Jane McGonigal's book on gamification, Reality is Broken, includes quite a bit of detail about this similarity between work and games. The basic idea is that humans enjoy work if certain conditions are met, and games are designed to meet these conditions. She defines a game as having four elements:
* Goals to be achieved that give the player a sense of purpose.
* Rules that limit how the player can achieve said goals.
* Feedback on the player's progress towards the goals the proves them to be attainable and motivates the player.
* Voluntary participation by players aware of the rules and goals.
And then the further argument is that we can make the world a better place and people happier in general by bringing all of these game-style elements into work and everyday life. It's an interesting read, if a little one-sided.
On the flip side, the Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Credits" features a dystopia in which most people spend their entire lives generating electricity by peddling on stationary bicycles to earn credits they can use to outfit a virtual persona. Let's hope that's not the logical conclusion of Farmville!
The point made in that book that stuck with me ever since I first read it is this (I think she was quoting someone else):
The opposite of play is not work; it's depression.
I think the key thing people do wrong through, is to take work and try to make it more like play by adding in superficial 'game mechanics' like achievements.
Visual Studio had this for a while, and it had things like "use the debugger 100 times" or something like that. This is not how you make work into play. Those achievements are meaningless. Worse, they could provide incentive for using visual studio poorly.
I'm pretty sure this is a rephrasing of a much older, well known principle in psychology (they cover it in undergrad), that work satisfaction is a function of: autonomy, feedback and variety.
In other words: people want to control how they do work, and feel they have some flexibility. They want to recieve prompt feedback so they understand when they're doing well or badly. And they want to encounter a variety of challenges.
Gamification is just building a tight feedback loop and providing sufficient variety. Autonomy is much harder to automate, because it seems to be the opposite of building an 'on-rails' experience guaranteed to please someone.
On the flip side, the Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Credits" features a dystopia in which most people spend their entire lives generating electricity by peddling on stationary bicycles to earn credits they can use to outfit a virtual persona. Let's hope that's not the logical conclusion of Farmville!