The recent turn towards “gameifying” user experiences has engendered more of a backlash than just my “points are stupid” rant of last week. Here’s a quick round-up of people pointing out what should be obvious but will probably be ignored.

Russell Davies suggests we need to steal other things from games than leaderboards:

…we’re going to encounter a bunch of crappy sorta-games foisted on us. Those rudimentary game schemes are going to be rolled out by everyone with a rewards card, CRM system, loyalty scheme or something that can be plotted on a graph. And they’re going to be no fun. They’re going to drive us all mad

Caroline McCarthy on “Social-media games: Badges or badgering?”

“Game mechanics,” as this sort of points-and-achievements gimmick is called, is tough to get right: Turning everything into a contest may grab some extra attention at first, but it can easily veer into the annoying

David Hayward at Gamasutra: “System Fatigue”

Mechanics and meta-game systems applied to everyday life are at risk of being so repetitive they never achieve any kind of worthwhile structure, let alone a peak.

Brad Hargreaves on “Cargo Cult Game Design“:

Ultimately, you’re better served by building something from the ground up. Start with the basic principles of psychology and game design and build them into your product at a fundamental level. Otherwise, it’s just an elaborate cargo cult ritual that mimics the process but fails to understand the underlying truths.

And there’s a really comprehensive round-up of critical responses to Jesse Schell’s talk (the one that set me off in the first place) from David Carlton here: “Critical Compilation: Jesse Schell, ‘Design outside the Box’“.

Really cheers me up to see so many people taking the time to respond thoughtfully: makes it easier to make the case that games are interesting not because of the technology or number-crunching, but because they let you play.

Singapore is pretty good for snacks, nibbles, bites, little somethings and all sorts of treats. I bought the three things above from Tiong Bahru Pau, just round the corner. The one in the middle is a pork pau (also bau – basically means ‘bun’ as far as I can see): the case is light and soft from being steamed rather than baked, slightly sticky to the touch, and inside is a few wedges of pork, with gravy. Was lovely. On the right is something that I’ve never had before and don’t know the name of, but it turned out to be a sort of super-powered Scotch egg: the batter case contained half an egg and some lighter slices of pork or ham. Both delicious.

And the thing on the left is another thing I don’t have a name for, but it made a good dessert. Sesame donut with red bean sauce inside, just the right blend of sweet and savoury. I got these from the kitchen shop on Outram Road, but they’ve got a stall in the hawker centre that’s on my list now.

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 diferent 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?

From The Story of the Amulet, which I was re-reading after coming across Gore Vidal’s 1964 article on Edith Nesbit, children’s author and member of the Fabian society: the children have travelled into a socialist future, when their own age is described as the “dark ages”, and find a boy alone, crying:

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m expelled from school,’ said the boy between his sobs.

This was serious. People are not expelled for light offences.

‘Do you mind telling us what you’d done?’

‘I–I tore up a sheet of paper and threw it about in the playground,’ said the child, in the tone of one confessing an unutterable baseness. ‘You won’t talk to me any more now you know that,’ he added without looking up.

‘Was that all?’ asked Anthea.

‘It’s about enough,’ said the child; ‘and I’m expelled for the whole day!’

‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Anthea, gently. The boy lifted his face, rolled over, and sat up.

‘Why, whoever on earth are you?’ he said.

‘We’re strangers from a far country,’ said Anthea. ‘In our country it’s not a crime to leave a bit of paper about.’

‘It is here,’ said the child. ‘If grown-ups do it they’re fined. When we do it we’re expelled for the whole day.’

‘Well, but,’ said Robert, ‘that just means a day’s holiday.’

‘You MUST come from a long way off,’ said the little boy. ‘A holiday’s when you all have play and treats and jolliness, all of you together. On your expelled days no one’ll speak to you. Everyone sees you’re an Expelleder or you’d be in school.’

‘Suppose you were ill?’

‘Nobody is — hardly. If they are, of course they wear the badge, and everyone is kind to you. I know a boy that stole his sister’s illness badge and wore it when he was expelled for a day. HE got expelled for a week for that. It must be awful not to go to school for a week.’

‘Do you LIKE school, then?’ asked Robert incredulously.

‘Of course I do. It’s the loveliest place there is. I chose railways for my special subject this year, there are such splendid models and things, and now I shall be all behind because of that torn-up paper.’

‘You choose your own subject?’ asked Cyril.

‘Yes, of course. Where DID you come from? Don’t you know ANYTHING?’

