Can everything be turned into a game?
(thanks @Lena Bolin for inspiration to this post)
Games are fun. You get immediate feedback on what you do and you always know when you are doing the right thing. Even more fun than doing the right thing is letting others know how good you are, which is what Microsoft understood with XBox Live.
Achievements, badges and trophies were of course not invented by Microsoft and Sony. They have been used by the military, the scout movement and as informal prizes in sports tournaments. Certificates have also turned into a sort of virtual achievement among friends. I see lots of people getting more certificates than they have time to actually use. For example: certificates for hunting, scuba diving, sailing, climbing, driving mc, the list goes on.
I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that. Au contrarie! if you learnt scuba diving just to get the certificate – more power to you. The act of getting a certificate actually made you learn something that you hadn’t learned otherwise.
And more websites are starting to realize that you can turn your website into a game by making you collect virtual goods: Facebook friends, notifications, twitter mentions, blog readers, comments.. are they all part of a virtual game?
When you write something on Facebook is this the prize you hope to get?
This is a basic human emotion – we are drawn to things that we understand and that give us immediate feedback. What else that we do can be turned into a game to make it more fun and rewarding? Your work? Your studies?