Last weekend I succumbed to temptation, and with the kids watching on in amusement I downloaded a game onto my iPad that I had been curious about for a long time—a game called “Angry Birds".
The premise of the game is that the green pigs have stolen the birds’ eggs and the birds are now attacking the pigs, who lurk in various precarious and increasingly elaborate structures made of stone, wood, boulders and other materials. The gamer’s challenge is to launch each angry bird from a sling shot and hit the pigs and their structures at just the right angles to destroy them. It is very much a strategic problem of physics to determine angles and accurately predict cause and effect—since at each of the many levels you are given only a certain number of angry birds with various capabilities.
The game boasts many sound effects—bird chirps and pig mutterings along with a high-pitched cry of “Wheeee!” from each bird as it is launched by the slingshot, sad little “oofs” and “ouches” when they fall to the side after missing a pig, and of course the smug chorus of pug grunts that occurs each time you fail in a try to get all the pigs, along with the triumphant “Woo hooooo!” from the birds when you succeed.
There are many levels and tasks to achieve, all clearly laid out and tracked so you can see your progress or lack thereof as you cycle through various strategies for getting the most pigs with the fewest birds. Clear and straightforward—unlike the messy ambiguities of life you are escaping when you play the game.
“Be sure to turn off the sound when you’re out in public like on a bus—or everybody will jump you,” advised my son as I sank further into addiction with my new toy. I found myself driven to achieve the next level and to think about the problem at each level and come back to it later to try new strategies. I stayed up past my bedtime working to get just one more level. I did research on the Internet to learn about best practices. I strove to beat my personal best. I did many of the things with Angry Birds that companies want their employees to do.
After a recent acquisition I’m now part of a very large company that, among other things, develops software applications used by companies to run their businesses. And in this company, one of whose goals is to produce “beautiful software,” the concept of gamification” comes up fairly frequently. The idea is that if the same compelling qualities that games possess could be injected into business processes and applications used by employees, those employees would become more engaged, involved, and driven to achieve the desired results, especially if they could understand exactly what they had to do and could always see their standing and progress from both a personal perspective and in comparison to others.
This is an idea I can buy—I saw it in action recently when I signed up for an exercise program at work. Each employee who signed up pledged to do 2100 minutes of exercise in 7 weeks, and record their minutes on an ongoing basis on-line. And each employee could see their personal progress, the cumulative progress for their site, and how they ranked overall in number of exercise minutes—updated every quarter hour.
Many quiet little competitions sprang up over the 7 weeks between people and sites, and I have no doubt more than a few people pushed harder and got more exercise because of this very public feedback, myself included. It was gamification in action, not only at an individual level but at a group level with the site rankings. If we could figure out how to do this for software development it would be very interesting. The agile approach, dividing the group into small scrums and measuring the productivity of each scrum over short periods of time with very publicly demoed results, can be tricky, since the challenges each scrum faces may be very different, and comparisons may negatively impact cross-scrum cooperation. Complex and creative work is not easily measured. And how do you inspire greater individual achievement without discouraging collaboration and teamwork?
Is all of life a game after all? And how do you avoid ending up with a flock of angry birds slinging themselves at throngs of obnoxiously snorting pigs? Gamify that.
