The Importance Of Toys

What games aren’t

Definable. That’s one. The world of media is an infinite sphere of infinite dimensions and within it, we’ve laid out a few boundaries and declared them to be meaningful. We decided that if you wrote about news we would call it journalism. And if you printed those words, we’d call that a newspaper. Brilliant!

Really, in real life, you can educate people about what is happening in the world in pretty much any way you like. A poem, a drawing, interpretive dance, machinima, an FPS, billboards or mime. And you can mime about anything you like. Drugs, love, bison, firework safety, trigonometry or the phone-hacking scandal. The need to put things in boxes doesn’t make the boxes real.

I'm on a horse

When you’re seeking to tell a story or play a game or teach someone or sell something, you can take pretty much any combination of things from that gigantic toy-box and make a new thing. Some of those things will stretch the words ‘ill-advised’ further than they were designed to stretch, but some of them will sparkle and glow like hot, buttered diamonds.

Furthermore, when you make a new thing from two old things, the old things don’t just suddenly cease to exist. Largely, media forms don’t change, they grow. When photography happened, it didn’t stop people painting. In fact it probably made painting a lot more interesting, because now there was another, largely better and certainly more convenient way of fulfilling one of painting’s original uses. Now painting was free to go off and examine what it was to paint, rather than do an eerily accurate copy of a big man’s face. This was good for everybody in the whole world.

What games are

So, that said, I want to talk about what games are. I want to do that because I want to talk about what toys are. My favourite definition of games is ‘toys with rules’. It’s my favourite because it’s short and it works. It also ignores the fact that toys already have rules.

oh god how did this get here I am not good with computer

A ball has the rules of physics. If you drop it, it bounces. It doesn’t have rules like ‘if it bounces that high, you win one billion points’ but it does, none the less, have rules. It has intrinsic rules, the rules that define it as a ball. If you get a certain kind of ball and give it to 22 grown-men on a big field, and only let them kick it, add goalposts and a man with a whistle and some casual racism, you have the game of football. And well done you.

The ball is a toy and it has intrinsic rules. Football is a game, that results from adding extrinsic rules to the ball’s intrinsic rules. So we can now say that games are ‘toys with extrinsic rules’. 

To infinity, and beyond

'I'm just a toy. A stupid little insignificant toy.'

This is how we think of toys. We think of toys as childish playthings. Toys are afforded even less social currency and clout than games, and games are rubbish. I collect games and from a distance they look a bit like books, so I can let people come inside my house occasionally. If I had endless shelves of action figures and toy cars, then visitors would either presume that they would never be allowed to leave or, at best, that they would never be coming back.

‘Whoa. Hey. Wait a minute. Being a toy is a lot better than being a...a Space Ranger.’

The thing is, much like gamification’s battle between intrinsic rewards (yay!) and extrinsic rewards (boo!), toys’ intrinsic rules make them fabulously good fun to play with. Game makers - despite being toy makers by default - want to make games. Often times, the game bit, the extrinsic rules bit, overwhelms that first point, that crafting of a supremely awesome toy. Again, like gamification, it’s concentrating on the extrinsic rewards (boo!), not the intrinsic ones (yay!).

Guess I got my swagger back

Toys need to get much more respect than they do. People shouldn’t be so keen to say they are game designers or that they want to make games, and should spend their time making beautiful toys. After all, what would you rather have contributed to the world of games, Zelda or dice? Grand Theft Auto or the pack or cards? In a thousand years, people will still be throwing balls around, they are far less likely to be playing Mass Effect 2.

It’s toys that make play happen, it’s rules that make toys into games. While there’s skill in both, making great toys is vastly under-appreciated. The battle over ‘are games art’ has been won and now they are. But if they are, then toys are an even greater art.

I’m off to change my job title, brb.

On Telification

I am sorry I said that word, I really am

Gamification is great and all (it isn’t) but it’s all a bit yesterdays news, don’t you think? ‘I remember gamification’ say the elder statesmen of the media world ‘and it was rubbish’ they continue.

Well the problem with it was that it had precisely fuck all to do with games. It was, as Margaret Robertson so eloquently put it, pointsification. Shaving the most insignificant layer of fluff from the exposed flanks of gaming’s prone body and magically exchanging the meaningless word gamification for the meaningless word engagement.

