I keep coming across the idea that games are informing the design of experiences that were traditionally not thought to have anything to with games, and there’s something about the way it’s expressed that’s been really annoying me. All these examples – the design of a new car fuel gauge, Amy Jo Kim calling social network one-upmanship “playful”, or the dystopian world mapped out by Jesse Schell at DICE recently – equate “accumulating points” with “playing a game”. And it’s just not true.

Jesse Schell should know better, actually: his book on game design is a fabulously sensitive journey through the complex and ephemeral things that make a game a game. Maybe I misunderstood his talk. But the thing that no-one’s saying, out of all the people who know better, is that games that depend solely on accumulating points are rubbish games. And there are lots of great games, games that inspire and transport, games that show you a different way of experiencing the world, that have nothing whatever to do with points. Points are for people with no imagination.

This is part of a wider tendency for people to overgeneralise when they talk about games, to take one part of it for the whole domain, to imagine that the part that grabs their attention most readily is the defining part. For a while now I’ve been talking and working with people in education who have an interest in games, usually because they see the way players devote their attention and focus to them and imagine that presenting their learning content in a game-like way will lead to that level of engagement being replicated. Frequently, it becomes apparent after a few minutes conversation that they think the game lives in the technology, and that as long as a screenshot looks game-y it’ll magically engage their students. They’re normally wrong, obviously, having never considered the structure of the experience, the careful thought that game designers (good ones) put in to keeping the level of challenge appropriate, or any of the other things that make games so much more than a mode of presentation. People who believe that assigning points to actions make an activity a game are making as large an error.

There are a few sources I can think of for the mistake. Firstly, it’s unavoidably true that points are frequently found in games, and it’s not unreasonable to think that they must be an important feature of games. Points are found in most early games, and when you’re working with a system as simple and limited as those early games, points are a pretty good reflection of what’s going on. There are only a few things to do, and usually one clear aim, and it’s easy to mimic a narrative by coding a repetitive mechanic, tweaking the difficulty and using points to provide a temporal structure (no points = “the beginning of time”, some points = “later”). Certainly there’s no room in a Pac-Man or Space Invaders cabinet for different maps, or new challenges. Points are good for keeping track of simple things, and when you don’t have many complex things they do fine. It’s noticeable, though, that there are fewer games released now that have the accumulation of points as a central mechanic.

The second root that springs to mind is the construction “to game”, in the sense of someone “gaming the system”. Huizinga offers a fascinating exploration of the etymology of play-related words like “game” in Homo Ludens, which makes clear that these words have a complex lineage, and the long history and central importance of our oldest parts of language can lead to misleading similarities. In short, where attributes are ranked numerically, people work to make themsleves appear higher in the ranking through actions that might not be what was being assessed. That is, they maniuplate their score: they game the system, in English. But, although this sense of “game” is related to the sense of “structured playful activity” via the card-tables and stock markets of renaissance Europe, it doesn’t actually mean the same thing. I have an idea that the association of this sense with scores, tables of achievement, ranking and so on makes it easier for people to elide the distinction and think they’re using the same word. But they aren’t, and a system that can be gamed is not necessarily a game. Metaphor is slippery, and hard to keep track of, and here I think it’s misled some people.

The third factor that occurs to me is our deep-rooted compulsive behaviour. People are good at behaving repetitively in search of some kind of chemical reward, whether it’s hammering mistakenly at a traffic-crossing button, or checking email again and again. Game designers are well-aware of this, of course, and make regular use of the principles of irregular reward that keep lab rats pressing buttons and hoping for sugared water: will there be a fuel dump there? Should I try walking into that wall? Using this sort of primal psychology in the service of the wider game seems more justifiable to me, somehow, than basing an entire game round it.

So none of these are so very important when considering actual games. What’s worrying, what makes it so vital that we clear this up now before it gets out of hand, is that there seems to be a wider enthusiasm for turning a lot of our online gardening into point-accumulation opportunities. People have noticed Xbox achievements; we’re familiar with the race to accumulate friends or followers on new online network tools; prototypical gaming forays into new forms of media (the first Facebook, or GPS, or AR games) tend to use the simplest possible game mechanics in the proof-of-concept stage. These seem to help to convince people of the supposedly increasingly playful nature of society, proof that games have won and that in the near future all our interactions will earn points. And it’s this that’s so worrying, this idea that it’s right our actions in the world should be quantified so thoroughly.

Play is dangerous and subversive. It’s a frivolous, unproductive, trivial waste of resources: these attitudes have been around for a long time (though perhaps not as long as play has). But the last hundred years of industrialisation and standardisation have made it even harder for activity that appears meaningless to be condoned, more difficult to sanction behaviour that seems not to be directed towards a particular goal, more important that effort be directed towards a clearly-defined outcome with economic value. Numbers are a big part of this. Nothing is usable, no information is meaningful, nothing can be recognised or acknowledged without it being quantifiable. Turning human interactions into opportunities to amass scores is just an extension of this way of thinking: ultimately, quantifying our relationships with people, or our driving habits, is something that serves advertisers much more than it serves us. It might be true that we’re finding more ways to award points for more of our activity, but this doesn’t mean that society is becoming more playful. It means that play is becoming more socialised.

