Speaker 1: Tt my thermostat empower Bill tell me like, hey, you
Speaker 1: know you're using twenty percent less electricity than your neighbor.
Speaker 1: And I would always tell people I'm not competitive, but baby,
Speaker 1: I want to be number one. Okay, I want to
Speaker 1: use so little electricity. I'm turning the lights off. I'm
Speaker 1: doing everything they taught us dark I'm just shuffling around.
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, is it hot? I will switch into
Speaker 1: a tank top. Okay. I want to use so little
Speaker 1: electricity that they think this home is vacant.
Speaker 2: Just so you can win.
Speaker 1: I want to win. I want to win. I am
Speaker 1: not ashamed. I want to win.
Speaker 2: My friends got the eye of the tiger.
Speaker 1: I want to be the eco friendly big boss. Okay.
Speaker 1: How did gamifications sneak into my energy use? And why
Speaker 1: is it taking over my life? I'm t T and
Speaker 1: I'm Zachiah and from Spotify.
Speaker 2: This is Dope Labs.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science,
Speaker 3: pop culture, and a healthy dose of friendship.
Speaker 1: This week, we're talking all about games. Specifically, we wanted
Speaker 1: to know more about the nature of games, the gamification
Speaker 1: of life, and the difference between the two because I'm struggling.
Speaker 3: You play a lot of games, though I do. You
Speaker 3: have a lot of games on your phone and you
Speaker 3: play video games.
Speaker 1: How do you know what's on my phone?
Speaker 2: Back back back, Because I know you. I've been knowing
Speaker 2: you for forty five years. We're not that long.
Speaker 1: Okay. Sometimes I play games. I don't even realize I'm
Speaker 1: playing games. But like crossword puzzles, those are kind of
Speaker 1: games relaxing for me. Sudoku Sometimes when I send little
Speaker 1: notes in the mail out at a sadoku, if I
Speaker 1: know people are game friendly, I know not to send
Speaker 1: you a Sadoku. You don't like puzzles and things like that.
Speaker 3: No, I don't like Wordle and things like that are okay,
Speaker 3: But now they have things like Wordle Unlimited, where it's
Speaker 3: like Wordle that's just never ending. You can play a
Speaker 3: thousand wordle games back to back to back, and I say,
Speaker 3: no way, I can focus my energy for thirty minutes
Speaker 3: to get this one word. But I'm not trying to
Speaker 3: keep going and going and going. That's just gonna stress
Speaker 3: me out. Yeah, when it's done, it's done, it's done.
Speaker 3: Go remove yourself from my eyeballs.
Speaker 1: All right, let's get into the recitation.
Speaker 3: What do we know TC, Well, we know that games
Speaker 3: have been a part of human life for a very
Speaker 3: long time.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is not a very long time. But even
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, when I really reflect, you know,
Speaker 1: people in my family were playing games jacks with the
Speaker 1: ball and the little right dominoes.
Speaker 2: Yo, that's old school.
Speaker 3: But you know what I always think of when I
Speaker 3: think of like early early age sports, it's the Mayans.
Speaker 3: So the Mayans had this ball game.
Speaker 2: M have you ever heard of it?
Speaker 1: No, tell me, girl.
Speaker 3: It's a rubber ball and the sides of the ball
Speaker 3: is like kind of like maybe a baseball size, I think, okay.
Speaker 3: And then there's this stone ring that's on a wall
Speaker 3: and the object of the game is to try and
Speaker 3: get it in there. But you can't use your hands,
Speaker 3: so you have to use other parts of your body.
Speaker 3: And this is it's like really high up. So they're
Speaker 3: using their backs, they're using their shoulders, they're using their heads.
Speaker 3: And so that is one of like the first sports
Speaker 3: I think that's been recorded was from the Mayans, which
Speaker 3: is really cool.
Speaker 1: It really is. I hadn't heard of that before. Wow,
Speaker 1: And that's really far back. I thought you were going
Speaker 1: to say, like chess, let me tell you something you
Speaker 1: didn't want to see me in the third and fourth grade,
Speaker 1: I had a little board.
Speaker 2: I know he was hustling people. I know it.
Speaker 1: I had some of my favorite stones. I always wanted
Speaker 1: to like I had three or four. I always want
Speaker 1: to end this one little cut out. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: this is making me think of so many games we
Speaker 1: played growing up, even hand games, yes, down.
Speaker 2: From bank to banky.
Speaker 1: How many doctors did it take you? Who was making
Speaker 1: that stuff up? And how was it spreading around so fast?
Speaker 1: Without social media?
Speaker 3: It felt like no matter where you were in the country,
Speaker 3: everybody knew these games.
Speaker 1: How go to my cousins, go from North Carolina to
Speaker 1: Georgia to visit them, they know the games. Go visit
Speaker 1: my cousins up in New Jersey, they know the same
Speaker 1: hand games. They're singing the same nursery rhymes or whatever
Speaker 1: those things were.
Speaker 2: How they're just so embedded in our culture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, game plan, Yes, it's a really great way to
Speaker 3: bond and connect with people. There are also a lot
Speaker 3: of apps out there than social media and services that
Speaker 3: have started incorporating games into them. Like the first thing
Speaker 3: I think of is the apple Watch. That's a game.
