Stanford University Professor Byron Reeves challenges fbFund REV teams to re-think the meaning of work and shares insights from years of research in an upcoming book, “Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete.”
Reeves highlights some of the most important ingredients of successful games and argues that businesses should incorporate at least some of these feature into work:
1. Self-representation: This could be as simple as an email address or as complex as an avatar. Do you realize that the same neurons for touch can be stimulated in the virtual world? A whole field of research is emerging to better understand the impact of self-representation in games.
2. Narrative: When a game provides a narrative, you feel part of the story. It’s no surprise that solo first person shooting games are arousing. Reeves explains that games with a compelling story can impact arousal (measured by physiological responses such as skin conductance) greater than games without an interesting plot.
3. Feedback: Moment by moment feedback is also essential. There’s always some type of bar updating in games that keep people hooked. Feedback may be one of the easiest ways to change people’s behavior, especially with new forms of real-time analytics.
4. Ranks and Levels: Unlike the real world, games allow people to break out of the confines of their status and achieve exciting goals. The key is that people can earn new ranks and levels much more fluidly in games, which is a huge motivator for performance.
5. Transparency: Meritocracy is built into many games and people often have a clear sense of where they stand in the game. There’s usually a public and transparent acknowledgement of your rank and level. More importantly, there’s not many ways to fake it!
6. Economies: This could be a whole book by itself. Essentially the use of synthetic currencies guide behavior. In all of these virtual worlds people trade real money in some form and it’s the most efficient way to express value from an economic perspective.
7. Teams: You have to collaborate in order to win in many games. This provides a great incentive to become social and can be leveraged by businesses to facilitate cohesion among co-workers.
8. Communication: The reconfigurability of different channels to talk to others is extremely important and you see can see this even on Facebook (there are many modalities to communicate with your friends). In games, there are overlays of communication on purpose that create more engaging experiences.
9. Rules: You know generally what it takes to get from A to B while playing a game (usually). But how do you get promoted at your job? When you analyze exit interviews for instance, employees confess that they didn’t know what to do to get to the next level. Creative rules can be also be used as a lever to motivate workers.
10. Time Pressure: The clock motivates people to pay attention. Everyone get excited at count-downs for a reason.
This ingredient list use can be matched with your company problems, but not all of them have to be used at once. Check out Part 2 of this talk for more examples about how you can transform work with games:
Byron is the Paul C. Edwards Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and Co-Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the H-STAR Institute (Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research) and its industrial affiliate program, Media X. He is an expert on the psychological processing of media in the areas of attention, emotions, learning, and physiological responses, and has published over 100 scientific papers about media and psychology. His research has been the basis for a number of new media products for companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, in the areas of voice interfaces, automated dialogue systems, and business process simulations. He is currently working on the application of multi-player game technology to behavior change and the conduct of serious work, and is Co-Founder of Seriosity, Inc., a company building enterprise software inspired by game psychology.
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