Recently I’ve been thinking about games – not RPGs for once, but games where you get points for (doing stuff), where doing stuff can be killing enemies, making a big farm, saving Princess Zelda, and so on.

Arcade games, which gave birth to many of the other genres of video game, were originally designed to convince people to put quarters in slots.  They accomplished this by being devilishly difficult, yet having a compelling short-term reward cycle.  Think about Galaga: each alien spaceship you blow up gives you a tiny, lovely feeling of accomplishment when it bursts.

(Years ago I read, in one afternoon, a Terry Pratchett book called Only You Can Save Mankind: teenage Johnny is playing a game that’s a cross between Galaga and Wing Commander, when the alien spaceships… surrender.  What would you do if you discovered that the aliens you slaughtered without mercy during your leisure time were fully sentient characters who viewed you as an immortal, genocidal maniac?)

Anyway, the reward cycle drives you to play the game more: you want not only to blow up more spaceships, but to clear more waves, maybe even beat the big boss.  Every once in a while you get a new gun – a new reward! – or see a different type of enemy – a new challenge!

There’s this move to “gamify” the workplace – to use the insight game designers have accumulated over the last fifty years about structuring user experience to make people love their jobs the way a World of Warcraft player loves WoW.  On the one hand, who doesn’t want their job to feel more awesome, and rewarding?

On the other hand… do we really want to model companies after an industry that’s designed, on a basic level, to move money from the consumer (the worker in this case) to the experience designer (the company)?  If companies are using the same reward cycle mechanics as WoW to convince workers to do more work for the same pay, aren’t workers losing out in the long run?

If people are happier at work because of some experience-jiggering that doesn’t cost the company much money, isn’t their happiness real?  Isn’t that, then, a good thing?  But, is the type of happiness generated by that visceral, limbic reward cycle equivalent to the happiness that comes when we’re rewarded for doing a good job with money or with more authority?  What about the happiness that comes from having a balanced cycle of work and life that permits you to spend time with your loved ones, your kids, and the sunset?  I really don’t know.  I suspect that these happinesses are not qualitatively equal, but can we quantify this inequality?

I may well be committing some kind of logical fallacy in the argument above – if so, point it out to me, please.  But the question remains: can we be wrong when we say (and believe) that we are happy?

Geez, time to break out the Plato again.

(It’d also be interesting to think of what kinds of experiment could capture any of the differences above… I’m no social psychologist, though.)