Speaker 3: You know, it's tracking your steps, it's tracking your exercise,
Speaker 3: how much you're standing, and sometimes you're just competing with
Speaker 3: you so you can see what you've been doing for
Speaker 3: the last month. So it's still a game, but it's
Speaker 3: just one player. But then also you can link up
Speaker 3: with other people's apple Watches, so then you have a
Speaker 3: multiplayer game. You can have challenges and all types of stuff
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 1: Yes, my friends are competitive. I lose those challenges every time.
Speaker 1: Kate from our Metals episode, Kate's closing her rings every day. Okay,
Speaker 1: well I can't keep up.
Speaker 2: I can't keep up and stuff though up there.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know. So you've made a really good point
Speaker 1: to see that these apps and services are bringing in
Speaker 1: different elements of gaming, like points, systems and achievements that unlocked.
Speaker 1: All of those are some of the foundational elements of gaming.
Speaker 1: But what else do we want to know?
Speaker 3: I think it would be helpful to know or understand
Speaker 3: why we play games. I think pretty much everybody feels
Speaker 3: like they are open to playing games. But why is
Speaker 3: it that we do play games? What connections are we
Speaker 3: trying to make?
Speaker 1: Yeah? And then I also think as we see the
Speaker 1: adoption of gamification. Is that the same thing as games?
Speaker 1: Where do we draw the line between gamification and leveraging
Speaker 1: certain parts of it and actually being a game? Yeah?
Speaker 2: A game or trick?
Speaker 1: I feel like that's a great starting point. There's probably
Speaker 1: so much we don't even know to ask.
Speaker 2: Right, trick or tree, Let's jump into the dissection.
Speaker 1: Our guest for today's lab is doctor Twin.
Speaker 4: My name is t Newinn. I'm a associate professor of
Speaker 4: philosophy at University of Utah. I was supposed to be
Speaker 4: an expert on fairly conventional issues and epistemology and meta ethics,
Speaker 4: like old school questions like what is knowledge and what
Speaker 4: is the good? And now I've walked down some weird
Speaker 4: path where I am a philosophical expert on games, porn, trust, transparency, metrics, Twitter,
Speaker 4: and weird that I think wasn't supposed to be part
Speaker 4: of my job description.
Speaker 3: Professor Nowan's book, Games Agency as Art explores games as
Speaker 3: a specific and very special type of art form and
Speaker 3: argues that games are essential part of our systems of
Speaker 3: communication and our art.
Speaker 1: We started with the basics and asked Professor to win
Speaker 1: what exactly is a game.
Speaker 4: My favorite definition of a game is from this philosopher,
Speaker 4: Bernard Suits. The book is called The Grasshopper Games Life
Speaker 4: in Utopia, and he tries to define a game. But
Speaker 4: the short version is that to play a game is
Speaker 4: to voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to make possible this
Speaker 4: activity of struggling.
Speaker 3: Professor Newan says, with every game, you have a goal,
Speaker 3: but what makes it a game is these arbitrary challenges
Speaker 3: that make achieving that goal more difficult.
Speaker 1: One example is a puzzle t t. You hate puzzles.
Speaker 1: I hate puzzles. The end goal is to be able
Speaker 1: to look at a complete picture. So if we didn't
Speaker 1: want to make it a game, we could just buy
Speaker 1: the picture. Why don't we do that?
Speaker 2: That's what I do. That's exactly what I do. I'm
Speaker 2: just gonna buy a nice picture.
Speaker 1: Well that's not the point, I guess.
Speaker 3: The point is the obstacles in the picture is cut
Speaker 3: into a thousand tiny little pieces that we have to
Speaker 3: well not we, that you have.
Speaker 2: To put together in order to see it. Here's another example.
Speaker 4: So in basketball, the goal is to pass the ball
Speaker 4: through the hoop, but it's not just passing the ball
Speaker 4: through the hoop, because if that was valuable, you would
Speaker 4: just go to a basketball court by yourself with a
Speaker 4: step ladder at midnight and just infinantly do it. It's
Speaker 4: not valuable unless it was done under certain constrems.
Speaker 1: Yes, so adding an opposing team who's also trying to score,
Speaker 1: adding a clock, all of those things, those are additional
Speaker 1: obstacles that make it a game.
Speaker 4: That must mean that the value of the activity, whatever
Speaker 4: it is, has to lie in the character of the
Speaker 4: struggle and not just getting the stuff at the end.
Speaker 3: Yes, the struggle is real and the struggle is fun,
Speaker 3: according to Tea.
Speaker 1: But that's not the only value games have. Professor Nowinn
Speaker 1: says that we're also drawn to games because they give
Speaker 1: us something specific to focus on for a finite amount
Speaker 1: of time.
Speaker 4: What games are for me are sculpted activities. The game
Speaker 4: designer is setting the goals and then giving you a
Speaker 4: set of abilities. The amazing part of a game is
Speaker 4: that you know what you're doing and for a little
Speaker 4: bit of time you just pay attention to that. When
Speaker 4: I'm rock climbing, I'm just paying attention to the rock.
