know for sure what you mean but it seems like that might lead to some weird kind of scoreboard where people have more points at life so they're judged to be better in some way. RL stats padding sounds weird.
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On February 06 2016 04:54 Djzapz wrote:
Isn't progress already rewarded in life? Also, I don't know for sure what you mean but it seems like that might lead to some weird kind of scoreboard where people have more points at life so they're judged to be better in some way. RL stats padding sounds weird.
Yeah well, progressing is rewarding in itself, I'd agree with that, but the simple addition of being able to show off what you've done through badges and achievements on social networks seems to engage people even further. I'm personnaly not fond of that kind of stuff, but it has worked. There's many other game elements that you can use to engage people, like sense of urgency of RTS, ressources management of simulations etc.
You can see that "sense of urgency" dynamic in crowdfunding platforms, where the timer creates a tension between the deadline closing in and the hope that some people have for the project to succeed. The same people might give an extra kick to communicate about the project or give an extra buck thanks to the rise of that tension, as the timer goes down.
About the scoreboard thing, it does sound weird when you put it that way, but I think it will indeed happen. When you think about it there's already a lot of "best of" in the current society, awards for arts, nobel for science, employee of the month stuff in some companies.
What would be interesting if all activity was tracked and could be turned into a scoreboard, would be stuff like "worst impact on the planet", "worse working conditions". Heard about that story with nestle recently ? They admitted slavery. Here, have a badge for that. Let this be pinned on your brand. If only...
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I fail to see all this as a positive thing. The sense of urgency for most people is a cause of stress, comparing yourself to others with arbitrary scores and badges seems like an unhealthy habit, and sharing your accomplishments with others through a medium other than explaining what you've done, with badges and whatnot, seems a bit weird.
Not saying it's necessarily bad but I hope there's going to be some serious thought put in it. I don't think it's a good idea to have facebook remind you "hey Steve, you're still working at a dead-end job, Lauren just got a promotion and Paul got his PhD in quantum physics. You're a piece of shit Steve"
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I don't get the notion of "gamification" of life, since games are simplified versions of real life mechanisms. You talk about society becoming a RL MMO, but aren't MMOs "virtualized" RL in the first place? That character sheet you talk about, isn't it pretty much a glorified and BigBrother-ified Facebook profile? These classes that allow you to unlock missions are just jobs. "Show off what you've done through badges" is already a thing, except you show off through your clothes, watches, cars, body language, tone, attitude, etc. These "leaderboards" already exist inside big companies, except they're most of the time actual officialized leaderboards but products of the mind of big people.
Sounds to me what you're describing is half our future, except it'll be way less glamorous and revolutionary than what you're making it sound, and half a strange dystopian world ruled by a dictatorial committee of no-life gamers who feel the need to put things into well-ordered little boxes.
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I feel like some of this has already been achieved through Facebook/social media/media and the effects have not been very positive. Everyone clamoring to give their nominal support to whatever the cause celebre is. Companies getting behind movements with no regard for anything but PR.
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in my experience, people manage their finances in RPG games very carefully like WoW or Maplestory while neglecting their actual personal finances.
people enjoy playing games where their character makes money, engages in productive activity and socializes, sometimes more than they do in actuality...
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https://habitica.com/static/front
habits and positively enforcing positive habits can benefit from using cold game logic...
"zero sum game" "at all costs" "mechanical rts efficiency"
but real life cannot be treated as a zero sum game. games at the core are about winning and beating other opponents and the means to do so in the most effective manner.
life is open to interpretation, and outside of war, society frowns upon the kind of behavior that playin to win elicits.
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It's interesting to think about including more game elements into real life, surely this could promote healthier mindsets and help keep people moving along rather than getting stuck all the time. One thing that I often struggle with is keeping my priorities straight because I have such a wide variety of things I'm interested in, it's hard to manage or decide which I should be doing right now and I spend way too much time trying to decide what to be doing at any given moment. If game elements in rl could help me with that that'd be really nice.
There are some aspects of it I wouldn't be particularily thrilled about. One part in particular I would not like is being able to readily compare yourself to others. I already have issues surrounding this and I think I'd be a lot healthier if I could focus my accomplishments strictly around only myself, I'm pretty sure that goes for other people as well.
Anyways, it sounds very interesting, I think you're getting way too many negative responses here  but then again, criticism is often one of the easier responses one can give.
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@Djzapz, good point, and you're damn right saying that a lot of thought as to be put into it. But if that is a true issue for Steve, he's probably already not feeling too well...
@Otherworld, the point is mirroring real life, so yeah, pretty much every mechanism I described exist. Adding gaming elements is just the cherry on top of having a cyber equivalent to our current system, to give it a less robotic and more engaging tone. Don't get too hung up on how I described it, as I said it's still a very emerging matter and a lot will change by the time anything is really started.
@Jerubaal: Agreed, Facebook and such failed to deliver on that regard. We identified that the lack of value of a "like" and the interest of those running these companies has a lot to do with it though. Crowdfunding and websites like change.org shows that it's still possible to achieve something through collective support, and we think this can be pushed even further. What if after giving some money for a project, you could also be involved in its realization and get your share of the funded money accordingly.
What if an open source facebook clone gave you the ability the choose which of your info you are willing to sell and to whom, and gave you that money after taking a % of it.
There's still some room for trial don't you think ?
@BeStFAN: Yup. Makes me think about Chef's point earlier. I'd tend to believe that an easier and centralized way, maybe gamified, to handle one's finance would help people (would work for me) managing theirs, but maybe that once you bring real life consequence into the deal, it actually doesn't change much... Mh, I'd say an easier chore is still better than nothing.
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Wow Habitica is sweet. That's what I'm talking about. It's far from complete but yeah, same idea.
but real life cannot be treated as a zero sum game. games at the core are about winning and beating other opponents and the means to do so in the most effective manner.
There are cooperative games, construction games etc. But even then, It's not about creating a game world where you just wander around aimlessly, it's about creating a proper data system to represent how things work, and displaying it in a multitude of ways, some of which could include elements from gaming to make the experience more engaging.
@TwoTrickPony. Thanks  Criticism is fine, most of it has been constructive. Plus I already am seeing help, and my shrink thinks it's a great idea, so, you see, it's all good haha.
Your concern could be easily solved by adding a public/private option on these badge for exemple, so they could be used solely for self improvement. This is why we need to involve as much people as possible, there's a lot to consider and everyone can add something..
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EPT