Do you do group discounts?

Of course for real gamification, actually learning from games and applying their sense of agency, loss, learning and self-improvement to anything that stays still long enough, the future is as rosy as it ever was. Those that really understand games are still rare, but they get less rare by the day and their influence will be felt everywhere. Gamification is dead, long-live gamification.

And so to telification. Adding television-like elements to things that are not television. This one can’t possibly get wrongly understood, right?

What this means for television

There are two kinds of broadly interactive television, Participation TV and Interactive TV. 

Participation TV is where the show invites contributions from the viewer, but doesn’t necessarily give anything back. Big Brother and The X Factor both fall into this category, inviting the viewer/player to give their opinion and vote for their favourite, but with no guarantee that their views will be reflected in the show itself. The Million Pound Drop also falls into this category, with the playalong elements, while mentioned as statistics, having no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the show.

This can be seen as the gamification of television. It’s adding game-like thinking to television. In all these cases, the show came first and the game came later. The TV show is by far the most important part of the equation and the game-like elements are there to get the player invested in that show, not to give them a meaningful game-like experience. It works very well, largely because it retains the essential TV experiences of passive, sit-back, almost ambient entertainment. 

Interactive TV is where the show reacts to every viewers input individually. It reflects the players actions back at them and alters their experience of the show accordingly. It is a vanishingly tiny sector of the TV market, in fact the only example I can think of is Dutch show ‘Intuition’. (Disclaimer - we make this show) That is undoubtedly going to change, as more broadcasters decide to take a risk with shows that put the focus on the audience rather than the show itself.

"The Rubik's Cube Show" never got the respect it deserved

This is the telification of games. This is starting with a game and adding in the television elements until you have something that looks enough like a TV show to persuade a broadcaster to pop it on their channel. 

These kind of shows won’t necessarily make for very good television. The problem with making them work is that either the game will make demands of the show which will make the show suffer or the show will make demands of the game which will make the game suffer. Seemingly simple factors such as pacing will be pulled in two totally different directions by the need to provide a good television (slower) or a good gaming (faster) experience.

Getting Interactive TV right will be extremely difficult. It is a whole new type of show and the rewards for getting it right will be vast, but in order to do that, television and game thinking will have to be brought to bear in very even measure. Only teams who can bring a genuine understanding of television and a genuine understanding of games together will be able to make this kind of thing work.

What this means for games

But what if we ignore the television entirely and apply telification to games that intend to remain games? I don’t mean the sort of EA Sports presentationism, where game and TV producers are locked in a dizzying race to make the art of sports presentation so bombastic it literally hurts your face when you look at it. And I don’t mean the idea of episodic content, seasons of content, a ball fumbled so expertly by Valve with their Half Life updates that no-one even knows where it is anymore.

FACT: The Queen is a huge fan of Frankie Boyle

Television has three relevant strengths. It is linear, it is broadcast and it is passive. Games can be linear in the same sense that a single television program is linear, but they are not linear in the same sense that a television channel is linear. Games are broadcast in the sense that many people may be playing the same game on the same server, but not in the sense of many people doing *exactly* the same thing at the same time. And games are passive in the sense of having cut-scenes, but even those bits aren’t truly passive, as you’re actually mashing every single button on the pad at that point, to try and dispel their dreadful interlude. 

These are genuine strengths, do not underestimate them. Television, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a rather popular way of passing the time. How can games take these strengths and use them to forward their own agenda. How do you make linear, broadcast, passive games? And if you could, if you did, would you even call them games anymore?

I think you can and I think we will, but I don’t know what we’ll call them when we get there.

Telification. It’s going to be rad.

How To Learn From Games

The four games you meet in heaven

I’ve spent about a thousand hours a day playing computer games since way before I was born. That’s turned out to be quite useful, not because I work in games but because I don’t. Games have a lot to say and if you don’t make games, you can learn an incredible amount from them. The inverse is true for people who do make games, but hey, those guys are a bunch of nerds, right?