Speaker 4: When I'm playing one of my absurd, stupid complex German
Speaker 4: board games. I'm just paying attention to the economic status
Speaker 4: of my railway investments. It's so pure, it's so clear
Speaker 4: for those of us that have trouble having moment of
Speaker 4: purity and focus because the world is like this, because
Speaker 4: that's like vomiting on you all the time. That purity
Speaker 4: is magical. And it's also in games safe because games
Speaker 4: are temporary and set aside for the rest of the world.
Speaker 4: You can focus intensely because you're in a little artificial
Speaker 4: space that's going to end.
Speaker 3: And in fact, a twenty nineteen study talks about the
Speaker 3: psychological benefits of playing board games. It links playing them
Speaker 3: to a decrease in depression and an increase in healthy
Speaker 3: behavior modifications like healthier eating, quitting smoking, and safe sex.
Speaker 1: And there are even more benefits to gameplaying. Games create
Speaker 1: connection between people. In his book, Professor Nowan actually argues
Speaker 1: that games are a special technique for communication.
Speaker 4: One of the neat things about games is because there's
Speaker 4: such tight, constrained spaces that they create this weird intimacy.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think some of the most intimate I've
Speaker 4: been with another person's mind is playing chess against them.
Speaker 4: You're like in each other's mind, and that's possible because
Speaker 4: the goals are so narrow and the space of possible
Speaker 4: moves is so narrow. Because of that artificiality, you get
Speaker 4: both the pleasure of like clarity of action and purpose
Speaker 4: and then the pleasure of like near telepathy, which I
Speaker 4: think you get in wordle.
Speaker 3: Right, wordle Okay, If you don't know a wordle is,
Speaker 3: I don't think you have access to technology or something like,
Speaker 3: you have not been on the internet. Because wordle has
Speaker 3: taken the world by storm. So it was created in
Speaker 3: October of twenty twenty one, and it gained the largest
Speaker 3: amount of its popularity in December of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3: But people are still playing wordle two day.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: The premise is there is one word, just one word,
Speaker 3: a five letter word, each day, and you have to
Speaker 3: figure out what that word is. And with every guest
Speaker 3: you get clues based on the letters that you chose,
Speaker 3: and then you get six tries, and your goal is
Speaker 3: to get the word before the six.
Speaker 2: Tries run out. Everyone is playing wordle. If you've seen
Speaker 2: those green squares, yellow squares, that's what it is.
Speaker 1: I remember posting wordle on January ninth.
Speaker 2: And I had no clue what word was.
Speaker 1: At that point, I sent it to somebody and they
Speaker 1: sent a question mark back, and when I posted it
Speaker 1: on Instagram, yeah, a lot of people were saying they
Speaker 1: didn't know, and only maybe two or three people knew
Speaker 1: what wordle was. They knew what my squares were.
Speaker 2: Now there's so many new iterations. There's wordle, there's qirdle,
Speaker 2: there's nerdle, there's world there's hurdle, so many.
Speaker 1: Different types m Professor Newan actually wrote this Twitter thread
Speaker 1: about what made wordles so successful, and that thread went viral.
Speaker 1: He says, when you first played wordle, your first thought
Speaker 1: is wait, you just guess, but slowly you realize you
Speaker 1: have more agency than you thought, with clues about letter
Speaker 1: possibility and letter frequency of each word. So the experience
Speaker 1: is about discovering this power you didn't know you had
Speaker 1: and all the agency that comes with it. But the
Speaker 1: social part of worldle that Professor and Winn talked about
Speaker 1: is what he says really sets it apart. Specifically, the
Speaker 1: graphic design of that shareable wordal chart. I know, I
Speaker 1: know you have seen that in one of your fees
Speaker 1: out on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook. You've seen it
Speaker 1: somewhere because.
Speaker 4: Of the graphic design, you get to see someone else's
Speaker 4: a gentile journey, like in a second. I think actually
Speaker 4: the coolest thing about word is you can look and
Speaker 4: you'd be like, oh, you were there, aren't you? And
Speaker 4: then you pulled it out. How long did it take you?
Speaker 4: Between line four and five? You can just see it.
Speaker 1: And so once you get this definition of what a
Speaker 1: game is, like this end goal that would be completely
Speaker 1: possible and doable if you didn't have all these obstacles
Speaker 1: that are basically artificial.
Speaker 2: In the way.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when you start thinking about that, you really realized that,
Speaker 3: like we kind of grew up within the culture of games.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I can remember playing Canasta after school with teachers of
Speaker 1: after school program.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in high school, we were playing skip Bow, we
Speaker 3: were playing Uno, we were playing all types of card games.
Speaker 1: And it really makes me think about video games in
Speaker 1: the portrayal of video gamers in like mainstream media. But
Speaker 1: if you were to ask most people, they probably wouldn't
Speaker 1: say they consider themselves gamers, right.
Speaker 3: But based on what we've learned from Professor Nowan, so
Speaker 3: far we might all be gamersh feels like it.