‘No,’ said Jane definitely; ‘so you’d better tell us.’

‘Well, on Midsummer Day school breaks up and everything’s decorated with flowers, and you choose your special subject for next year. Of course you have to stick to it for a year at least. Then there are all your other subjects, of course, reading, and painting, and the rules of Citizenship.’

‘Good gracious!’ said Anthea.

‘Look here,’ said the child, jumping up, ‘it’s nearly four. The expelledness only lasts till then. Come home with me. Mother will tell you all about everything.’

‘Will your mother like you taking home strange children?’ asked Anthea.

‘I don’t understand,’ said the child, settling his leather belt over his honey-coloured smock and stepping out with hard little bare feet. ‘Come on.’

So they went.

The boy is named after Wells, “the great reformer”, who lived in the dark ages and argued for progress: their own age, with its sharp corners and infant deaths, so appalls their adult host that she is bodily evicted back to her own time, “where London is clean and beautiful, and the Thames runs clear and bright, and the green trees grow, and no one is afraid, or anxious, or in a hurry”.

When I read the book as a child, I remember noticing the way this section stood apart from the historic sections. The hint of back-to-nature romanticism of the boy’s bare feet sat oddly with the talk of Utopian future to someone raised on shiny metal futures, and the worthy nature of the “Citizenship” poetry seemed offputting. But I remember feeling very proud that someone thought enough of us to say a room in each house fit for a child’s needs was a basic necessity.

I’ve read Will Davies’ potlatch for a while, and always enjoyed his writing and the chance to engage with domains he knows much more about than I do. Catching up recently I enjoyed his reaction to the planned Westfield Mk II shopping centre, and the developers’ efforts to “harness that edgy, eclectic east London feel” through giving the artists and independent producers perceived as responsible for that edginess a central role in designing and filling the shopping centre. His piece highlights the absurdity of a mall co-opting the “messy, racially mixed, polluted, dangerous city street”, after a bit of a scoff at the surreality of putting Hackney bohemians next to Nandos. I enjoyed it: I recognised a shared response in his searching for ways to explain or understand the collision between mainstream corporate lifestyle provisioning and the real world.

But the things that seem to give rise to such tensions of authenticity and what looks like the co-opting of the ‘underground’ (or least a less visible) economy aren’t peculiar to Britain. When I arrived in Singapore from the UK, it took me a long time to understand that there was no irony or contradiction in having edgy independent outlets based in malls owned by pan-Asian conglomerates, except that generated by my own Eurocentric ideas about the correct places to situate particular ways of selling things. From the tone of the piece, Will might be surprised to learn (as I was) that there are plenty of hip young things here who “dream of one day draping antique suits and second hand books across the window of their own glass box”, and around Orchard Road it wouldn’t take you too long to find a pastiche of “anti-corporate urbanism”. I’m writing this in an educational establishment which has stalls available in the public foyer for those students who want to become ‘youthepreneurs’: perhaps that’s some indication that here the imaginary line between ‘real’ and ‘commercial’, the distinction between authentically hip and tragically imitative is blurred in ways that seem contradictory to European sensibilities. (Perhaps it never really existed – perhaps it was just us being embarassed about being in trade.)

Regardless, there’s a kind of honesty to the way ‘subculture’ is sold in airconditioned malls here that I missed when I lived in Dalston six years ago. The bus along the Kingsland Road to Liverpool Street took me past any number of independent shops working hard to avoid the impression that anything inside was associated with anything as crass and mainstream as commerce. The shops in the Cathay have copied their anti-shopping presentation, but by living inside a mall there’s no deceit or pretence. They have nice things and will exchange them for your money. That seems more authentic an approach than pretending your edgy east London isn’t lifted from an incomplete impression of New York in the seventies, or trying to pass Hoxton off as a sort of new media version of Berlin.

This isn’t to contradict or challenge Will, really, just to note that the notions of public space and urbanity that operate in his discussion seem tightly coupled to a particular place, and that the militia marshalled at the head of the piece are out of their jurisdiction in these parts. Globalisation might happen everywhere, but the frames used to understand it are always local.

(Related: I enjoyed this interesting paper on one of Singapore’s first malls: Chii, Wong Yunn and Lin, Tan Kar (2004) ‘Emergence of a cosmopolitan space for culture and consumption: the new world amusement park-Singapore (1923-70) in the inter-war years’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 5:2, 279 — 304)