RPG for developers. Two years later
Just over two years ago, I published an article Another vision of boring GTD planners through the prism of RPG games , in which I described my old idea about combining work on software projects and elements of RPG games.
You all know what GTD is. Projects, Tasks, Mailstone and Deadlines. Many offices and development teams use this or that system based on (or not on the basis of) GTD to control tasks in projects in their daily work. I propose to replace the basic concepts of this methodology with the terms of multiplayer RPG, add buns, statistics, achievements, beauty and fan. We will get the same scheduler, but not so boring and with additional motivation.
The topic then collected 100,500 comments (mostly “super! I want!”), And the most infectious gathered in teams and began to implement the idea. So what has been done in these two years?
')
I know a few teams who tried to implement similar projects, but could not resolve the contradictions, which will be discussed.
This text was written in early January, so that some data could have time to become outdated.
Over the past year, unnoticed by most of us, the idea of ​​using game mechanics in everyday life captured the minds of millions and received a separate name - Gamification. On Habré about it already wrote a relatively long time. At the end of 2011, The Gamification Summit conference was held, the next one is scheduled for June 2012 - so everything is serious here.
More and more sites are overgrown with meaningless badges, points and awards. When I wrote that article, I was not thinking at all about it, although in the current classification it can be described as gamification of software development. And many conclusions are well extrapolated to gamification as a whole.
I advise you to watch these videos about gamification:
So, why hasn’t anyone implemented the system described above? The answer to this question is rather complicated, ambiguous and sometimes uncertain. It turned out that to completely transfer the game to the real world is not so simple.
The problems remain the same (from the previous post), although many try to ignore them:
Do not think that nothing interesting has appeared in the last two years. On the contrary. At the end of the article you will find a fairly large list of sites and services that in one sense or another partially implement the voiced ideas.
It is good to have friends who can come to ask "how do you like the idea?", And who honestly answer "shit", knowing that I will not be offended. Periodically changing the shell of the idea, I again asked the opinions of friends. And in the end the counter question was raised:
- Would you use it yourself?
- Of course, this is fun!
- OK, and in a month, when the funny will bother?
And then I realized that no. In a month it would have gotten me. I even tried for some time, while at work, to imagine that there is a similar system and that it throws me some notifications. For example, I’m sitting in the office for the second day in a row, the code isn’t compiled, the crocodile isn’t caught, and then the achivka pops up. You are at work in a row more than 24 hours! ”... oh well ?! and I did not know.
Take, for example, Foursquare. This is where a person writes that he has stopped using the service, because in the end everything has slipped to badges for badges. Another example is Stack Overflow. If you remove the rating system and badges, it will remain the same excellent resource that many of us get directly from Google.com on a particular programmer issue.
Recently, I even specifically began to answer daily questions on Stack Overflow, in order to put an experiment on myself - what motivates me to do it. It turned out that after some small number of points, it became useful for me to help people myself - you remember some details, google the correct query, learn something new. In other words, you study yourself. And I never paid attention to the badges there.
Badges and achivkam need meaning. So what if I created 1000 classes or used 15 different languages ​​in the project (the latter, of course, says something about me, yes)?
If you watched the video at the beginning of the article, you remember what Gabe Zichermann calls one of the most motivating factors. Right - status. Meaningful badges and badges give the user a higher status than others. But inside the company there is already a status hierarchy. No matter how many points you get, you will not be cooler than your boss.
Another thing is the status in the community. But for this, it needs the same goals and rules of the game (which is discussed further). Partly on the Open Source community, what services are targeted like Coderwall , Ohloh , Masterbranch .
The last is history. Although it is difficult to draw a parallel here, the history of the game world is always present in games, namely, why are you doing this. Suppose you do not need to kill 100 pigs, and get 100 pig tails to save the world! Or work in Excel can be turned into an MMO game and take money for it (yes, I'm talking about Eve online).
What is the point of this system?
What happens if you remove points and achivki?
Why will people use the system for more than a month?
© Bernard Suits
What is first: reward or action? I play - I have a reward for achievements, or I work to get a reward. Games are not played just for the sake of rewards and points. Otherwise, Progress Wars would be the most interesting game in the world.
Games are voluntary activities. If an if-then question arises, then someone makes me do something — this is a completely different psychological interaction. So, for example, imposed ratings can be the opposite demotivating. It is wrong to think that the game mechanics are easily one-to-one transferred to the real world and will be just as fun.
Sebastian Deterding, in the Meaningful Play lecture, says that fun = study in an optimal setting. When we play a game, we gradually increase our skills in this game. The same thing in real life, remember when you last studied something new with interest. That was a fan. But in real life there is little interesting voluntary study of the new, mostly monotonous use of old skills.