Speaker 4: I think there's this weird, weird inattention to play in games,
Speaker 4: and despite the fact that it's one of the oldest,
Speaker 4: most central parts of human culture. From my perspective, now
Speaker 4: it seems totally weird that the history, at least of
Speaker 4: Western European philosophy has spent so much time working on society, ethics,
Speaker 4: the meaning of life, what counts as a good life,
Speaker 4: and the shelf of stuff about games in play is
Speaker 4: almost non existent. Like, how did we get to the
Speaker 4: point we thought we could understand humanity without this stuff.
Speaker 1: So, according to Professor t not only our games the
Speaker 1: central part of human life, and not only is it
Speaker 1: possible that we're all really gamers, but he kind of
Speaker 1: proposes that games could actually be the meaning of life.
Speaker 4: Burner two, to the end of his book, has this
Speaker 4: funky argument that always pisses my students off, where he says,
Speaker 4: imagine utopia, we've used technology to solve all our problems.
Speaker 4: What would we do all day? We'd either play games
Speaker 4: ord be bored out of our minds. So games must
Speaker 4: be the purpose of life.
Speaker 3: And doctor Nowe is not the first person to think
Speaker 3: about this in this way. It actually goes all the
Speaker 3: way back to Aristotle.
Speaker 4: Aristotle thought though the value in human life was not
Speaker 4: you made, but good quality activity. So another way to
Speaker 4: put it is the meaning of life must be an
Speaker 4: activity that is valuable in and of itself. The philosopher'strength
Speaker 4: is autotelec activity, activity that's valuable not to get something else,
Speaker 4: but in doing itself. And I think Toods just saying
Speaker 4: what is the ultimate autotelecactivity, it's games, that is the
Speaker 4: struggle that you choose for its own sake.
Speaker 1: Well, if we accept this that games are the meaning
Speaker 1: of life, and you know it is the activity for
Speaker 1: activity's sake, then they must be pretty valuable, right Like,
Speaker 1: if this is what we're all doing, If that's what
Speaker 1: the big picture is, how did we capture the value
Speaker 1: of games? And that's something Professor wid talks about in
Speaker 1: his book thinking of games as like an art form.
Speaker 4: One of my suspicions is until lately, it was much
Speaker 4: easier to sell a painting than to sell a game
Speaker 4: if you think the painting is beautiful and you just
Speaker 4: buy the painting. But I think if you think what's
Speaker 4: beautiful in the game is your experience of doing it,
Speaker 4: that's not as transferable between people.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: That's something that's going to vary from player to player.
Speaker 3: What's cool about thinking about games is art is that
Speaker 3: it's art that we are active participants in. Looking at
Speaker 3: a painting isn't as active as playing a game.
Speaker 4: There's this obsession with art objects that are stable, that
Speaker 4: is like the painting is the same for everyone, But
Speaker 4: true games are not stable because people are free during them.
Speaker 4: And the really remarkable thing about games is that you're
Speaker 4: free in games and what you do it becomes beautiful
Speaker 4: in identific interaction between you and the design of the game.
Speaker 4: But that's not as easily saleable.
Speaker 1: So what he's really saying is that games are art, okay,
Speaker 1: and not even that basic stable art that y'all like
Speaker 1: to say you really love. Games are dynamic art that
Speaker 1: are unique inexperience for each person, designed with your agency
Speaker 1: in mind. This art that's created for players to move
Speaker 1: through and have their own interaction.
Speaker 4: For example, tabletop role playing like Dungeons and Dragons often
Speaker 4: gets detegrated as very aesthetically low, and if you redescribe
Speaker 4: in a certain way, here's an activity where people who
Speaker 4: are largely passiveists who otherwise might be sitting around watching
Speaker 4: the shittiest Netflix show that repeats the same stories and
Speaker 4: not you know, digesting it, are sitting together inventing new
Speaker 4: stories on the fly. And then somehow this becomes like
Speaker 4: the lowest part of like it's it's just weird and
Speaker 4: like now I'm just looking for an explanation for this.
Speaker 4: Stuff has been like excluded from being at the core
Speaker 4: of what we do.
Speaker 3: This way of thinking is not something that I do often.
Speaker 3: I just don't think like this. But now listening to
Speaker 3: Professor Nuhen, I'm like life, life is a game. Life
Speaker 3: is games. Every part of life you can look at
Speaker 3: it as a game.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It feels like the short of it
Speaker 1: is you thought it was one way, but it's another.
Speaker 1: Like you know, you're living around and seeing game like
Speaker 1: activity everywhere. It does make you start to ask some questions,
Speaker 1: like is everything a game? Was the matrix for real?
Speaker 4: I don't think everything is a game. The suit in
Speaker 4: definition is that games are voluntary you have to choose
Speaker 4: to take them up, and so game like systems that
Speaker 4: are forced on you where you have to engage in
Speaker 4: them to survive. Systems where the points are associated with
Speaker 4: I don't know, eating or having a good job that
Speaker 4: doesn't have the kind of ideal structure I'm talking about
Speaker 4: where you freely choose a goal and a game for
Speaker 4: the joy of the struggle. It's unsurprising if you see
Speaker 4: game like activity everywhere. I don't think that's because games
Speaker 4: are everywhere. I think it's because games are a crystallization
Speaker 4: of every day activity. John Jue, the great American philosopher,
Speaker 4: said that every art form was the crystallization of something
Speaker 4: we do in normal life, like the crystallization of seeing
Speaker 4: in fiction is the crystallization of telling each other that
Speaker 4: should happened in our day. In games of the crystallization
Speaker 4: of doing, the crystallization of action. And a lot of
Speaker 4: the times we play games because once in a while
Speaker 4: than life, we get to have beautiful, interesting, rich action,
Speaker 4: But most of the time in our life the actions
Speaker 4: are crap.
