Elliott – you bring up a good point around the drive to create in games, the leadership and teaching role of creators (a related education term is the ‘zone of proximal development’), and the close relationship between transgression and creation. A physical analog would be the tinkerers ‘transgress’ real world objects by taking them apart, as they are not designed to be taken apart. Of course, that’s acceptable transgression, but some reverse engineering is obviously not. Also in there is distinction between wanting to see things break and test the limits (nearly all of us) vs. see what’s inside things, testing the limits for a more directed purpose (some of us).

You’re correct that a small number of people naturally take on this creator role. Bradley Horowitz has a good blog post about this, discussing Creators / Synthesizers / Consumers as an escalation of participation in creation and a logarithmic drop off in users. See here: http://www.elatable.com/blog/2006/02/17/creators-synthesizers-and-consumers/

Related to this, also consider the natural dynamic of leadership/creators in communities. You can only have so many creators relative to consumers before our social programming kicks in. In a vacuum of leadership, leaders (creators) arise given demand / interest. In an excess, some pull back. Obviously the ratios are different depending on different contexts, but the 1:10:100 ratio in Bradley’s post is a good starting point.

Related to the ‘grind’ discussion: games are in a really rapid innovation cycle that far outpaces corporate structure and organizational psych, and at the individual experience level, a much brighter spotlight of attention is shining on games. I suspect the more we understand and tweak games, the more we’re going to understand what ‘work’ is, how much grind vs creative vs social we can handle, and how better to design for this. One place to read further on a slight tangent is Seriosity (www.seriosity.com), as they’re experimenting with game mechanics and rewards in the workplace, via an Outlook plugin at first. Many others are doing research here.

One caveat I’d add to Doug’s thesis is that many – if not most – people who play games, and even MMOGs, are not ‘gamers’ by this definition. In the same respect that ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ labels are fairly meaningless beyond surface-level product distinction (not necessarily user habits), those who play MMOGs don’t all optimize and focus on results, or wouldn’t in contexts that didn’t necessitate that of them. There is a generational shift and games are affecting this, but getting too crazy about these loud, internet-enabled ‘gamers’ ignores that they may have had that personality regardless, and lots of others don’t.

Sorry for sounding like a know-it-all or research nerd here, feel free to pick apart at will and vehemently disagree!

There was much discussion of the social impact of “the grind” as large-scale cultural phenomenon: is it good to indoctrinate kids into a “gamist” mentality?

You know, I thought about that and the idea of the ‘grind’ is most certainly not limited to games. People who are into the high level raiding end game in things like EverQuest and WoW, and yet who also claim to despise going to work every day crack me up. If you think about it, going to the job has a lot in common with a raid – you have a sizable group of people at a company (guild), each with different roles and responsibilities (classes), who have to act in a highly coordinated fashion (tank, heal) doing something repetitive and unpleasant for a paycheck (loot drops). It seems like young powergamers should be able to translate into corporate climbers pretty well.