Seeing the accumulation of points as the central, defining characteristic of games means we’ve taken the worst bits of games, the parts that we’ve nearly grown out of, the features that speak to the least human and most animal parts of us, and I don’t think we should do that. Computer games originally used points because they had to: with limited memory and little experience in designing games, it made sense to use points. Later, points were a way to reflect progress in a wider narrative, a way of quantifying progress that acted in the service of something larger. Now, it’s possible to design games that offer reward and track achievement through more subtle means than numbers. Chasing numbers is dehumanising and humiliating. Now computers have grown out of having to use scores to track our progress, shouldn’t we?

I’m trying out Chrome for a bit, and liking it enough to get over my dislike of using products from the Man: it’s clean and fast, and seems to do everything I ask it well. It’s like a web butler. But one of the things I’ve noticed about it is that its default homepage is changing the way I browse.

Like Opera, the homepage has nine slots in it, for screenshots of pages you find useful so you can click on them and get going. I like it in Opera, and thought quite hard about which sites I wanted to include (mail and twitter, obviously, and this blog, and work webmail, and a couple of other things). But in Chrome I don’t think I have that choice: it looks at my history and decides which ones I like most.

And as a result I’ve noticed that I spend less time on trivial or just plain uncool sites, in case someone sees my homepage and thinks that what I like. I’m sure that over time my “most visited” will be a genuine reflection of the sites that are most useful to me. But in the meantime, I’m a bit disturbed to find how easily I regulate my behaviour if I think other people will see it.

I’ve been talking to various people about a game, Resonance, that involves arranging yourself in shapes with other people and casting spells using your bodies as glyphs on the nodes of the pentagram, weaving superstition and magic and the occult together through space and concrete. They’re not talking about exactly the same thing, of course, but Dan Hill and Matt Jones are lumped together by Bruce Sterling as being heralds of a new pervasive urban alchemy, an open sorcery revealed through lumps of plastic and metal. I’m encouraged by the sympathy between Resonance and their more thoughtful perspectives, but I kind of still wish I was the only person making Kircherian links between these technologies and older ways of knowing the invisible. I am rubbish at sharing.

(Do you know what, I just saw this post again for the first time since I posted it, and I’m sorry to say my first thought was that the author should count themselves lucky anyone wants to follow them at all. How prissy and uptight! Dear oh dear. Still, I can’t think of any other way of saying it. Never mind.)

If you ask to see my updates on Twitter, and I don’t know you as a friend in real life yet, then I probably won’t approve your request. It’s nothing personal. I’m sure you’re really nice. But for me Twitter has always been about friends I know, not work or celebrity stalking or accumulating vast numbers of webfriends or selling magazines. And I’m not making the mistake I did with other social networks, where I let other people dictate how I used them.

Also, I reserve the right to break that rule and to apply it inconsistently.

Also, this article describing Twitter as your house is a good read.

I just read this while meant to be doing something else, so I’m making a quick note to myself before getting back to work. Turning objects into addressable things with URLs and RFIDs and persistant identities is more possible now than ever, and lots of designers have been excited about it for a while. But is this a healthy thing? Don’t we fetishise and worship and reify things enough? Islam teaches that we don’t properly own anything, that we borrow any object we use from God. Buddhism spends most of its time showing you how attachment leads to suffering: most ethical systems will point out that worrying too much about material things and ownership is a step backwards. But that particular post seemed to me to represent a desire to make a possession even more of a possession.

Wouldn’t it be nice if these properly-made things were only sold to collectives, instead of being made into fetish objects for individual brand junkies? Even the “contract” between the owner and the eventual inheritor is speaking the middle-class aspirational heirloom language of Patek Phillippe (whose slogan was something like “you don’t own a Patek Phillippe watch, you merely look after it for the next generation”), belying the carefully homespun outdoorsyness of the brand: it’s for you, then your kin, not for anyone else. It’s wonderful to think that something’s being made with thought and consideration of how to use materials best: it’s depressing to think their message seems to be mainly about one person hanging on to it for longer.

I am of course being monstrously unfair to the post’s author (fortunately very few people read this and most of them would take his side over mine), and the explicit point of the post was to talk about the product having a story, not the person. And if the story ends up being about how many people the bag’s helped, or where its different owners have taken it, I’m wrong and I’ll enjoy reading it. Though I guess that would mean leaving the username and password of the tumblelog in the bag (how could a thing log itself in to a web service?). I think I just get a bit bored by stories from corporates that seem radical and positive and end up helping people to reinforce the consumption and product fetishisation habits that got us in trouble in the first place. I suppose if I need to carry something maybe I could work on having enough friends to borrow a bag from, if I really want to be sustainable?

Stinking hippy. Not going that far. And I spent a lot of money on a bag that I hope lasts me a long time myself. But I didn’t pay extra for being told it would last: I just tried to buy something that was well-made.

Not even going to start thinking about how sad it is that making a product that doesn’t instantly fall apart is a design event that commands such astonishing prices.

Off chest, back to work.