Speaker 1: All right. So whether you're life right now is rich
Speaker 1: in action or feeling like it's full of crap. We're
Speaker 1: going to take a break, and when we get back,
Speaker 1: we'll dive into game design, the gamification of everything from
Speaker 1: money to exercise to drinking water to flossing. We're back,
Speaker 1: and before we dive back into games and the literal
Speaker 1: meaning of life, let's tee up next week's lab. It's
Speaker 1: almost June and that means it's Pride month. Next week
Speaker 1: we're going to be here from members of the LGBTQIA
Speaker 1: plus in STEM community, so be sure to check that
Speaker 1: lab out. You don't want to miss it.
Speaker 2: Okay, back to talking about games with Professor t. Nuan.
Speaker 3: We've been talking about what games are, why we like
Speaker 3: playing them. Now let's talk about the people who are
Speaker 3: actually designing them. There's a lot of thought that goes
Speaker 3: into creating a good game, including thinking about a player's behavior.
Speaker 3: When you're designing a game, you have to account for
Speaker 3: the freedom of the players and create space for them
Speaker 3: to have agency.
Speaker 4: The things in the world the game design is the
Speaker 4: closest to is actually making governments and making cities. But
Speaker 4: these are sets of rules or constraints that transform people's
Speaker 4: actions inside them while still trying to leave them substantially free.
Speaker 1: So, aside from the actual design the colors, what the
Speaker 1: interface is like, and the graphics look like, all of that,
Speaker 1: you're also thinking about how people might or might not
Speaker 1: engage with the game and all of the different scenarios
Speaker 1: that can happen.
Speaker 2: From that, there's also figuring out the goal of the game.
Speaker 4: So I have a figle favorite games. It's reyner Kinisia.
Speaker 4: He's the Mozart of Germany game design. He says, Yeah,
Speaker 4: So the most important thing in my toolbox is the
Speaker 4: point system because the point system tells the players what
Speaker 4: to care about during the game. It sets their desires.
Speaker 4: You literally just open up the rule bug and it
Speaker 4: tells you your desire and you.
Speaker 1: Just do it. This makes so much sense. Yes, if
Speaker 1: I download a game and I'm playing and I feel
Speaker 1: like I can't get enough points, or I have to
Speaker 1: watch too many ads to get points, or do I'm out.
Speaker 3: So one of the types of games that I like
Speaker 3: to have on my phone is like restaurant games. And
Speaker 3: I'll download a restaurant game, and if the point is
Speaker 3: to just make the food and that's how you get points,
Speaker 3: that's boring to me.
Speaker 2: I want customers to have a.
Speaker 3: Timer over their heads, and you lose points if they've
Speaker 3: had to wait for longer than fifteen minutes to order,
Speaker 3: longer than twenty minutes to get their food. Like, I
Speaker 3: want those types of points. So I will decide based
Speaker 3: on how the points are given out, whether or not
Speaker 3: I'm going to engage with a game.
Speaker 1: Because it's telling you what to value, right. I don't
Speaker 1: want to just value making the food. I want a
Speaker 1: more complex world. I want to have to consider emotions.
Speaker 1: I want to have to consider how much time is
Speaker 1: taken for my customer?
Speaker 2: What does that say about me?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 2: I don't want to get into all of that. Let's
Speaker 2: skip over. That's another episode. I'll talk to about therapist
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 4: People will say things like game designers tell stories or
Speaker 4: game designers create worlds, and I think that's actually underselling
Speaker 4: the issue. Game designers create alternate sells for you, which
Speaker 4: have alternate abilities, but specifically alternate desires, And the true
Speaker 4: heart of gameplay is manipulating the desires and the abilities
Speaker 4: and the obstacles in the environment so that together action
Speaker 4: in that is likely to be awesome, beautiful, funny, thrilling, dramatic,
Speaker 4: even though you're free in that designed space. I mean that,
Speaker 4: I think is the true heart of game design.
Speaker 1: So if games are the crystallization of everyday life, then
Speaker 1: the question I'm immediately asking is do people typically gravitate
Speaker 1: towards games with goals and desires that are secretly like
Speaker 1: baked inside? You know, like, do you really want to
Speaker 1: be a restaurant own?
Speaker 3: I don't think so. I hate cooking for myself. I'm
Speaker 3: just going as a key South.
Speaker 4: I think a lot of times games let you indulge
Speaker 4: or explore desire sets that you don't have it all,
Speaker 4: Like with literature. I think some people just like the
Speaker 4: literature where they recognize the character of themselves, But a
Speaker 4: lot of us like literature because we need to explore
Speaker 4: completely different personas and styles. Since every game records a
Speaker 4: different kind of agency, you can explore totally wildly different
Speaker 4: agencies from yours and games and you can just use
Speaker 4: them to explore what's it like to be a total Machaveellian?