People are different and we can learn from each other

The problem is that there are more games out there than there are stars in the sky, so working out which ones can teach you the most is basically impossible. I’ve already played literally every game ever made, so here’s my break-down of THE GAME that can teach you the most, based on your profession.


It’s extremely important to note that you have to actually play these games. If you just read this and think you’ve learned anything except which game you should play, then you are an idiot. A big stupid idiot. Reading a few words written by another idiot about the most important games in the world is no match whatsoever for actually playing them. You spend more than it costs to buy these games and their accompanying consoles on lunch and stupid shirts in less than a week, so go and put the time in. In exchange, you will be hailed as a genius by your tribe. It’s not a bad deal.

If you work in education, play Way of the Samurai on PlayStation 2

Oh god just please go and play this now, oh god please. Way of the Samurai is half sword fighting game, half choose your own adventure. It’s set in 1878, at the end of the Samurai era. The fighting game is fun and the whole thing is very short. 

It’s arranged into areas and each area presents the player with a dilemma and leaves them to decide how to deal with it. Depending on how they react, the situation in the next area they visit may be affected. Because the game is very short, players can and will play through it several times, getting to see what the effects of their actions truly are from many different perspectives.

Typical Samurai dress circa 1878

The fighting bit is highly enjoyable and the desire to see what else might happen is incredibly high. You learn a great deal about 1870s Japan and you bloody love doing it. Go, now, play, now. You’re wasting your time if you haven’t seen how well this can be done. 

If you work in marketing, play Demon's Souls on PlayStation 3

If you work in marketing then you are interested in gamification. And, if you are interested in gamification, you’ve heard that games people don’t think gamification is worth shit. Well Demon's Souls is the game that will demonstrate exactly what they are talking about, and it will do so with utterly brutal efficiency. 

Demon's Souls is fucking hard. Really, totally fucking hard. It is a game about loss. About losing. About losing over and over and over again, until you win. And when you win, it is the best feeling since that one time when you smoked rainbows while having sex with god, dressed as a unicorn.

What is this, I don't even...

If you want to understand what actual games rather than the operant conditioning machines of Facebook have to offer your profession, you’ll go home and beat yourself against this game until you finally bend it to your will, by which point you will have become an immortal being, a god among men.

Demon's Souls is the opposite of gamification and will teach you more about what gamification can actually offer than any other object in the known universe. Get on with it.

If you work in advertising, play Ridge Racer on Playstation

This one is as effortlessly enjoyable as it is embarrassing to every single person who works in online advertising. As the game is loading, it lets you play Galaga, an ancient 80s arcade shooting game. You play for a few seconds, then the game starts and you play that instead. 

They don't think it be like it is, but it do

It’s incredibly simple and fun. It is the most engaging pre-roll ever made. Literally no piece of pre-roll or interruption advertising has been as good as this was. And it’s been there since 1994, four years before Google existed. Go, get a PlayStation, and play it. Then stop making pre-roll videos, start engaging people through engaging objects and receive a colossal pay-rise and infinite respect from your co-lifeforms.

If you work in television, play Final Fantasy 12 on PlayStation 2

Oh how I envy you. To be able to go back to a time when I hadn’t played Final Fantasy 12 is a regular subject of my thrice-hourly daydreaming sessions. It’s a gigantic, huge, sprawling epic of a game that takes forever to finish. It’s on a scale with watching the whole of The Wire. That was worth doing and so is this.

The reason is that this is a game that basically plays itself. You tell it how you want it to play and it does that. It’s a game that seems to take control away from the player, but actually gives them greatly more, by giving them a position as director rather than actor.

Owls are both passive and interactive

If you want to know how to do passive, sit-back, yet interactive programming, then go and play this game, then have a good long think. Control isn’t just about pressing buttons and seeing a man jump or an enemy die. From the lightest of touches in the rightest of places, you can give people an incredibly interactive experience. Go and learn how. Now.

This is the end bit

I’ve said here before that we all do the same job, that we all need to look outwards, not inwards. Well now you know exactly where to start looking when it comes to games. The time and money you spend on actually playing these games will repay you a thousandfold. I don’t even have a joke to finish off with here. 

