[...] Supernova 2008: “All the World’s A Game” summary “Humans enjoy transgressive play” and will always try to break free from the game constraints. (tags: play playfulweb web2.0) [...]

[...] the World’s a Game” panel at Supernova from a few weeks back. (I previously blogged about a summary written by The UpTake Blog). Now you too can see the arguments over [...]

[...] Supernova 2008: “All the World’s A Game” summary “Humans enjoy transgressive play” and will always try to break free from the game constraints. (tags: play playfulweb web2.0) [...]

[...] Elliot Ng was there for (almost) the full panel, and has the complete write-up on his blog. Raph has his own take on the panel, and points out the similarities to an earlier talk he gave at Project [...]

As your post points out though, getting the user to ‘create’ is much more than that. Creating / customizing for your own purposes is a fairly net neutral thing to others, and tagging in delicious is a net positive thing for others (it adds to the intelligence of recommended tags). Only creation that is net negative to others, such as the forming of a group where one is the leader who creates / owns the conversation and associated creations, leads to a small number of creators due to competitive pressure for the attention and resources of followers. This is of course independent of difficulty which naturally limits who participates.

Yea, Byron’s a cool guy.

You’re correct that a small number of people naturally take on this creator role.

My response arguing this is not true:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/20/user-created-content/

One place to read further on a slight tangent is Seriosity (www.seriosity.com)

Byron Reeves actually did some of his early research into this based on SWG…

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?

A great quote from Einstein: ‘not all that can be measured matters, and not all that matters can be measured’

The grind and ‘gamist’ mentalities are heavily measurement-driven, with rapid feedback. Not all human endeavors that matter give us clear and quick feedback, so we must keep this in mind in evaluating good/bad for this kind of indoctrination. We can see this in action today in how we are compensated at work, quickly for quick results. The cultural shift to frequent job switches (I’ve heard something like 9 in the first 10 years), means a certain amount of institutional memory and long term thinking suffers. Long term work is where a qualitative analysis of someone’s work is valuable, something a ‘gamist’ mentality may have more difficulty with.

To be consultant-y and put it in a 2×2, I’d say:

black / white vs shades of grey
short term vs long term

are the two variables, gamist being b&w and short term, qualitative being grey and long term. Feel free to make up your own terms for the other two conditions! I’m sure this is a simplification of some wisdom of the ages but sometimes it’s good to cart out the obvious

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!

[...] Raph Kosters blog today links to The Uptake Blog which has a summary of a panel Raph was on at the Supernova 2008 conference. [...]

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.