Speaker 4: What's it like to be a perfect member of a
Speaker 4: team that is in locks?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 4: You can explore all these different things through games.
Speaker 3: Now that we've talked all about games, let's get into
Speaker 3: the idea of the gamification of life, like what you
Speaker 3: were talking about Zakia earlier on with your light built
Speaker 3: and wanting to win in your neighborhood. But when we
Speaker 3: say gamification, okay, what do we actually need?
Speaker 4: It's any procedure where you take techniques from game design
Speaker 4: and you export them to ordinary life activities to make
Speaker 4: those more like a game in some way.
Speaker 1: And we've talked about gamification in different capacities in a
Speaker 1: few different Lab forty nine when we talked about the
Speaker 1: habit equation and you know, just filling out habit trackers,
Speaker 1: Lab forty Money Moves, when we talked about some of
Speaker 1: the latest and fintech, and then even in Lab thirty
Speaker 1: seven in Denial.
Speaker 4: There's also an even bigger thing that I really care
Speaker 4: about that's kind of vaguely gamification, which is all these
Speaker 4: cases in which metrified systems and clear rankings get into
Speaker 4: our life and then suddenly like they just take over,
Speaker 4: and we get really excited to get points by whatever
Speaker 4: points systems that is, which includes rate point average and
Speaker 4: citation rates and clicks and all the other stuff by
Speaker 4: which our achievements are measured, ranked and immediately fed back
Speaker 4: to us valuations of how successful we are as human beings.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's what your light bild is doing, even in
Speaker 1: your car, all of these little readouts everywhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, even like on your phone every new update. I
Speaker 3: feel like it's more gamification where it's like, oh, how
Speaker 3: much screen time did you have? And just making you
Speaker 3: aware of these numbers, like the awareness of the numbers.
Speaker 3: I feel like innately we start to evaluate ourselves and say,
Speaker 3: maybe I should do less, and then you compare yourself,
Speaker 3: you know, week to week, or like we were talking
Speaker 3: about earlier with the Apple Watch, where that gamifies your exercise.
Speaker 2: So on an.
Speaker 3: Apple Watch, it tracks your heart rate, it lets you
Speaker 3: check your text messages, let you check your email, but.
Speaker 2: It also is recording your steps.
Speaker 3: It'll record if you exercise, and based on your settings,
Speaker 3: you can say, oh, I want to take you know,
Speaker 3: a thousand steps in a day, and if you get
Speaker 3: to those thousand steps, it closes that ring. And if
Speaker 3: you say I want to do thirty minutes of exercise
Speaker 3: every day, once you hit thirty minutes of what your
Speaker 3: Apple Watch sees it exercise, it closes that ring. And
Speaker 3: so each day you can see how much of your
Speaker 3: ring you completed and.
Speaker 2: If you closed it or not. So it's kind of
Speaker 2: a thing where you can.
Speaker 3: Look back over the week, over the month, over the
Speaker 3: last year and see how many times you closed your rings.
Speaker 3: And so, you know, we talked about it in the
Speaker 3: Habits episode where maybe that might not be such a
Speaker 3: good thing for some people because it's not a really
Speaker 3: great motivator. But for others, you know, the gamification of
Speaker 3: their health and wellness works.
Speaker 1: So when we say gamification, it sounds like we are
Speaker 1: pulling some elements of games. But is it technically a game?
Speaker 1: Because I am struggling to become number one? Okay, it
Speaker 1: is hard to keep my electric use game.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 4: There are a lot of differences, but one of the
Speaker 4: key differences for me is that in a true game,
Speaker 4: the points are something that you know is just there
Speaker 4: to get you through an interesting struggle, and in gamifications,
Speaker 4: the points are somehow this sick motivation to get you
Speaker 4: to do something that you detest and find miserable or awful.
Speaker 1: Another point to think about where we've talked about gamification
Speaker 1: in the past, and it's kind of the maybe not
Speaker 1: so positive version that Professor Newen is talking about, is
Speaker 1: in the ad to cart episode where Christopher Mems told
Speaker 1: us about what they call scientific management, where they were
Speaker 1: going through and looking at productivity. Right, we're still seeing
Speaker 1: that the gamification like keep your mouth or are you
Speaker 1: still there?
Speaker 2: Such a good point?
Speaker 1: We're seeing it of work. That's something I detest, okay,
Speaker 1: and you're trying to make me do it with stars.
Speaker 2: This performance evaluation at the end of the year. Keep it,
Speaker 2: you can have it.
Speaker 1: Another big difference between games and gamification is that a
Speaker 1: game has a pure set of goals that you're trying
Speaker 1: to achieve within a finite amount of time, whereas this gamification,
Speaker 1: like hey, did you go to work five days in
Speaker 1: a row? Get two hours off in the next two
Speaker 1: week block. It's infinite and sprawling.
Speaker 4: I think that is the major difference between games and gamifications.
Speaker 4: Games end and then you step back from those narrow goals.
Speaker 4: Gamification don't end. You're in them forever, and those goals
Speaker 4: often aren't secluded but set over something like tweeting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the gamification of social media. Likes, retweets, reposts, shares,
Speaker 3: all of that is gamification, and lots of people feel
Speaker 3: bound by those shares, likes, and all those things like that.
