gamification
There is a big trend in new edge thinking, probably headed by Jane McGonigal. I've even played in one of her games, Evoke. The basic idea is to somehow make use of the skills games players develop to fix the world. So you make a game of saving the world.
This is closely related to applying gaming design to business and environmental efforts. A crappy example of this would be gaining points, just like in a game, adults collect nectar points for some kind of loyalty scheme.
This seems to be the general gist of the gamification movement: to use the skills of games players, and to use game techniques in business. It's big business. There's a lot of investment in this direction. You will see more and more services which work in this way, both in the virtual world and more and more in the real world. Have you seen the new mercedes advert, "get me out of this map", or "trapped in street view" or some such?
But what if this is just a temporary evolution, a culdesac of memes, something which will die out because it has limited effect? What could evolve as a result? And how would I know?
social evolution of gaming
When I was a kid, I played roleplaying games. I got into them because my brother, eight years older, got into them. We were playing computer games as teenagers, as my brother was designing them. My peers were generally not interested in computer games. Now look at the situation, with fullblown ads on christmas tv for playstation 3's, xboxes and nintendo wii's.
Our interest in games took us from roleplaying to "live" gaming, where we took over a house and pretended to be people in a situation, in a spaceship in orbit in the corona of the sun, for example. Just after that time, dinner table game boxes came out. We evolved from games in our little team, to more wide-spread games. You can see this with social games like sf0, and other sites.
Hmm... this was not the objective of this post, or this section. I wanted to explore a development that suggested that the next thing is not to do with with gamification, points etc, but with direct social engagement. It's not to do with points, or cards, or these elements we are used to in games, but that we are willing to play. And all it takes, is a bunch of people.
evolution of gaming
I came up with action cycles in 2009 when I saw the problems faced by entrepreneurs, and the classic silo problem, as well as the problem facing graduates which has caught our attention recently. I call it a game, and people weren't willing to take it into businesses, possibly because of the term "game". People didn't take it seriously. As things get more desperate, as institutions clamp down on costs, it is going to be harder for entrepreneurs and free-lancers, because getting their foot in the door will be harder.
So, seems to me, that gamification is going in a direction which is as fibril as the crappy games the masses are playing. As those kids who played games as teenagers grow into their twenties and thirties, it is reasonable for the quality of game to be childlike, like the "gold stars" and "merits" and "badges" that are awarded in primary school, or boys and girls clubs like scouts. But this kind of artificial reward is seen through in adolescence. It may sound good, to have mozilla's open badge development, because the "rewards" methodology appeals to educators because it is so easy. It is easy for amateur or even professional theorists and social media pundits, or culture designers to come up with this stuff, and we will see how worthwhile, how deep, how significant their influence.
I suspect, and hope, that gamers who reach their forties and fifties, or the new youth, reject this quite frankly silly and juvenile bag of techniques, and adopt a wiser and deeper approach. That is, to play games that go the heart of the matter, that merge money and social value, that reject all manner of category and distinctions, so that we can just go ahead and get things done. The game, is life, is the world, and it is serious. It's about life and death, and the future of our environment. If we are not careful, we will end up winning games, and losing the world.
money
Which leads us to money. I've explored some ideas which seem to me reveal aspects of how money actually works. Eg, we can't save money, it is always something we use. We don't get paid for what we did, but the money goes forwards to buying things we need or want. You can read about this in Dunno.
More recently, I had this idea while I was being interviewed by Anna for her phd project, book, documentary, Rethink Work: what if people who turned up at Westminster Hub, came away with double the money they took? Seriously.
In fact, that same day, I ended up meeting Tav and Nick and Tav gave me £60, and so, that day, I came back with 12 times the money I had spent to get there.
Think about it. When someone goes to the office, or factory, they do something, and then they are given money. The money they take home and spend as they like. That is, they do something useful, produce something of value, presumably, and in return they are given money. Could a similar thing happen with the Hub? Or an extended network.
Or think about social capital. What is social capital? Well, map it to monetary capital. How does that work? Amass money, and then lend it out, and expect a return with interest. Well, if you think about a company as being a certain amount of social capital, what is the turn that comes with interest? Think about the social value. After all, the structure of a company allow people to trust one another, so that one department trusts another, or one person in one company position interlocks with another person in another company, the seller and marketeer, the supplier and the contractor.