In any sandbox game, such as World of Warcraft, you, it seems, can do anything, but nevertheless everyone is limited by the rules of the game world. For the same quest give the same amount of exp. The more difficult the enemy, the more gold will be given for his murder. Remember, in most games, goals are straightforward and structured.
How to ensure a fair assessment for all team members? Is the class written by Vasya more important than the class written by Petya? How many points to give for them? What to say about when I set myself goals and goals.
How to evaluate the skill in some area of ​​a person? An interesting attempt is the programmer competency matrix , but the concept of “programming” is now so broad that it is possible to argue about the applicability of this table.
I spied on a cool idea in Strokes , a system for Visual Studio - challenges. Something like writing implementations for pre-prepared unit tests. The task is one for all, the rules and evaluation are unambiguous. The ideal solution for educational purposes.
In RescueTime there are goals that allow you to set goals for yourself, such as “sitting on Facebook no more than an hour a day. Rypple’s project management system also has goals. But they try to adhere to collective unambiguous goals, for example, “increase profits by 20% compared with the previous quarter”. Everyone who participated in the achievement of this goal can attach a badge, which in this case carries a certain status meaning.
But in real life we ​​don’t choose when and what kind of chelendji will appear. And most importantly, there is no system of unit tests that could give an answer how well these challenges have been fulfilled.
Although, if there is willpower, then you can only move mountains by self-control, lose 100kg or level up as a developer - a person has set a goal for himself and has invented a set of tools to improve programming.
And one more important thought - in games we learn from mistakes, in real life they are fired or deprived of prizes for mistakes.
The uncertainty of the rules smoothly flows into the need for a game master. In the computer game, the game itself is the game master: no subjectivity, everyone is equal, everyone plays by the same rules (yes, later on cheating). What would any MMO turn into if everyone gave himself an experiment for completing the quest?
If the assessment of the performance of tasks and the verification of the rules cannot be automated, a person is necessary, whose authority is recognized by everyone, and who himself decides what and how much to give for the performance of certain tasks.
For example, in RescueTime goals there is a controller - a person who sets goals and monitors their implementation. In a team of one person, I don’t see how it can work at all, in a small team there must be some kind of disinterested person who does not participate in the rating, and some tough automation and the moderator’s ladder are needed in the big team. Although, the example of many online communities tells us that the self-moderation of an open community is quite possible.
People will always try to get the maximum result, spending a minimum of effort. Whatever the system, it will be exploited and tightly screwed.
No need to go far, see VS Achievements Leaderboard . Most zadroty just completed all achivki (many of which are rather anti-achivki), and sit with the same result.
Or an example with Foursquare and the Mayor Maker application, which is automatically checked everywhere in radius of visibility. The good idea was with Foursquare.
And how are Coderwall- type aggregators going to fight with open-source wrapping ? When under any progress I can create a special repository on github.
Of course, this is a separate topic. In our our Internet, considerable experience has been gained in dealing with cheating and cheating: pre-moderation, karma, levels, and limitations. Any solution can be found. The main thing is not to turn a blind eye to it.
And the last. A huge part of the responses to the previous article was from programmers. Many programmers underestimate the role of game designers in the development of game software (especially those who did not work in game-devs). This is how services from developers for developers are obtained. None of the teams that tried to do something, there was no game designer.
You need to understand that the development of interesting game mechanics is difficult.
However, since the time of writing the previous article, many interesting projects have appeared.
Interestingly, this technique is very well suited for learning, because the role of the game master is performed by the teacher. Here, for example, is an excellent World of C # -craft article .
And on the network, online programming learning sites, such as rubymonk.com and codecademy.com , have been launched . Although, judging by the questions asked there, some are better off not trying to learn how to program at all.
As I said, the problems remain the same. It is good that interesting projects appear. I really want to see examples of successful implementations of these ideas and hear constructive comments.
You all know what GTD is. Projects, Tasks, Mailstone and Deadlines. Many offices and development teams use this or that system based on (or not on the basis of) GTD to control tasks in projects in their daily work. I propose to replace the basic concepts of this methodology with the terms of multiplayer RPG, add buns, statistics, achievements, beauty and fan. We will get the same scheduler, but not so boring and with additional motivation.
The topic then collected 100,500 comments (mostly “super! I want!”), And the most infectious gathered in teams and began to implement the idea. So what has been done in these two years?
')
I know a few teams who tried to implement similar projects, but could not resolve the contradictions, which will be discussed.
This text was written in early January, so that some data could have time to become outdated.
Gamification
Over the past year, unnoticed by most of us, the idea of ​​using game mechanics in everyday life captured the minds of millions and received a separate name - Gamification. On Habré about it already wrote a relatively long time. At the end of 2011, The Gamification Summit conference was held, the next one is scheduled for June 2012 - so everything is serious here.