Speaker 3: And so what Professor Whet is saying makes so much
Speaker 3: sense because social media is so much a part of
Speaker 3: our day to day lives, and a lot of people
Speaker 3: don't feel like they can take a break from that,
Speaker 3: and so they're constantly participating in these games that aren't
Speaker 3: games that are the good type.
Speaker 1: Of games and that artificial value. Professor Winn has done
Speaker 1: some extensive writing around Twitter, including a paper called How
Speaker 1: Twitter Gamifies Communication, where he proposes Twitter's use of artificial
Speaker 1: goals such as likes, follows, and retweets are not necessarily
Speaker 1: increasing our motivation to actually communicate with each other, but
Speaker 1: more so just the score points right, So folks are
Speaker 1: just more so trying to be viral than trying to
Speaker 1: say something that actually has meaning.
Speaker 4: Think about all the rich values that you might have
Speaker 4: in communication. Twitter doesn't measure those. Twitter measures likes, retweets,
Speaker 4: and follows, which are basically a popularity measure. And the
Speaker 4: reason is partially because at institutional mass scale, we don't
Speaker 4: have the technology to measure empathy understanding transformation. What we
Speaker 4: have is the ability to measure likes. Similarly, the fitbit
Speaker 4: can't measure whether you're at peace through the exercise or
Speaker 4: whether it's aesthetical feel like. It measures steps.
Speaker 3: So it really feels like gamification is everywhere. Why is
Speaker 3: it so pervasive in modern culture? Why are we so
Speaker 3: different from the cavemen?
Speaker 1: M They probably were keeping scores they had to. When
Speaker 1: did they go from a bunch of lines to four
Speaker 1: and then a diagonal line.
Speaker 4: I think a lot of the other reasons aren't overt gamifications.
Speaker 4: A lot of them have to do with the need
Speaker 4: for processing information at large scale, and a lot of
Speaker 4: the things that now look like metrics that gamify our
Speaker 4: lives start their lives as attempts to keep track of
Speaker 4: and monitor complex situations, often for really good reasons.
Speaker 1: An example Professor Nowain gives here is diversity and inclusion initiatives,
Speaker 1: which he's been involved in, and he says they try
Speaker 1: to address this huge problem of a lack of diversity
Speaker 1: by starting with simple metrics counting the number of women,
Speaker 1: people of color, etc. And corporations, and how having a
Speaker 1: simplified quota can actually hurt those efforts.
Speaker 4: My intellectual obsession is why we respond so intensely to
Speaker 4: the presence of rankings and points, and the negative side
Speaker 4: of it is we can capture whole institutions and people
Speaker 4: and get them to do exactly what we want by
Speaker 4: tying it to our ranking system. And he's putting that
Speaker 4: ranking system everywhere. But we love this. It's like really
Speaker 4: really well documented the degree to win, which me as
Speaker 4: human beings just instantly responded orient around any available clarifying
Speaker 4: ranking even tho when we know in our hearts that
Speaker 4: ranking doesn't track what really matters, And so.
Speaker 1: We really have to ask, like, is this gamification of everything?
Speaker 1: Is it a good thing? You know? Like there are
Speaker 1: some places where it feels good to have it in
Speaker 1: your life. I think that's good for me. I see
Speaker 1: those rings closing. Yeah, But for some people it is
Speaker 1: daunting to be like, oh, I have to close this
Speaker 1: entire ring today, right right? You know. And the other
Speaker 1: part is sometimes the ring is not even the right metric.
Speaker 1: It's like, do I feel strong today? Do I feel
Speaker 1: good today? Right?
Speaker 3: You might have worked out really hard the day before,
Speaker 3: and so today might be a rest day and your
Speaker 3: Apple Watch telling you, hey, get up, and you're like, nah, yes,
Speaker 3: I crushed it yesterday.
Speaker 4: Notice that part of what makes games so sexy is
Speaker 4: that they are brief moment where you know exactly what
Speaker 4: you're doing because there's this artificially clear point system which
Speaker 4: is pleasurable precisely because it's clearer than the nausea complexity
Speaker 4: of ordinary life.
Speaker 1: A word, what are we doing here? Why is it
Speaker 1: so complex? Why isn't it clear? And where are the rings? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Imagine imagine if we move through life.
Speaker 1: Oh, there are some rings over there.
Speaker 3: I'm gotta go that way, right, you know, like, just
Speaker 3: tell me which way to go.
Speaker 2: I'm sonic. I'm just out here looking for rings.
Speaker 4: So a lot of the gamifications I think are offering
Speaker 4: you this trade where they're like, hey, you can have
Speaker 4: the pleasure of a game in ordinary life. All you
Speaker 4: need to do is take a real world activity and
Speaker 4: orient your motivations around a simple, pre produced technological embedded
Speaker 4: points system. Then you'll get thrills.
Speaker 1: Ooh, it doesn't sound so fun when he breaks it
Speaker 1: down like that. I'm still trying to be number one, though.
Speaker 1: Light energy use is going low.
Speaker 2: Lou Lou.