The Revolution Will Not Be Broadcast

Children are different

Moshi Monsters is a game for children. It’s made by a British company called Mind Candy and run by a man called Michael Acton-Smith. It is a mixture of virtual pets, mini-games, education and social network. You may have heard of it. You may not. You should check it out.

It has 50 million users. More than half of all British children between the ages of 6 and 12 play Moshi Monsters. It has one new sign-up every second and users in 150 countries across the world. It already sells a staggering quantity of soft-toys, clothes, music and magazines off the back of its huge and highly engaged user-base. Its next project is Moshi TV, a version of YouTube for kids. YouTube isn’t really the kind of place you’d want to let your kids wander unsupervised, so Moshi Monsters is going to step up and offer their own take on YouTube specifically designed for children. 

I've had a great evening. This wasn't it

Kids already love YouTube, love the way it puts them in charge of their viewing. Pausing, rewinding, choosing what to watch next, sharing what they’ve seen with their friends. this is how children see TV, this is how they understand TV to work. 

Children are idiots

More than that, young children not only don’t understand why they can’t pause the television, they also don’t understand why the television doesn’t respond to them touching it, like the iPhones they get to play with do. They don’t even understand why they can’t move around the characters in their favourite cartoons, why the content itself doesn’t respond to their input. To a child, interactive TV - interactive to a degree beyond any adult’s wildest imagining - isn’t some future dream, it’s what they expect.

Now it’s fair to point out at this juncture that children are idiots and don’t understand anything. But the world they are growing up in is mind-blowingly different to the world even today’s teenagers grew up in. YouTube launched six years ago in 2005. The iPhone launched four years ago in 2007. Farmville launched two years ago in 2009. The iPad launched a year ago in 2010. The media landscape has changed utterly in the time it takes to make a child and send it to school.

This child looks weird.

Back to Moshi Monsters. It’s not a broadcaster or a production house or a company with any previous experience in television whatsoever that’s bringing that brand-new vision of TV to the children of the world. It’s a game company. They have yet to launch this service, let alone make it a success, but this is only one of hundreds of examples of non-traditional entrants into the TV business. And there will more entering tomorrow than entered today.

Children are terrifying

There’s a time in the future, no-one knows when, where broadcasters make these visions a reality. Between now and then, they are open to disruption. Are broadcasters comfortable with that? It’s not just the obvious giants that are trying to steal their cakes, not just Google or Apple or Microsoft or Facebook whoever. It’s not just the media start-ups, Zeebox or Starling or Tunafish. It’s also start-ups in the general entertainment sphere who have a lot of users and absolutely no pre-conceived notions of how the world of television works.

Children see the world differently and aren’t going to be satisfied with you telling them that ‘it just works that way honey’. That applies just as much to the children of the media world as it does literal children. It’s not the direct attacks that broadcasters should worry about. It’s not about Google wanting to steal your content and put their own adverts by it. It’s about companies not only redefining what broadcasters do, but redefining what content is in the same open-minded flick of the wrist. About taking the entire question, the worries, the concept of entertainment itself, and turning it on its head. 

This is not a metaphor and I am not the dog in the metaphor this isn't

The television program itself is as ripe for reinvention as the way it’s delivered. Today, a child will grow up surrounded by devices and products that are desperate to shape themselves to their needs and entertain them on their own terms. And the speed with which these new, user-focused objects are being produced is increasing, faster and faster every day. Today’s idiot is tomorrow’s customer. Prepare yourself for the rise of the idiots.

I Blame Riots For Grand Theft Auto

Nee naw nee naw


The people who blame videogames for violence, especially for the sort of riot based violence the summer of 2011 specialised in are fucking idiots. I have no intention of getting into the giant clusterbomb of discussing why riots happen, or how you stop them because I don’t know the answers to any of those questions. I’m an awesome game designer, not a sociologist/politician/gobshite.


What I know about isn’t poverty or depravation or education or crime. What I know about is fun and games. See, the thing no-one really likes to talk about with riots is that they are, you know, a riot! They’re chaotic, social and, at the time, fun. They’re incredibly stupid and if you’re on the receiving end of one, completely terrifying, life-destroying and potentially fatal. But if you’re in one, in a huge, anonymous crowd of people being terribly naughty and doing all the things you kinda want to do but would never dare, then they are great. A carnival with free stuff and running and hiding and shouting and breaking stuff and standing still. Awesome!

