Game mechanics for society, culture and people (Part 1 of 3)

There’s been a growing level of discussion about the use of game mechanics to make products more fun, using them in social software, and the obsession of gaming on facebook.

I’m not going to contribute to this debate, and whether or not social gaming is ultimately evil.  I fundamentally believe that gameplay can be applied in meaningful ways in many different applications.

However, I suggest that we are looking in the wrong place to identify the meaningful value game mechanics can bring to people.

Games are structured by having a game HOST (farmville) structuring incentives to elicit certain behaviour out of the game PLAYERS (the farmers).  There’s many ways to do this (here’s a gaming mechanics 101), but at it’s simplest level;

  • players receive points for carrying out activities,
  • players see feedback on progress like leaderboards, and
  • players are rewarded things like badges, effectively showing they have achieved certain goals.

The incentives in many of these games are structured to do one thing really well, make money from the players who pay the game hosts.  The outcome is purely financial (with some social engagement window dressing).  It’s primarily a one way exchange of money.

A really important question we should ask is how can we make the outcomes more useful?  

How can we create better incentives that are more valuable to society, culture and people?  

Should we look at frameworks and structures that are two-way?  Delivering value symbiotically?

My suggestion is that we can flip these mechanics around - what if the PLAYERS became the HOST and the HOST became the PLAYERS?

Imagine a group of people (the hosts) set the framework and parameters of outcomes and incentives that are valuable to the group; personally and as a community.  These outcomes could be related to things like environment impact, sustainability, coolness, fashion, reputation, trust, finances, culture.

Now imagine there are businesses that are (the players) that would be interested in trading with these groups.  If the businesses acted in certain ways, they would be awarded points, they could see how well they are doing on a leaderboard, and they could be awarded badges for achieving certain goals.

Now this idea isn’t just theoretical.  There’s a game like this in hundreds of countries around the world today - it’s a financial market called a stock exchange.

The hosts are the investors.  The framework of incentives that exist are primarily driven by law (organisational structures) and industry regulation.  The investors subsume these incentives as what they value in outcomes.  The primary outcome is financial gain.

The players are the businesses that are listed on the exchange.  Their goal is to increase share price and market capitalisation, to increase value to their investors/shareholders.  The activities they carry out are oriented around making this happen, and they can see indexes for their industry which are the leaderboards.

How much is something like this worth? - well the NYSE has a market cap of $8 billion, but the real value is in everyone else that plays the game - The aggregate market cap of all equities, derivitives available through all the NYSEs’ markets is $15 trillion. 

And this number doesn’t necessarily capture the value of all of those unlisted companies that aren’t measured on the exchange but are involved in managing and creating value - from brokers, to investment managers, to banks, to data providers.  There’s a lot of complimentary services and products that exist because of the market. 

I hypothesise there is explosive potential in game mechanics from this perspective.

The potential is far greater than one single company like Zynga who creates games just to create value for themselves.

In these new games that we can create, we should look beyond finances because that only supports businesses driving people to consume more and more.  We should be looking at other types of capital and meaningful stuff that are more highly valued by people, culture and society.

In Part 2, I am going to illustrate some other examples of games and their markets that are trading in more than just finances today.

In Part 3, I am going to propose what this means to marketing and how game mechanics can make marketing more meaningful, by “plug[ing] brands and ads into the social and cultural structures of interaction itself, to make return on attention hyperefficient”, “through markets, networks and communities” (ht Umair Haque for his ridiculously early insights - these links are almost 4 years old!).

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