Speaker 3: All right, it's time for one thing, and this week's
Speaker 3: one thing is special because of this episode.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about our favorite game right now.
Speaker 1: Okay, So one of them is a crossword book. That's
Speaker 1: my analog game. My analog game is my crossword puzzle.
Speaker 1: But I think my one game right now that I'm
Speaker 1: really enjoying is Farming Simulator twenty nineteen. If you want
Speaker 1: to upgrade me, I'll get you my you know, I'll
Speaker 1: give you my Xbox name. But right now, I am
Speaker 1: really enjoying playing that game. I'm learning about a lot
Speaker 1: of farming equipment. I have a lot of respect for
Speaker 1: people that are driving big equipment on regular roads. I'm
Speaker 1: crashing a lot. I'm doing contract work on other farms.
Speaker 1: I'm spreading lime. I'm doing all kinds of stuff that
Speaker 1: I didn't even know I needed to do to maintain
Speaker 1: the health of my farm.
Speaker 2: What's your favorite crop?
Speaker 1: Right now? Its soybeans and they were selling high. Oh
Speaker 1: you gotta sell it to you can sell it. You
Speaker 1: can a lot of stuff in there. You can lease equipment.
Speaker 1: I'm learning about all these different manufacturers, so much stuff.
Speaker 1: It's really cool. What's your favorite game?
Speaker 3: My favorite game is a game that I started playing
Speaker 3: during the pandemic.
Speaker 2: It's a board game.
Speaker 3: So me and Jimmy have played this game a number
Speaker 3: of times. It is called Pandemic. Oh, it sounds insensitive,
Speaker 3: but this game was created a while ago. I heard
Speaker 3: about it from someone else and I was like, Okay,
Speaker 3: this might be a really interesting game to play. Give
Speaker 3: us some perspective because this was early twenty twenty, you know,
Speaker 3: we didn't really know much. And you see the entire
Speaker 3: world and it has these city centers. You draw cards
Speaker 3: to figure out what your job is, and depending on
Speaker 3: your job, you can make specific moves. So there's a pandemic,
Speaker 3: but you're trying to control outbreaks, okay, and so you're
Speaker 3: going to different countries dropping off medicine and vaccines.
Speaker 1: Oh so you're doing aid work. Yeah, you're doing it
Speaker 1: this game.
Speaker 3: If you're a reporter, then you have the ability to
Speaker 3: inform people about what's going.
Speaker 2: It's very involved.
Speaker 3: We've been planning with just two people, but you can
Speaker 3: play two to four players.
Speaker 2: It is a lot of fun.
Speaker 3: It takes time because you have to really strategize with
Speaker 3: your team to figure out how to stop this pandemic.
Speaker 3: And we've lost so many times and it is always heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: You lose as a team.
Speaker 2: You lose as a team.
Speaker 3: The whole thing is team based, so if one loses,
Speaker 3: we all losing. And so it is drama filled lot,
Speaker 3: very drama filled. But it's a really great game that
Speaker 3: makes you think a lot.
Speaker 1: It sounds like it. That's it for Lab sixty five
Speaker 1: and we want to hear from you. Do you consider
Speaker 1: yourself a gamer? If you do? What games do you play?
Speaker 1: What type of games do you play? Are you playing
Speaker 1: games on your phone? Are you gonna delete all your
Speaker 1: game apps? After this? Call us at two zero two
Speaker 1: five six seven seven zero two eight and tell us
Speaker 1: what you thought. Also, you can give us an idea
Speaker 1: for a lab you think we should do this semester two.
Speaker 1: Don't forget you could text or call us at two
Speaker 1: zero two five six seven seven zero two.
Speaker 2: Eight, and don't forget that.
Speaker 3: There is so much more to dig into on our website.
Speaker 3: There'll be a cheap cheap for today's lab, additional links
Speaker 3: and resources in the show notes. Plus you can sign
Speaker 3: up for our newsletter. Check it out at Dope labspodcast
Speaker 3: dot com. Special thanks today's guest expert, c t Nowan.
Speaker 1: You can find or follow him on Twitter at add
Speaker 1: underscore ha WK or you can read more of his
Speaker 1: work in his book Games Agency is Art and you
Speaker 1: can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs Podcast.
Speaker 1: TT's on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho.
Speaker 3: And you can find Zakiya at z said So. Dope
Speaker 3: Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega Ownmedia Group.
Speaker 1: Our producers are Jenny Ratlckmask and Lydia Smith of WaveRunner Studios.
Speaker 1: Our associate producer from Mega Ohmedia is Breanna Garrett.
Speaker 2: Editing in sound design by Rob Smerciak.
Speaker 1: Mixing by Hannes Brown.
Speaker 3: Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex
Speaker 3: Sugier from Spotify. Executive producer Corinne Gilliard and creative producer
Speaker 3: Miguel Contreras.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Shirley Ramos, Jess Borrison, Jasmine Afifi, Kamu Ilolia,
Speaker 1: Till krat Key and Brian Marquis executive producers from Mega
Speaker 1: Own Media Group, r us T T show Dia and
Speaker 1: Zakiah Wattley. And some people are still playing games even
Speaker 1: as adults, and they're not playing the right ones, all right,
Speaker 1: So you know another thing