Location: Room 1300 — Conrad Grebel University College, 140 Westmount Rd. N. · Waterloo, ON N2L 3G6 (bottom floor, in the hallway that connects the main building to the Chapel-Residence building)
Date: Monday, 11 February 2019
Time: 7:00-9:00PM
Are you a gamer? Wouldn’t it be great to play games during work? Are you a game designer? What role does gamification have in Non-Profit organizations? Can gamification make a SysAdmin’s life easier? What value do games have in the Non-Profit sector?
Join our round-table discussion on Gaming, and share your views.
–Bob Jonkman & Marc Paré
Resources
Meeting Notes
Encouraging Gaming
- Gamification of Disaster Recovery
- Playing a role playing game
- Roll the dice “Your mail server has failed”
- Good for scenarios
- Needs a Dungeon Master who understands security
- Gamification of server uptime
- One SysAdmin has a server with 1000 days uptime
- Challenge other SysAdmins to do it too
- Ensures SysAdmins will coddle the server to ensure uptime
- Movie effects for computer screens
- Don’t look like reality, more like computer games
- But tools are trying to look like games
- Want more customers to use their products
- Security products (eg) are hard to use
- Making the UI easier, more exciting to use
- Trying to keep the user on the device as much as possible
- Targetting today’s users who are gamers
- Try to concentrate attention on the things that need attention
- 12 hour operator shifts
- Very tiring, trying to spot “hacker” anomalies in gigabytes of data
- The job doesn’t get done, staff doesn’t care after a few days
- If the system had been gamified it might have made the job better
- But mostly it seems a management problem for having 12 hour shifts
- But gamers are in front of monitors that long, don’t have the apathy problem
- Can World Of Warcraft design be used to analyze logs?
- Players are unknowingly doing the work while playing the game
- But what gets attention is based on what the player finds fun
- May be similar to using spare CPU cycles to do bitcoin
- Have a reward attached to success
- But in some cases there’s no control, so success is not based on work but luck and gamification won’t work
- Games are visually appealing and attractive
- Competition is appealing
- Re-Captcha has gamified proofreading
- Spread out the work to millions, make it fun
- Purpose for captcha owner may not be access control, but OCR improvement, traffic AI optimization
- “Sex and violence moves the world forward”
- Porn has driven technology: Hi-res, accurate skin tones; VHS technology; video streaming
- And the military has pushed technology too
- Sometimes gamification gets in the way
- “You have won this case number 54321!” is just annoying
- Trying to fool employees backfires, recognized by employees
- But maybe if the gamification could be switched off
- An experienced worker can do more without gamification
- But his attitude was that life is one big game
- Young people develop new skills that older people don’t have
- This affects how they approach gamification
- “War Games”
- Using games to make serious tasks go better
- Also, how much control do you turn over to the computer?
- Has become reality – military drone operators
- US Military had an RPG for recruiting
- Very realistic, eg. speed for loading a rifle
- Intent to get people familiar with army life before recruiting them
- DARPA Challenge
- Started as a monetary reward for specific goals
- 100 metre autonomous vehicles in 2004
- 100 km autonomous vehicles in 2005 (xxxxxx check dates!
- Started as a monetary reward for specific goals
- People in finance and politics use gamification
- eg. “First Past The Post” is a horse racing analogy
- Different rewards are effective for different groups
- eg. Grade 3 kids may be influenced by a reward of bubblegum, but not Grade 8 kids
- Bread and Circuses
- Roman Warriors went from lean survivalists to entertainment
- Games became a distraction, so young people no longer wanted to be warriors
- Games in any environment have limits and rules
- The objective is to be attained by following those limits and rules
- The effects games have on social cohesion and morale are defined by those limits and rules
- Not just rote and repetition, but applying strategy
Preventing Gaming
- User Friendly cartoons about Doom on the LAN
- SysAdmins wanted to prevent smart phones, more work to provide bandwidth
- Security concerns with using personal devices in work
- Accessing corporate data with personal devices
- But people found these devices made their work more fun
- Is there any way to run a corporation without using some kind of gamification?
- Boring, routine jobs need it
- But some people just aren’t suited to that kind of work
- People who can remain focussed on routine work are scarce, but may not benefit from gamification
- People have to be interested in the objective
- Gold Farmers are playing a capitalist metagame
- It should be possible to roboticize the work to make gamification customized
- But then it is probably possible to automate the work directly, no longer requiring a worker
- There are programs to monitor online behaviour to identify mental health issues
Categories of motivation
- Mastery of skill
- Exploratoin/ Discovery
- Competition
- Cooperation
- How does cooperation and collaboration help with work?
- Competition:
- Nobody wants to be the laggard in the group
- Competition is a loaded word in our society
- But a notion of competition, argumentation with the aim of improvement, everyone winning
- Gamification needs a goal, objective
- eg. politics – getting people informed
- Gamification is not Learning
- Competing against other players
- Or against your previous score
- Someone has to know all the answers in order to mark your score
- How can we solve problems that have not already been solved?
- That’s not gaming, that’s learning
- If you’re moving into an unknown area you don’t know what rules apply, what the goal is
- Self-directed, independent study courses are a form of gamification?
- No, that’s exploring, learning challenge; vision quest
- Minecraft: No predefined goal
- Possible collaboration, also competition
- Used in education, “kids learn without knowing they’re learning” (but not accepted by all educators)
- Letting kids play games, and maybe learning, is too haphazard, it’s not education
- “Everything is a game”, “Life is a game”
- But that makes the idea of a game useless.
- When outside things are gamified, are people just being conditioned? Or are people learning?
- eg. the Army game
- Making games highly addictive
- Are people conditioned to play again and again, spend money
- Are corporations just games? Employees buying into it again and again.
- Being fooled into learning can lead to a real interest in the subject
- Movies, books can lead to further research. Reality is more interesting than fiction.