Anyone born around the decade of the 1960s came of age in that brief window of time between 1980 and 1985 called The Golden Age of Arcade Games, when pimple-faced kids pumped more quarters into machines than anytime in human history. Arcades were a $20 billion industry at its height. More than three times what EVERYONE spent on movies. More than all the revenues of all major sports combined. Twice as much as everything spent in all the casinos in Nevada.
I was dead-center in the Golden Age, born in 1968. I was eleven when Space Invaders kicked it all off. Then Asteroids. Then the highest grossing video game of all time, Pac-Man. I remember a trip to Hawaii when I was twelve. Forget the sands and sun of Waikiki. I scrounged for quarters, pasty white in the arcade almost the whole time. So motivated to play.
Fast forward thirty years. No more quarters. but love for games as big as ever. Over 200 million Americans play video games. Men and women. Young and old. 70% of bosses play too, despite what they may want us to believe. And we’ve got all kinds of games: Dance Dance Revolution; Wii Sports; Guitar Hero; FarmVille; Angry Birds; Halo; Call of Duty; Sims and Solitaire. Worldwide, we spend over three billion hours a week in virtual worlds. Then when we add in sports, either watching or playing, the numbers go up again.
We’re all highly motivated to play. We’re willing to pay money and exert ourselves for the love of the games.
Games as Virtual Work
And what are we really doing when we play games? What are we doing in these virtual worlds? Virtual work. In Asteroids I sat in a spaceship, shooting rocks. Had to blow them up or they would kill me. Sounds like work to me. Challenging work. In FarmVille we farm. In Call of Duty we go on military missions. In Sims we build things. All these are virtual work. Games are accomplishment simulators, and within them, we’re highly motivated to accomplish things.
Life changes when we can take that innate motivation for accomplishment and bring it into the real world. We’re motivated to work when we can measure our progress. When we can see our impact. When goals are clear and compelling. When rules of action are clear, we feel we can follow them, and they don’t change in the middle of the game. When feedback is fast, so we can see our progress, and we can feel like we’re actually getting something done.
How can we transfer some of this motivation to the real world of work? One way is to bring game principles into the workplace: compelling goals, rules of action, and fast feedback. Whenever these are present, motivation goes up.