Fuck the Police

We had a smashing time


Blaming games for riots, or indeed any anti-social or criminal activity gets the entire thing back to front. Riots aren’t fun because Grand Theft Auto is fun. Grand Theft Auto is fun because riots are fun. Doing what you’re not supposed to do, is fun. Smashing things up is fun. Setting things on fire, is fun. Running away from a slow, heavily armoured opponent is called kiting in computer games, is called fucking with the police during a riot and it too, is fun.


Most people would never actually do a riot because they understand that their bit of fun comes at an incredible and hideous cost to all concerned, same as most people would never commit murder or steal some shoes and run away or set fire to a policeman’s hat. But it’s not because we don’t want to do those things or because those things aren’t enjoyable at the time. It’s because we understand the implications and costs of our actions. 

Damn, it feels good to be a gangster

Computer games take those costs away and allow people to indulge those fantasies without the horrible implications, pain, death and moral vomit that they would otherwise cause. They isolate the fun part and present it alone, without care or worry for the player. Don’t blame the thrill of computer games for violence. Blame the thrill of violence for computer games.

My Girlfriend Has No Strong Feelings about Xbox Live Arcade

It’s complicated...

So here’s a question. What would XBLA look like if it had the same userbase as Facebook? What kind of games would we see on XBLA if someone decided to give an XBox 360 to every single person on Facebook?

It is dangerous to go alone. Take this

Would it be the kind of games Facebook already plays host to - FarmVille, CityVille, ItPrintsMoneyVille? Would it be casual games like Peggle, Plants Vs Zombies, Menopause Villiage? Would it be exactly the same games we see now - From Dust, Bastion, Handstitched BombMetaphor?

In other words, would they be very simple games, would they be kinda simple games or would they be complex games? Is complexity a consequence of number of users? Can only games ‘that’ simple be ‘that’ popular? Why so many questions?

Thrown off games

Is complexity an issue in other media forms? No, not really. Soap operas and daily dramas, one of the most popular forms of television, have insanely complex, lengthy and convoluted plots, often dealing with a good number or arcs at one time, with endless reams of squawking characters switching relationships in a blurred and dizzying cacophony of emotion and spit.

The Harry Potter series is over a million words long. A million words. I don’t even know a million words! It’s a big, long, complicated story and it’s the most mainstream thing imaginable. Game of Thrones is even more complex has even more words and that seems to be doing ok for itself. And lets not get started on comic books. I do not even want to know how many Batmans there are.

Is it Batmans or Batmen?

So complexity is fine, if not desirable in other utterly mass-market media. So why are the most mass-market of computer games so simple?

You are terrible at this

Could it be that it’s not the simplicity of social games that makes them successful? In fact could it be that it’s the simplicity which results in their difficulties in retaining users? Been there, done that, bored now, what’s next? There’s anecdotal evidence that Zynga’s gargantuan advertising spend is all about retaining their existing users, not attracting new ones. Look at this wooga presentation all about their attempts to stop the drop off in users. Not all is well in paradise. Perhaps things in paradise are a bit too simple?

There are two other things that differentiate social games from traditional games. One is the inability to fail. Recalibrating the spectrum of the worst failure to the greatest success so that the greatest failure results in only a small reward instead of the computer throwing a bucket of pig faeces over the player, allows even those with the most dog-eared of brains to press buttons and see a pleasing sequence of lights and colours. Or indeed, those who have less hurty brains but just don’t give a fuck.

The other is the assumption that the player is, in gaming terms, a complete idiot. Having watched the girlfriend I haven’t mentioned since the title play the various games I’ve made her play and the various games she actually plays of her own accord, there’s one very clear difference. The games I want her to play have more buttons than she has fingers and   generally expect her to use pretty much all of them within the first ten minutes. The games she likes to play have one button and are usually pretty impressed when she manages to press that.