More and more sites are overgrown with meaningless badges, points and awards. When I wrote that article, I was not thinking at all about it, although in the current classification it can be described as gamification of software development. And many conclusions are well extrapolated to gamification as a whole.
I advise you to watch these videos about gamification:
- The game of layer Building on top of the world ,
- Meaningful Play, getting gamification right ,
- Fun is the Future: Mastering Gamification ,
- TEDxKids @ Brussels - Gabe Zichermann - Gamification
So, why hasn’t anyone implemented the system described above? The answer to this question is rather complicated, ambiguous and sometimes uncertain. It turned out that to completely transfer the game to the real world is not so simple.
The problems remain the same (from the previous post), although many try to ignore them:
- Meaning,
- Voluntary activity
- Uncertainty of the objectives of the evaluation rules,
- Lack of a Game Master,
- Cheating and cheating,
- Programmers, not game designers.
Do not think that nothing interesting has appeared in the last two years. On the contrary. At the end of the article you will find a fairly large list of sites and services that in one sense or another partially implement the voiced ideas.
Meaning
It is good to have friends who can come to ask "how do you like the idea?", And who honestly answer "shit", knowing that I will not be offended. Periodically changing the shell of the idea, I again asked the opinions of friends. And in the end the counter question was raised:
- Would you use it yourself?
- Of course, this is fun!
- OK, and in a month, when the funny will bother?
And then I realized that no. In a month it would have gotten me. I even tried for some time, while at work, to imagine that there is a similar system and that it throws me some notifications. For example, I’m sitting in the office for the second day in a row, the code isn’t compiled, the crocodile isn’t caught, and then the achivka pops up. You are at work in a row more than 24 hours! ”... oh well ?! and I did not know.
Take, for example, Foursquare. This is where a person writes that he has stopped using the service, because in the end everything has slipped to badges for badges. Another example is Stack Overflow. If you remove the rating system and badges, it will remain the same excellent resource that many of us get directly from Google.com on a particular programmer issue.
Recently, I even specifically began to answer daily questions on Stack Overflow, in order to put an experiment on myself - what motivates me to do it. It turned out that after some small number of points, it became useful for me to help people myself - you remember some details, google the correct query, learn something new. In other words, you study yourself. And I never paid attention to the badges there.
Badges and achivkam need meaning. So what if I created 1000 classes or used 15 different languages ​​in the project (the latter, of course, says something about me, yes)?
If you watched the video at the beginning of the article, you remember what Gabe Zichermann calls one of the most motivating factors. Right - status. Meaningful badges and badges give the user a higher status than others. But inside the company there is already a status hierarchy. No matter how many points you get, you will not be cooler than your boss.
Another thing is the status in the community. But for this, it needs the same goals and rules of the game (which is discussed further). Partly on the Open Source community, what services are targeted like Coderwall , Ohloh , Masterbranch .
The last is history. Although it is difficult to draw a parallel here, the history of the game world is always present in games, namely, why are you doing this. Suppose you do not need to kill 100 pigs, and get 100 pig tails to save the world! Or work in Excel can be turned into an MMO game and take money for it (yes, I'm talking about Eve online).
What is the point of this system?
What happens if you remove points and achivki?
Why will people use the system for more than a month?
Voluntary activity
© Bernard Suits
What is first: reward or action? I play - I have a reward for achievements, or I work to get a reward. Games are not played just for the sake of rewards and points. Otherwise, Progress Wars would be the most interesting game in the world.
Games are voluntary activities. If an if-then question arises, then someone makes me do something — this is a completely different psychological interaction. So, for example, imposed ratings can be the opposite demotivating. It is wrong to think that the game mechanics are easily one-to-one transferred to the real world and will be just as fun.
Sebastian Deterding, in the Meaningful Play lecture, says that fun = study in an optimal setting. When we play a game, we gradually increase our skills in this game. The same thing in real life, remember when you last studied something new with interest. That was a fan. But in real life there is little interesting voluntary study of the new, mostly monotonous use of old skills.
Uncertainty of objectives and rules of evaluation
In any sandbox game, such as World of Warcraft, you, it seems, can do anything, but nevertheless everyone is limited by the rules of the game world. For the same quest give the same amount of exp. The more difficult the enemy, the more gold will be given for his murder. Remember, in most games, goals are straightforward and structured.
How to ensure a fair assessment for all team members? Is the class written by Vasya more important than the class written by Petya? How many points to give for them? What to say about when I set myself goals and goals.
How to evaluate the skill in some area of ​​a person? An interesting attempt is the programmer competency matrix , but the concept of “programming” is now so broad that it is possible to argue about the applicability of this table.
I spied on a cool idea in Strokes , a system for Visual Studio - challenges. Something like writing implementations for pre-prepared unit tests. The task is one for all, the rules and evaluation are unambiguous. The ideal solution for educational purposes.
