maps, warcraft and cycling

A few years ago i had the pleasure of working on a project looking at World of Warcraft, trying to understand why users were so obsessed with the game, and how a specific video games publisher could develop a successful competitor title.

i found the project itself fascinating. it opened up a new world to me. online gamers were forming guilds which seemed to play a similar role to social clubs or 5 aside football teams. member were even starting to meet up in real life and forging friendships which went beyond the mindless duals of alternate clicking that make up the actual game.

before long, i realised that in order to understand people's obsession with the game i needed to play a little bit by myself, or at least that was the excuse i gave to my wife. to cut a long story short, after a couple of nights of playing and some help leveling up from a few friends i found myself unable to pull myself away from it. it was compounded by my wife going to Cambodia for a fortnight and leaving me without a voice of reason telling me i was wasting my time.

I finished that last paragraph with a bit of a value judgment about videogames. I don't subscribe to the extreme Folk Devils and Moral Panics view of video games, that they are ruining young people and that they are morally detrimental to society (as wonderfully, Brass Eye'ly depicted in this BBC documentary.... do watch it, it is very funny). i did, however, quickly find myself lost in the spectacle of World of Warcraft, playing obsessively and not really understanding what benefit i was getting from it. i'd finish playing at 2 in the morning and feel... kind of hollow. there was no great joy in playing, beyond the transient satisfaction of leveling up every few hours of play, the occasional feeling of camaraderie or act of virtual kindness shared with another player. Compared to other video games which involve beautiful worlds to explore, speedy reaction, comedy or beauty, eerie and emotive landscapes or anything really, World of Warcraft seemed to have very little except for a series of reward systems internal to the game and yet sucked people in for way longer than other more genuinely entertaining, challenging, brain taxing games. oh and a hugely complex element of strategy but that i found too bizarre and removed from anything and was wasted on me (listen to the leroy jenkins team chat and ask yourself: what are they talking about? please Jesus, what are they talking about?).

The time it really hit me was when i'd spent a couple of hours improving my fishing skills. grinding: repeating the same action just to get points. Eventually i achieved my goal and after the momentary sense of joy that i'd got to where i wanted to be in the world of virtual fishing i realised I'd lost two hours of my life pretending to learn a skill in a video game with little application within the game, no joy in acquiring the "skill", nothing learned which would then have application in the non game world. Having reached level 30 or so with my gnome wizard (homunculus magician… dwarf fairy… whatever.. i cant honestly remember, the character was called Argonspleen tho) i cancelled my account.

It comes back to the Guitar Hero dilemma of video games: why invest so much in learning a skill in the digital world when you could spend the same amount of time/ effort doing something good? while part of the joy of video games is that they are unproductive, silly and indulgent, it seems with Warcraft the relationship was all wrong: of intrinsic enjoyment (low), payoff outside the game (none) and addiction (crazily high).

So why not take the horribly addictive elements of world of warcraft and apply them in the real world? the idea would be to identify good goals and behaviours which can take place in the game environment of a real person's life and then work out reward structures that make those behaviours "sticky".

Presumably with a bit of creativity any behaviour which you want to encourage could be tackled through this gamitisation model. There are examples out there now: all the track run and publish to facebook apps feel very game-y, similarly things like the Nike Run events seem specifically designed to run like games. I've even come across examples of apps which are designed to make young offenders sticking to curfew feel like they are playing a game (I can’t find the link right now, but will post as soon as i do).

In advance of a suite of iPhone apps which turn life into a game (or more specifically take the goals you have in your life and make achieving each of those goals feel like a game), I've been thinking about what i can do to help making certain positive behaviours as addictive as Warcraft.
- target: be a nicer person. interact with and help a stranger every day. log the interaction/ exchange on paper. Assign a percentage score for the complexity/ kindness of the interaction. Watch over time and see whether you become more moral
- target: improve your French. listen to a proportion of Michel Thomas' introduction to French everyday. log percentage listened on a fund raising type giant thermometer hanging in your living room

-target: have more original thoughts. Everytime you have an original thought scribble a lightbulb onto your forearm with a marker pen, providing yourself with a constant reminder of how well you have done on a given day
- etc.

I’ve plumped for one specific game for now. I'm training for a cycle event later this year and I’m looking for a way to motivate myself and make sure that cycling doesn’t just become a chore. I have always found the map element of video games motivating. i love the way that a player starts (often) as a Cartesian point on a blank map and then, as they explore and unlock more of the world the map changes, showing more detail and changing from a blank slate into a rich depiction of the world. in games it can act as a quick infographic showing progress through the game, a visual showing how much you've discovered and how much more there is left to go. It makes the game more addictive by simultaneously rewarding and gently chastising: you have unlocked this much map, but you have more work to do.

My plan is to replicate this videogame experience in the real world: i want to gamitise my training and make sticky. I've bought a map of central London (like this) and plan to spend the next few weeks populating it. Everyday i will log where I’ve ridden by scribbling over the roads with a Sharpie. my plan is to take a photo every time i add to the map so eventually I’ll be able to produce a time-lapse of my exploration of London streets.

I've decided to do it this way rather than digitally because it's more tactile, there's more ceremony and ritual around it than just pressing a switch on a Smartphone, it gives a BIG pictorial representation of what I’m doing (rather than a piddly 4" google map) and... and... because i want to do it like this... I'm old fashioned, alright?

My goal is to have cycled down every road on the central London a-z by November. as i have no idea how many miles that is or when i am going to be inspired to actually go to Walthamstow, i don’t know if this is achievable, but i do so want to find out. watch this space.