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Game CEO Sees "Gamification" of Work and Military
An anonymous reader writes "The CEO of Unity discusses 'gamification' — applying game design and technology to real-world applications beyond 'gamespace.' The military is using game design theory for some training programs — not just 'the 3-D, realistic, virtual world experiences, but also the built-in use of frustration and reward.' (And similar training packages were adopted by Unilever, the giant corporation which owns Ben & Jerry's ice cream.) Medical professionals have licensed a 'Google Earth for the human body,' and game design is also being used to build tax software. ('It has to be the most boring field, but I mean that's the point. You can make it slightly challenging and give people little reasons to play these tax tools — beyond, you know, not going to prison!') While some companies conduct team-building exercises using Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, others use game technology to standardize their in-house employee training programs. The interviewer adds, 'I know I'd feel better about job training if it felt more like killing zombies.'"
... the military has yet to implement the "Game over. Play again?" feature.
Have gnu, will travel.
You know, from recent news, those speaking "Come on buddy all you gotta do is pick up a weapon", "Well it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle", and apparently enjoying it (laughing at the least)
Seriously, some things shouldn't be made closer to computer games.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I know I'd feel better about job training if it felt more like killing zombies.
Sadly, job training is about CREATING zombies, not about killing them.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
'I know I'd feel better about job training if it felt more like killing zombies.'
I know I'd feel better about customer service if it allowed for ganking newbs.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The military treating civilians like targets in a game.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Exactly. I think the problem essentially lies in that "gamification" does the opposite of what one should feel during the process.
For example, on April Fools, we hid one of newest coworkers files somewhere on the network that he had access to and told him to go searching for it. He semi-enjoyed the process, but the benefit was that he learned more about the current heirarchy and server structure at our company while doing so. It didn't feel like work because we made it a game. Turned that boring task into a game and it made it fun.
Inversely, like your example, people who would feel the weight of attrocities they commit became completely desensatized to that environment, and in the end have appalling effects. (I don't know for sure if those soldiers played video games, but I wouldn't at all be surprised).
The biggest shame is that its the military who essentially jump-started the whole gamification process. Pilots regularily went through computer simulators long before warfare tactic games were released. So how do you stop the military from doing something they helped invent?
We should also teach physics in first Person shooters. With Schroedinger Zombie-cats which are only half alive and Maxwell deamons. Well. Maybe not.
I think the absolute perfect example of this is Call of Duty. I remember playing the AC130 gunship level in Modern Warfare (the first one) and thinking to myself how scarily accurate this is to real life. I knew I was playing a game and that those little spots of light weren't actually real people I was killing, but I have to admit, it must look like a game to the soldier watching the monitor on the real gunship.
And I think that that's the next phase in technology that the military will take/is already taking: moving the human element out of war. Already we have unmanned combat planes - planes that essentially take the humanity out of warfare. Just point and click on a monitor screen thousands of miles away and you just killed three 'terrorists.' Soon, the U.S. military will hire only gamers for their front-line efforts.
P.S. This is the first step to a completely economic style of warfare. When humans no longer fight and it's just the U.S. robots vs. the Chinese robots, then will war become completely pointless and entirely about economics. I think science fiction predicted another one.
Gamification is a perfectly cromulent word. It embiggens your intellect.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
P.S. This is the first step to a completely economic style of warfare. When humans no longer fight and it's just the U.S. robots vs. the Chinese robots, then will war become completely pointless and entirely about economics. I think science fiction predicted another one.
No.
Everyone will quickly discover that when both sides have easily replaceable robots and limited amount of resources, defending against enemy robots is less efficient than spending same resources to attack enemy's homeland and civilian population, destroying them faster than enemy destroys you.
We will be lucky if amount of expected destruction (and politicians' understanding of it) will be sufficient for MAD-like situation when even best outcome after the first strike is so much worse than the current situation, no one would want to start such a war. Something tells me that either it won't be true, or politicians won't believe that it's true.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
That they're treating civilians as targets is clear, but where do they say it's like in a game?
It seems to me like there are more effective ways to dehumanize opponents and convince someone that the only good arabs are dead arabs, without video games. You just need half the country and their idiot ministers bleating about how Islam is the work of the devil, they're all terrorists, they're all hell-bent on destroying Christianity and the West, they all hate us for our freedoms, they all want Sharia courts in Washington DC, they're all child rapists like <insert isolated tribal incident<, they all want to be suicide bombers when they grow up, etc. And attribute to them some ways of thinking born out of the pure ignorance of the idiot minister or fundie banner-waver ascribing it to them. (E.g., if I see one more rationale which basically takes it as a fact that Muhammad is like Jesus for the Muslims, I might barf.) And how you might be letting some good people burn in Hell if you let the Islam spread.
And then give them guns with references to bible verses inscribed on their optics. (It actually happened.) And have idiot fundie sergeants introduce it as "the Jesus gun" in training.
With a sizable chunk of America being in that state of mind, where every single Muslim is a dangerous enemy, not by virtue of actually shooting at anyone or even having a gun or anything, but just by virtue of being Muslim... do we really need video games to explain why it was inevitable that someone just lets it rip on full auto and lets God sort them?
And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying _all_ America is like that. I know that a lot are very embarassed by their bleating fundie brethren. But when you have some tens of thousands of soldiers over there, if even one in ten is fighting a Crusade in his own mind, and is more concerned about his being elligible for the Rapture that'll come any day now than about peace in a few years, this kind of thing is pretty much doomed to happen.
It's sorta like for a high score all right, but not the video game kinda high score. More like about the kind that'll get some idiot in the top scores list in Heaven.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.