An important question that arises in enterprise gamification is whether the game is truly voluntary. And one way to describe that is the word playbor which is the combination of play and labor. If it's both play and work at the same time, what is it? Is it a game? Well, under the definition of games that I gave you, it's not. A game has to be voluntary. That's at the essence of what makes up a game like the fact that you choose to play and you choose to take the rules of the game seriously. If someone says go play this game right now, then you don't necessarily have a choice. If you're forced to do it, you may be going through the same motions. If, let's say, you're an actor hired to play a game of soccer in a movie, you're not playing soccer when you're acting out your role. You're acting out your role. So, what about someone who is forced to play a game at work or more commonly is forced to engage in some gamified activity at work? What if they don't have agency and choice over the matter but their employer puts into place a gamified system to incentivize them to work harder and be more productive. What about, for example, these check out cashiers at target who have the screen here that you see in front of you when they are checking people out at the store. The screen has a system that gives you either green, red or yellow, based on how fast you check someone out. So this person that just got checked out, they got a G. They did well, they did that fast enough. You see your last ten scores, you see your total scores. This person has 88% G, and other information. Now, you can look at that and say, great, that's incentivizing those target check out clerks to do a better job. It's making it a little bit more fun for them. It's giving them some extra added incentive to do a better performance on their tasks. Or you could look at it and say, wait a minute. First of all, this is not about the cashiers at all. It's about the company monitoring them down to the level of every individual check out. So it's this kind of private Big Brother looking over your shoulder constantly, every second as you're at work. And secondly, it's not at all about fun or about voluntariness or about meaning or anything for the employee. It's purely about external extrinsic controls. It's purely about we will reward you if you do well, or maybe even more so, we will punish you if you don't do as well. And where's the game aspects in that? So there's a real question here, at the conceptual level about whether these are gamification, but more importantly, at the practical level, are these a good idea. And are these mandatory systems truly fair and appropriate and ethical for the workers. Here's another example to take a look at. This is an article from the Los Angeles Times. If you want to read the actual article, you can get it here. It's a story about a group of laundry workers and housekeeping staff at hotels at Disneyland. And Disney has put into place, at these hotels, a leaderboard system. So, as they are doing the laundry in the basement of the hotel, they see how quickly every member of the housekeeping staff is cleaning rooms, and performing their other assigned duties. And there's a leaderboard and a ranking that shows them in that way. And the employees have a name for this system. They don't call it a game. They don't call it a leaderboard. They call it the electronic whip. [SOUND] It's something that they perceive as standing over them, threatening them with punishment and goading them on to work harder. Here's a couple of quotes from the story to get you thinking about whether this is the kind of practice that should be encouraged. Or if potentially, it's the kind of practice that necessarily will follow as gamification takes hold in the enterprise. Here's a quote from one of the workers saying, I was nervous and felt I was being controlled even more. So this ties in very directly to what I talked about with regard to self-determination theory. Part of what makes something intrinsically motivating is when the person feels autonomy. They feel like they are in control of the situation. If the feedback that they get doesn't promote that autonomy. If it's not purely informational, but it's perceived as controlling. It's feedback saying we are using this to tell you what to do and to make you do what we want. Then it does not promote intrinsic motivation and then actually it can demotivate. It can lead to worse performance. Here's a couple of more quotes. What were the effects of this electronic whip system according to the workers? Well, it led to a sort of competition, great, competition. The workers see the leaderboard, and without being told anything more, they figure out that this is a game and they try to play the game and try to score high. And some of the workers try to race to the head of the pack. So, you might think, okay, great, this is working the way it should. But, here is the kicker. That led to dissension and made other employees worry that a reasonable pace wouldn't be enough to keep the boss happy. Is that really what we want? Is that really even in the interest of the company in terms of promoting a successful and effective workforce? And final quote here. According to some of the workers, employees have been known to skip bathroom breaks out of fear that their production will fall and managers will demand an explanation. All of this just from a leaderboard. So it's important to think about, first of all, how can gamified systems in the enterprise be designed to promote the beneficial aspects of gamification. But not lead to this kind of Lord of the Flies, all-against-all competition that demoralizes workers. And likely, based on the research about intrinsic motivation, likely will lead to worse performance than they had before. How do companies avoid that and still get the benefits that we've talked about from gamification in the enterprise? One aspect is the extent to which the system is voluntary and is perceived as voluntary by the workers, and is perceived as transparent. What is this doing? Is this actually tracking me for something that will be used in assessing my job performance? Or is this just informational to help encourage me to do a better job? And what are the elements of the gamified system that are being employed? As we've talked about a pure leaderboard. A pure ranking and scoring system is probably the worst way to promote the beneficial cooperative engaging aspects of gamification. And instead promote the more vicious and harmful kinds of gamification among workers. Beyond that, I leave it to you to think about this question but it's an important one for any company to take in to account when going down the path of putting game like systems into their workplace.
