Can the Structures of Gaming Help You Work Better?

“Can the Structures of Gaming Help You Work Better?” has been a question asked by Lifehacker today. Here are my thoughts about this. If you think work really has nothing to do with killing monsters, think twice: how many ( ugly looking ) problems do you have to move out of your way every day ?

I am always astonished to see how well some games are designed to keep you going .. for hours and days. I am also astonished to see how badly some business applications are designed to actually hinder you as much as possible to achieve what you are trying to achieve. In that sense I am a big fan of games @ work, or better: design work like a game.
In the era of smart project planning and activity centric computing this should not be too much of a challenge: imagine you get some sort of credit for every activity you accomplish. A project manager or architect or some smart computer system has determined the complexity of your activity; the more complex it is, the more credit points you receive. The faster you accomplish it, the more points you get. There is some acceptance criteria assigned to the task; depending on how good you fulfill it, the more points you receive.
Based on number of points you receive you advance to higher "levels of expertise" ( depending what type of activity you accomplished ) in your company, or higher "level of reputation". Credit points can be converted to
. extra money ( I am sure CFOs will love this option
. free time
. extra resources to get your work done, like file space on a network drive or your own virtual server, or even a small budget for your own projects
Work could be so much more fun ( and thus productive through motivation boosts ) if carefully "designed". Will it ever be possible to "design" work ? Or should we stop dreaming and realize that there is a major difference between work and fun ?

More of my thoughts on this in “Playing, learning, growing … “ I wrote in August 2009.

My favorites for week 8, 2011

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about cubicle landscapes

One of the many reasons why I love Dilbert comics is that they very often are about the pleasure to work in these modern cubicle landscapes our employers have crafted for us. Well, I only go there if I have to, otherwise I stay at home. Why should I go through this morning commute madness ( actually not so bad in my case; just a 20 minute car ride into Mainz, a medium size town in Germany ) just to get to a place where I actually can not work efficiently ? Anyway, here is another nice one about this topic:

Something to watch: my favorite video clip of the week – about an amazing Guitarist

Thinking outside the box might mean to use a tool in a very different way than people do usually. Watch Erik Mongrain playing his guitar in a very different way … http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/xerqg Amazing Guitarist

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about a crater in Death Valley.

"Little Hebe Crater" by stevelyon. Apparently the Little Hebe Crater must be somewhere in the Death Valley Area, as I assumed when looking at this photo by Steve Lyon, and as I confirmed through Wikipedia. I must have missed it when I was there in 1995. May be next time. You can’t see everythng when travelling…

Something to surprise: my favorite "I really didn’t know this" of the week – about facebook

Did you know that Facebook has 642 726 020 users world wide, most Facebook users come from the US, where 49 % of the population have joined this social network, Germany is on rank 11 with 16 million users, that is 19 % of all Germans in the US the majority of Facebook users are female. Source: These statistics are available here on socialbakers.

Something to talk about: my favorite quote of the week – about language

Language is the source of misunderstandings. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French writer (1900 – 1944) ~ Especially human language ! Watson did a great job last week to deal with this and win the Jeopardy! Challenge. In case you missed it you may want to head to my stream of IBM related videos on youtube and find there 6 10-minute video clips showing how the 20-minutes show episodes went last week on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, or you may just want to watch this nice 10-minute summary. A collection of articles about Watson I have collected here as a Goodle Bookmarks List.

Professions for my next life

Next time I am born I think I will go for one of these professions instead of becoming a project manager:

"4) Spazzacamino 2007" by Alberto Ferrero.

• Chimney sweeper. One has been in my house recently. He charges me € 65 for 15 minutes routine work, and this contains a lot of small talk as well.
• Scuba diving instructor somewhere on Fiji or the Maldives. Probably not the right profession to make lots of money but the right profession to always be at beautiful places where other folks have to pay a lot of money to be there for just a few days. OK, I would need to become a much better scuba diver than I am currently, but if I would start to learn it early enough in my life that should work. Or how about mountain guide or something similar ?
• Writer of books about programming. If you know your topic it is easy to fill hundreds of pages just with the source code you have written. Currently I am reading “Ajax: A Beginner’s Guide” by Steven Holzner, also available on Books24x7. Don’t get me wrong: it is an excellent book I can recommend to everyone who wants to start with web programming and Ajax, with HTML, XML, dynamic HTML, Javascript, PHP, or who thinks who knows something about web programming and Ajax, about HTML, XML, dynamic HTML, Javascript, PHP, like I did. The book is excellent to teach or refresh a lot of fundamentals and comes with lots of interesting examples in a very detailed way – and that’s where the author generates lots of pages with developing and repeating his source code again and again as he explains it in detail. Which is good. And a reasonable way to make money. More about this book may be later here in my blog.

The myth about multi-tasking

Multi-tasking is bad, this is my opinion.

Nevertheless, "bild der wissenschaft" published a nice article about multi-tasking titled "The myth of multi-tasking" in May 2008 with some interesting and surprising findings ( and I added a few of my own additions here ):

• The term multi-tasking comes from computer science and describes how an operating system performs "multi-tasking" by actually switching quickly between tasks to make it look like it would perform these tasks simultaneously.
• Our brain can sense multiple sources simultaneously but can act only on one task at a time. Thus multi-tasking of a brain works the same way as in a computer operating system: through frequent switching. Switching creates extra effort, that’s why I hold to my opinion: multi-tasking is bad. At the end activities take longer and much non-value-add time had to be invested to simply swap thoughts in and our from active parts of your brain. And this swapping is a source of many errors.
• When doing multi-tasking the productivity of our brain is decreased by around 40 %.
  

  "MULTITASKING" by akbar Simonse from Den Haag, The Netherlands

• It is not scientifically proven that women are better in multi-tasking than men, even 80% of people asked during a survey would think so and some studies seems to indicate this. It is as strenuous for women as it is for men. Keeping multiple items under control like the three kids in the living room, the pot with soup on the stove and the phone call with a friend is simply a matter of training, men could learn that as well. As long as the kids and the pot are fine and don’t require any action the situation is under control, but as soon as the woman or man would have to act on multiple events multi-tasking would be required for the price of reduced productivity and stress. The best example I always like to mention: watch people trying to drive a car and having a phone call at the same time and you know what is meant here.
• There are people who actually like that frequent switching and short periods of time to focus on one activity. These are typically people who can not focus on one thing for a longer period of time.
• Companies should try everything to avoid multi-tasking for their work force. This would reduce the rate of errors, stress and the risk of employees to become sick ( of that or because of that ).
• One hint here: check your e-mails only every two hours.

Non-smoking grumbler fired

The boss of a computer firm in North Germany has fired three of his employees because they are non-smoker and insisted in having a smoke-free working place. They delivered good work results, says the boss, but he simply doesn’t need grumbler in his company. People there work close together due to limited space ( sounds familiar ). “We have a lot of phone calls”, said the boss, “and this works best with having a cigarette.”

Wow, and I always thought that smokers are having a hard time in these days. As you probably have heard meanwhile they are not allowed anymore in Germany to smoke in a restaurant or only if there is a designated room for smokers. 

I wonder how this story continues, whether it will be taken to labor court and what the outcome will be then.

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Source (all in German language): net tribune, shortnews.de, Vorarlberg online