There are no words to describe this image

If you look at the complex but mainstream successes in other media, they also exhibit this combination of traits. Either they start very slowly and build up their complexity, or they start complex, but in a suitably self-aware fashion, reveling in their mystery and using it to draw the viewer in. You can’t fail at watching Game of Thrones. Even if you haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on, it’s over in an hour and there was probably an awesome fight and some naked people. The Machiavellian scheming and seemingly infinite character and story arcs can take their time to worm their way into your brain and reward you for watching more by giving you more reasons to watch.

So is simplicity actually clouding the picture? Is it not more a case that deep and difficult games are perfectly appropriate for a casual audience - in fact more desirable - but to achieve this, they need to make sense to everybody and anybody and keep moving forwards, regardless of how ‘well’ the player is playing?

So what I’m saying is, if you’re planning on making a Facebook game any time soon, please could you make one that is complicated, but has simple and well explained controls and no fail state? Then we can find out if I’m full of shit or not. Thanks. You’re the best.

Batman image stolen from Peter Madik
Other images just stolen.

Everybody Is A Game Designer

Everybody is a storyteller


I was lucky enough to be at the Develop Evolve panel ‘New Stories for New Platforms’. I’d gone along expecting to leave at the end filled with seething rage. See I’m one of those people who doesn’t like stories in games. Not the kind that the designer tells the player. I’ve never found myself wishing a story had more game in it, so why would I want more story in my game?


The story the designers bake into a game is never as powerful, memorable or relevant as the story that players tell themselves. I can’t remember the story in Halo (I think it may have been set in space?) but I can regale you with a seemingly endless selection of anecdotes about that bit where I was killed by that guy or that thing with the buildings and that one time when I accidentally killed all of my own men with a single, inappropriate grenade.


This isn’t surprising. As they sip red wine and smoke cigarettes in an imaginary French bistro, clever people can often be heard suggesting in their serifed voices that our brains look at the world in terms of metaphors and stories anyway, whether we like it or not. The little person inside, narrating our lives is a real thing. If players are going to tell themselves stories anyway, it’s the designer’s job to make sure that those stories are great and many.


Much to my pleasure, the panel spent quite some time discussing this exact idea. Instead of setting out a linear narrative, Alexis Kennedy of Fail Better Games likened this approach to ‘fires in the desert’ an idea explained in this blog post. The designer should point the player off in the direction of the next major plot point - you’re secretly a woman, you’re your own brother, your arms are made of jam - but between these points, the player should be  encouraged to be their own storyteller. Because they’ll be doing it regardless. They talked about a bunch of other stuff too, but I’d stopped listening by that point.

Fires in the dessert

Deal or No Deal: Vendetta


If players tell themselves stories, we can make games that inspire the player to tell particular kinds of stories and we can make games that allow the player to tell themselves as many stories as possible. But games are about story enabling, not story telling. If you want your players to enjoy your game, remember your game and tell other people about your game, you should aim to get their inner voice to tell them the funniest, scariest or most exhilarating stories possible.


Game shows already understand this principle very well. Consider Deal or No Deal. The mechanics are simple to the point of barely being there at all, but the show is still embarrassingly easy to watch. That’s because the game gets out of the way and encourages the players to tell their own stories. The whole achingly dumb, yet effortlessly engaging rigmarole of luck being transformed by sheer will into tales of love, honour, betrayal, desperation, misery and exhilaration is the result of the designers thinking about how to make a bunch of great stories, very cheaply.

Nodeal Edmunds

Where all this gets terribly interesting is where we see that people don’t just tell themselves their own stories, they also play their own games. Don’t step on the cracks. A game we invent and play inside our own heads. We add a rule to walking and now walking is a game. Walking: Vendetta. Grinding through the washing up to unlock the cigarette at the end. Super Washing Up Man: Vendetta. Throwing your socks into the basket from great distance to avoid the penalty of having to walk across the room and put them in. Sock Ball Jam Washing Basket Adventureland: Vendetta.


I’m so meta, I shit myself


The recursive madness contained within all of this is that if we make our own games up, we must logically make up our own stories about our own games. Not only do we avoid stepping on cracks for high score, we internally narrate our progress through our attempts at crack avoidance. We pass on to ourselves tales of our triumph over the forces of washing up, we exalt in our now certain progress to the national finals thanks to that arcing long range sock dunk.


