Fishburn Hedges

01.09.2010

First we had social. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg, Delicious. The myriad of websites, communities, forums and apps that have introduced the power of sharing to the world. As Clay Shirky said recently in a lecture on cognitive surplus, it’s not that we necessarily all wanted to be selfish couch potatoes in the 80s and 90s, it’s just that we didn’t have the tools to offer our expertise, advice and insight to our fellow citizens for their benefit.

Now with new ways to share information and the generosity of spirit displayed by some developers we have sites like Ushahidi, which has enabled people in Kenya to gather data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. This simple idea has enabled Kenya’s public services to develop an overview of crisis areas throughout the country and provide huge amounts of information to the public.

Gaming gets serious

So social has been amazing and can be world-changing.  

But gaming is coming next and will develop the power of social still further. Gaming is getting serious.

How do you change individual behaviours? It’s a problem that governments and public servants have been wrestling with for decades. The concept of gaming seeks to take behaviours and turn them into fun, interesting and rewarding games. Like what? Some games play with the concept of ‘communal discovery’.  Digg and Wikipedia, and to a certain extent, Foursquare are examples of this. They reflect the joy in finding out about something new, and sharing it with your own community.

There are also ‘appointment’ games, like the EpicWin app on the iPhone. This kind of programme turns your ‘to-do’ list into an adventure game. When you perform all your allotted tasks you can ‘level up’, get more experience, win more points. Smartphones make the addition of location based, and behaviour based game dynamics into real life a real possibility.  

Playing games is a built-in human behaviour, driven by motivations that have been deep-wired into us through our evolution. Just look at the size of the computer games industry today which now contributes over £1bn to the UK economy. Turning these powerful motivations to more serious use must be part of the solution for governments seeking to change behaviour.

So move over nudge theory. Level up instead.

Posted by Simon Redfern