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Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game
james_bong666 writes "According to the New York Times, business software vendors can learn a great deal from how video games are designed.
This makes a lot of sense — how many professionals like working with their software in the office as much as gaming after hours? Developers can deal with looking at tables and grids full of data to make decisions and get things done, but other types of workers (executives, salespeople, etc.) have little to no attention span and need a picture to be worth a thousand words, i.e. their software designed completely differently."
Actually videogames are becoming more like work than being a diversion where a person can blow off steam. Have you played GTA: San Andreas? All those mini button pushing games just to get the character up to snuff to complete a quest. Don't get me started on Harvest Moon. Pokemon with its breeding, hatching eggs, growing berries and other nonsense. Games don't reward the player for their skill or talent at completing a level or pulling off a stunt. Nowadays games simply add hours to their playtime by adding hours and hours of pointless grinding to unlock something really stupid.
By the way, I don't care how much someone loves their job. Anyone who stays after-hours and plays games or just hangs out is sad.
The guys at Naked Objects (http://www.nakedobjects.org/) have been singing a similar tune for some time now. Not the part about making business more like games, but about using "open-ended" and proper object oriented software that allows user interaction similar to games. I think they even used The Incredible Machine as inspiration.
I can definitely see this sort of thing happening in my line of work; I'm a mechanical engineer who specializes in design. I'll spend the bulk of my work week playing with 3D models, and the finite element model does all the work I hated having to do by hand. The people who use my work give ratings for how much they like the final product, so I like to think of (that rating)/(total cost) as my "score".
ETrade's user trading interface was deliberately designed to look something like a video game. Not too many choices, self-guiding, big type. This encourages users to trade too much.
Scientists, small business owners, executives, and even the person tending the grill at the burger joint have normal attention spans.
Do not underestimate the difficulty and attention required of other people's work. I am now a lab manager of a memory development lab at a major university, but I've spent many years working at mini-markets, coffee shops, etc.
Let me tell you. If you have 14 fraps, 5 iced lattes, 3 vanilla lattes, 4 hot mochas, and several ice teas to make in under 6 minutes, all the while greeting customers and making small talk, you damn well better pay attention, and concentrate.
In such cases, you transcend the planning of one or two drinks, and start planning and attending to the situation at a larger scale. At that level, its Zen.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
You're absolutely right.
My computer science course, for instance, did spend some time in the first year emphasising that getting user requirements was absolutely crucial, and if you didn't have a good idea what they wanted you may as well go home now.
But most of the marks came from designing and producing code. There was only one project which required us to go out and find user requirements before implementing them, and that was in the final year. Everything else, the requirements were given to you in plain language right at the start. Even developing some sort of sane user interface was of minimal importance.
This might work OK if you're a developer in a huge organisation and all you ever do is churn out code to requirements which have already been given to you - but you'll have to put in a lot of work to advance beyond that point.
I already can make work look like a videogame... Just look at my interface to kill processes :-D
Perhaps we need to stop requiring developers to design user interfaces and have UI specialists write that part of the code?
Developers write fantastic User Interfaces. Also see Unix. Not quite what you mean? Find a specialist who specialises in UIs for non developers.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.