Children will turn anything into a toy, any toy into a game and any game into a story. Adults do just the same thing, they just don’t do the noises. At least not when anyone’s looking.

L-R Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman, Invisible Man

Play is a fundamentally creative act, this is completely unavoidable. Even if you have no interest in your players telling themselves metaphorical stories in your game, or adding their own rules to change the way the game works, they still will. You can embrace this, and make them love you, or you can ignore it and pin your players to a board like so many greasy, unwashed butterflies. 

Games Gamified Games, Guys

An Answer To The Question ‘What Is Gamification?’

If you ask a vaguely normal person what they think gamification is, they’ll likely tell you that it’s ‘turning things that aren’t games into games.’ What gamification professionals will tell you is that it’s ‘adding game elements to things that aren’t games.’ A small but important difference.

The professional definition falls into the larger set ‘persuading people to do the stuff you want them to do’ along with advertising, marketing and behavioural economics. You’ll note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone has to have any fun. Gamification, as she is practiced, is about achieving specific, measurable results, be that more visitors to a site, more viewers for a TV show, more sales for a sports shoe manufacturer, or in the case of Playboy’s efforts in the area, making there be more naked women.

While the normal people definition is hugely interesting, here I want to talk about the kind that evil people do in exchange for money.

An evil person, yesterday

Gamification Uses Techniques From Games

In 1972, Atari released their first arcade game, Pong, a two-player tennis game. The machine was famously adorned with the wonderfully concise instruction ‘avoid missing ball for high score’. This contains two elements. ‘Avoid missing ball’ - which is the game - and ‘for high score’ - which is the gamification.

The joy of avoiding missing the ball is an intrinsic reward. Even with no points at stake, even with no opponent bar an impassible wall, avoiding the ball is fun in and of itself. The high score is an extrinsic reward. It only has meaning in the context of the game, to track your progress and reward your ego for having been successful at avoiding missing the ball. Well done you! 

This specific way of keeping score needed to fulfill two goals for Atari. One, to make people play as many times as possible and two to make sure no game lasted too long. As such, you don’t get a point for avoiding missing ball at all, you get a point when your opponent fails to avoid missing ball.

This means that players don’t want to avoid missing ball alone, they also want to make sure their opponent cannot avoid missing ball. It is not enough to win, someone else must lose. In doing this, Atari had gamified Pong. Their players were persuaded to do the stuff Atari wanted them to do - play quick and play often.

Failed to avoid missing ball

Every Game is Gamified

Pretty much every video game uses these techniques to encourage the player to act in the way the designer wants. Some games are defined by their ability to make the player change their behaviour by changing the scoring system. 

Bizzare Creations’ Geometry Wars, a game entirely about shooting things, has an achievement for surviving a set amount of time without shooting any things. Treasure’s Ikaruga is played in wildly different ways depending on if the player is going for high score, where they die on the first level, or mere survival where they die slightly further into the first level. Rovio’s Angry Birds breaks up marriages by letting the player murder all the pigs however they like, but not being impressed until they murder all the pigs in exactly the way the designer wants.

A good game designer understands how to use the persuasive power of extrinsic rewards to gently push his players down a particular path. Even very basic game design concepts such as levels and different playable characters are tools for shaping player behaviour and encouraging them to experience the game in different ways. And thus gamification persuades its victims to do the thing by giving them things when they do the thing.

Scoring in a game

Good for the Goose

Successful gamification techniques will work on things that are not games in the same way they work on things that are games. Apply exactly the right extrinsic reward in just the right way, at just the right time to encourage the player to play the game the way you want them to play it.

The tools of gamification get their power from the years of work game designers have put into making their players do exactly what they were damn well told. There’s no question that there’s art in that ability, that good games become great because they are well gamified. 

Gamification isn't something that exists outside of games. It's games that invented it. If you want to gamify something, just look at how games already gamify themselves, because they are bloody good at it. If you find gamification in some way unpalatable, you should remember that these techniques have their name because they were things games did first. Games are described as addictive because games are addictive as hell and it’s game makers that made them addictive as hell. Now the rest of the world wants a piece, and who are we to tell them they shouldn’t?

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