"Your work does not become a game, but you begin to work as if playing"

The other day, the professor of the Warton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Kevin Verbach, spoke to the audience of the Digital October Center with a lecture under the Knowledge Stream project dedicated to gamification. What is it? Verbach has in mind a set of motivational management techniques borrowed from the games and their creators. Say, glasses, medals and other attributes of virtual victories can serve as a form of intangible - “gaming” - reward: you sold two stars over the past month, and it - for three. Medals, badges, points - yes anything, the main thing is that people plays to move. The game revives routine. Not wanting to go far, Kevin gives an example his own training course in a business school. The usual academic program is quite boring: lectures - semester - exams - lectures - semester - exams. But why not organize this as in the game, with overcoming the levels of complexity and the gradual transformation of a beginner into a master? The monotonous road becomes embossed, there is a motive to move from one level to another. You are advancing to your goal by the player.

Before the performance of the maestro gamification in an interview, Slon told how the demand for game techniques in business will grow and why Plants vs. Zombies is the best textbook.

- How did it happen that you have become the main preacher of gamification?

-I am a professor of business schools, and in the past a professor of law. And in this capacity, I devoted a lot of time to the legal aspects of the Internet policy. In parallel, I studied promising technological trends, trying to understand how the Internet changes the nature of business, and indeed relations between people. I was looking for trends that most people underestimate. Sales of video games some time ago led to the creation of a powerful market-at least in the States. He grew rapidly, and the young generation actively used these games. At the same time, the games themselves became more and more complex. In general, I was always interested in games, another thing is that this interest of mine had no visible connection with business and other things that I taught. Gamification made it possible to unite my knowledge in games and business. I realized that the tools for developers of gaming techniques can be used in solving problems in the business sphere.

- Video games are designed for children and youth. Why are more mature people who are accustomed to study and work without any game incentives to plunge into this element?

- Not quite so. Humanity tends to play. Any societies, including prehistoric, did it. Say, our love for puzzles or games like Challenge is rooted in sociology. So games are not necessarily what you play for the sake of entertainment. And for me, gamification is a science not so much about games, but about what makes them so entertaining, exciting, interesting, and how much these qualities are able to prove themselves in business, training and other areas of our activities.

- In other words, it is not necessary to love games in order to experience the advantage of gamification?

- Continue to do what you are doing. Gamification will simply make your work more pleasant and exciting. The game concentrates many points of motivation - adversarial, prize stimuli, logic of overcoming obstacles. Simply put, your work does not become a game, but you begin to work as if playing.

- Gartner predicts that at least half of the technological sector companies by 2015 will use this approach in their work. Do you believe that?

- I carefully relate to such numbers, especially since I do not know what they are based on. On the other hand, I see how hundreds of large companies, and taking into account the Internet business, perhaps even more of them, they seriously study the gamification. And when giant transnational corporations launch gaming projects, this means that the whole business is changing. Management resorts to gamification as a way to develop and systematize its motivational policy. In favor of the popularity of the direction, companies like Bunchball, Gigya, Badgeville are already selling whole independent platforms for the implementation of gamification - in particular, in the field of customer relations. Of course, it would be an exaggeration to name the gamification of a separate large industry, but the scale of its spread is already impressive.

- It sounds like you are talking about the start of Facebook and Twitter.

- And the situations are really very similar. Who could imagine that social media would become ubiquitous? I remember that a few years ago, authoritative people claimed that corporations would never use this. About gamification, the same was repeated.

- But it seemed to me that critics of the system more doubt its effectiveness than popularity. Your colleague from the Georgia Technological Institute, Yan Bogosta compared the new use of Games with TOST oil - yes, so tastier, but is it more useful? - There are really doubts indicated by Yang. There are also people from among the participants in the industry who understands the idea of ​​games too simplified. They say: games are a thing about how to reward the staff who won in anything. So let's just reward these people. But this is profanity! That is why some people are skeptical of gamification. The system is not limited by such narrow frames. We are talking about the game as a way of creating challenges that motivate people to overcome difficulties. After all, this is the essence of the game and game consciousness. In addition, there is a rich gamut of various techniques used by designers in the process of creating games. And each of them is potentially capable of causing a person the right reaction, to encourage him to action. - And you play games yourself - I mean computer? - It's funny that my business colleagues and the academic environment are sincerely sure that I am constantly playing games. They think about me as a fanatical gamer. Of course, they exaggerate. Although from time to time I like to play - say, in World of Warcraft. Right now I am playing a game called Bioshock. This is what I do for entertainment. At the same time, I carefully test a lot of games for my course - Plants vs. Zombies, say. Even on Facebook - Farmville, Cityville. These games are very useful in terms of training and have specific techniques motivating players. They are very simple, but make people continue to play and buy virtual goods. In general, I really play a lot, but not because of the manic passion for games, but only because they help me teach game methods.