That is, free your mind from thinking about the roles and categories, and just examine how money flows. If we are to produce an alternative system, there will be equivalent aspects to sales, marketing, etc. They may fulfil these functions, but they won't be "sales" and "marketing"... more like "honour payment" or "donation", and "recommendation". Remember multi-level marketing? That fad was riding on the notion that people could make a little money from recommending a thing, a toothpaste they used. Of course it turned people into salespeople, which wasn't good. So, this new form is not about turning people into salespeople, but recording how things happen, and making sure money flow appropriately.
transitional games
These are transitional games, at least on my time-map. They are temporary measures, experiments, so that we develop the skills and attitudes necessary to be able to play some really serious trust games, games that will deal with the level of environmental degradation, that can resolve our massive social disorders and injustices.
Currently, organisations cost a lot of money just to maintain the organisation itself. Effectively, if we produce similar effects without organisational overheads, a lot of money is saved. But we should be wise with this, since as we know we don't save money. We just reduce costs.
However, think about how factories changed, replacing eg 10 men with a robot. Even with the costs of robots etc, the total cost goes down. The company appears to "save" money. And ten people are made redundant. (Of course, this is replaced with other people getting work, the robot manufacturers, but perhaps as a whole, the robot manufacturers cost less than all the workers the robots replace.)
Now, when we make managers redundant, and various roles, it may look like the same kind of thing. We replace manager hierarchy with horizontal self-organising systems. For some reason, I don't think it is the same. What do you think? And if it does "save" money, what should a company do with this money?
Basically, in this transition period, we are moving from positional contracts, to ones that are more related to genuine trust. It is all to do with trust, it is just we don't need the organisational scaffolding of qualifications and roles, just the direct engagement of people doing the job.
hubminsters
I haven't collected together my thoughts about this, because they are so varied. I am hoping that by presenting them to the right people, elements will be contributed that are essential. If we pull it together, we might be able to present a proposal so exciting, so reasonable, that the powers that be will be willing to play.
I'd like to take three levels of game play. Option One which just involves the hubminsters saying yes, and enabling it with their permission. Option Two which involves the hubminsters actually putting their name to it and leveraging a little money from them and with their partners. And Option Three which involves getting a reasonably high investment to see if we can get a substantial result. Think about it as manually kick-starting a bike, or the old rotatary handles on the first cars, or pulling the propellors to get the airplane engine revving. Or, having a small starter motor, to get the engine moving. Or, actually unleashing the power of an atom, to start off a chain reaction.
So, here are some small ideas:
- getting paid, like in a company, but as a network
- playing scalable games, from £10, to £100, to £1000, to £10,000
- invited to play, pay nothing; but self-selecting to play costs
- initial self-selecting filtering process implemented by hosts, eg pam's 20th/21st century thinkers
- non-directed relationship building, eg lloyd's tuttle club
- super-lean business practice, eg david's action cycles
- social value tracking, eg tav's system
- ipool, the non-bounded network, which grows into people's social world, like the net
- credits, being paid in closed black (money now) and closed red (expected return)
The trick is to come up with something that is ecologically sound. The money flow is sorted. The hubminsters have something already set up, a business model of some kind. Something about the sale of desk-time as membership fees, and the space to host activities. This shouldn't interfere with it. It should complement it.
I came up with some formulation, which probably fits in to Option Two or maybe Three from above. It is preliminary, and has something missing. Basically, we give £10 to 100 people who turn up at the hub a day. This is funded by eg unltd. Why? Because it is effectively funding Pam's filtering process. Is her process worth £10? If it is, the trick is to roll it out to 100 a day. In addition, we give £100 to 10 people, people who are invited to play based on their self-selection and what they give to the hub in their involvement. This can be paid by a company. And a final payment of £1000 to one person.
It is all scalable, and it needs to be done based on results. That is, people invited to the hub have to come up with some social value that is worth more than £10. And they need to convert this into more money than £10. The initial £10 is for expressing that there is trust that a person has value, and because the hub have no idea, they are given the benefit of the doubt. That is, it is the opposite process that currently happens with funding, which is to be suspicious, and force organisations to compete for funding, and this builds up to ludicrous sums of money. Here, we are talking about giving small amounts of money right from the start.
How can people turn social value into money? Well, for a start, they could use pam's technique, or perhaps david's action cycles with colleagues and companies in order to produce results -- will their colleagues pay them for taking them through pam's filtering system, or david's action cycles? Since the materials are open source, and concepts, they can use these freely. The flow of money is pure. There is no extra money being absorbed by the machinery of the organisation. There are just individuals aligning to do things, collectively, and for one another.
The trick is relating social value to monetary value. We do it in companies already, apparently.
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