In RescueTime there are goals that allow you to set goals for yourself, such as “sitting on Facebook no more than an hour a day. Rypple’s project management system also has goals. But they try to adhere to collective unambiguous goals, for example, “increase profits by 20% compared with the previous quarter”. Everyone who participated in the achievement of this goal can attach a badge, which in this case carries a certain status meaning.
But in real life we ​​don’t choose when and what kind of chelendji will appear. And most importantly, there is no system of unit tests that could give an answer how well these challenges have been fulfilled.
Although, if there is willpower, then you can only move mountains by self-control, lose 100kg or level up as a developer - a person has set a goal for himself and has invented a set of tools to improve programming.
And one more important thought - in games we learn from mistakes, in real life they are fired or deprived of prizes for mistakes.
Lack of a Game Master
The uncertainty of the rules smoothly flows into the need for a game master. In the computer game, the game itself is the game master: no subjectivity, everyone is equal, everyone plays by the same rules (yes, later on cheating). What would any MMO turn into if everyone gave himself an experiment for completing the quest?
If the assessment of the performance of tasks and the verification of the rules cannot be automated, a person is necessary, whose authority is recognized by everyone, and who himself decides what and how much to give for the performance of certain tasks.
For example, in RescueTime goals there is a controller - a person who sets goals and monitors their implementation. In a team of one person, I don’t see how it can work at all, in a small team there must be some kind of disinterested person who does not participate in the rating, and some tough automation and the moderator’s ladder are needed in the big team. Although, the example of many online communities tells us that the self-moderation of an open community is quite possible.
Cheating and cheating
People will always try to get the maximum result, spending a minimum of effort. Whatever the system, it will be exploited and tightly screwed.
No need to go far, see VS Achievements Leaderboard . Most zadroty just completed all achivki (many of which are rather anti-achivki), and sit with the same result.
Or an example with Foursquare and the Mayor Maker application, which is automatically checked everywhere in radius of visibility. The good idea was with Foursquare.
And how are Coderwall- type aggregators going to fight with open-source wrapping ? When under any progress I can create a special repository on github.
Of course, this is a separate topic. In our our Internet, considerable experience has been gained in dealing with cheating and cheating: pre-moderation, karma, levels, and limitations. Any solution can be found. The main thing is not to turn a blind eye to it.
Programmers, not game designers
And the last. A huge part of the responses to the previous article was from programmers. Many programmers underestimate the role of game designers in the development of game software (especially those who did not work in game-devs). This is how services from developers for developers are obtained. None of the teams that tried to do something, there was no game designer.
You need to understand that the development of interesting game mechanics is difficult.
Interesting projects
However, since the time of writing the previous article, many interesting projects have appeared.
- Visual Studio Achievements - Achievements integrated into Visual Studio. I would call most of them anti-acrobats, because they propagate shit.
- Strokes is an earlier version of Visual Studio. Few people knew about this plugin before the hype around the previous project.
- Jira Hero - Achivki for Jira. Smart people immediately told me to make a plugin for the existing system. I do not know anyone who would use it.
- UserInfuser is a kind of gamification platform from www.cloudcaptive.com . Downloaded less than 200 times each file, 9 followers - no one uses.
- Play Nice.ly - bug tracker with badges and all garbage. Pretty dull. The video has 394 views.
- Progress Wars - the irony of gamification and exp.
- Ribbon Hero - office tutorial from microsoft. Quite an interesting project.
- Coderwall - githab parsite and gives achivki . An example of the use of badges.
- Red Critter Tracker - task tracker with achivka. Video - 382 views, slow, done in flash. For points, you can buy rewards in rewardstore. You can write what skills you have. Agile. More than 2.0 interface than ripl, but still curve.
- Rypple - tracker with badges. You can set global goals, give custom status badges for their implementation. Parameters of badges: skills, how much and who can issue a rolling badge. Socially: like, comment. The interface is crooked.
- Badgeville is a platform for adding gamification to your site. Make a platform for company management - badgeville.com/solutions/enterprise.php# / www.simplyzesty.com/social-media/badgeville-launches-gamification-for-the-workplace
- Masterbranch - analyzes open-source projects.
- Ohloh is an old site, also parsing open-source projects, but it was not overgrown with gamification.
- Mindbloom is also a new project. Tries to motivate you to do something. Tamagotchi. Subjectively. Does not work.
Training
Interestingly, this technique is very well suited for learning, because the role of the game master is performed by the teacher. Here, for example, is an excellent World of C # -craft article .
And on the network, online programming learning sites, such as rubymonk.com and codecademy.com , have been launched . Although, judging by the questions asked there, some are better off not trying to learn how to program at all.
Instead of epilogue
As I said, the problems remain the same. It is good that interesting projects appear. I really want to see examples of successful implementations of these ideas and hear constructive comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/142466/
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