As businesses discover that most people aren't that enthusiastic about their jobs, turning work into play has become a major focus for employers. Tabletop role-players have naturally adopted the elements of engaging play for decades by playing Dungeons & Dragons. As the business world embraces "gamification," tabletop gamers may be able to teach the industry a thing or two about what makes a game -- or work -- more fun.
[h=3]Does ANYONE Like Their Job?[/h]
Gallup reports engagement numbers on a daily basis. The average hovers around 30% in the U.S., but -- good news everyone! -- it hit a 31.5% high in 2014:
In 2015, the number slipped. Only 30% of employees are engaged at work. Fortune estimates that number is even lower with only 13% of employees engaged. Much of the damage was wrought by the pernicious belief that "maximizing shareholder value" is the goal of every company. Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post explains:
The drive to fulfill shareholder demands has caused some undesirable side effects. The New York Times posits what the problem is:
The antidote to this malaise seems to be to make work feel less like work. It's not a secret: Psychologists have known for decades what makes human beings happy, and by proxy what makes an employee happy. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) consists of three basic needs. When these three needs are met, a person is happier and engaged in the task at hand. Those needs encompass competence (being good at what you do), relatedness (being connected with others), and autonomy (having control when and how you do something).
The elements that make D&D so popular are the same elements that make gamification engaging. Co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax, explains the secret sauce in Role Playing Mastery:
Tabletop gamers have been experiencing the benefits of SDT for years: D&D fulfills all three of the theory's needs and businesses are finally taking note.
[h=3]Competence: 20th-Level Managers
[/h]
One of Dungeons & Dragons' earliest innovations and a contributing factor to its enormous popularity was how it addressed the SDT need of competence. D&D introduced levels, ability scores, and hit points, all attributes that are ubiquitous today in all forms of gaming. Jon Peterson explains in Playing at the World:
Work has its own levels, including titles, offices, vacation, and of course pay. The more an employee has of any of these, the more it is indicative of competence. Of course, in real life progression is not nearly as neat and competence often has nothing to do with level.
D&D's "clean" progression, in which every character advances commensurate with experience, is what Peterson reports as being revolutionary at the time the role-playing game debuted:
In short, people like the idea that the harder you work, the more you gain. Dungeons & Dragons provides what careers so often do not -- a clear path of stratified progression.
[h=3]Relatedness: Getting the Party Started
[/h]
Dungeons & Dragons has relatedness in spades; it is the very foundation of the game. Although computer games have made it feasible for a solitary experience, at heart a role-playing game involves gaming with other players. This is reflected within the game itself in the form of a party. Gygax explains in Role-Playing Mastery:
Peterson points out how revolutionary this was for gaming:
Teamwork is a critical part of how work gets done, but work teams are not successful 60% of the time. Of course, all of these issues plague D&D groups as well, the difference being that the typical adventuring part acts as a fast-failure testing ground for players. D&D reinforces the importance of cooperation for survival and if the party fails, they roll up new characters and start again.
[h=3]Autonomy: Let Me Tell You About My Character[/h]
Of all the elements of SDT that work sometimes lacks, autonomy is likely the biggest challenge. Workers are often expected to be part of teams as part of the daily grind, but they do so by sacrificing some autonomy. Gygax clarifies how autonomy creates engagement:
This creative freedom to actively shape a story sets RPGs apart from other games, as Peterson attests:
Or to put it another way, the very act of playing D&D is an exercise in self-determination theory. Imagine if work was nearly as engaging!
[h=3]Let's Get Engaged[/h]
Companies invest nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars globally in trying to get employees to be more invested in their jobs. It isn't working and may well be focusing on the wrong people:
Engagement processes focus on all the wrong things by using the same old structures that caused disengagement in the first place. Enter gamification. Gamification expert Yu-Kai Chou outlined eight elements of gamification (Meaning, Accomplishment, Empowerment, Ownership, Social Influence, Scarcity, Unpredictability, and Avoidance) he calls Octalysis. Role-playing games have all of these elements, and many of these attributes have filtered to gamification through computer RPGs:
Despite the appeal of gamification, 80% of gamification efforts fail. Gartner explains how businesses confusion the artifacts of gaming (badges, levels, point systems) with actually implementing good game design:
Although there is significant risk, there are also some notable successes. It's a big business, with some projections estimating the market at $5.5 billion by 2018. It seems like a place where gamers -- and role-players in particular, who know the mechanics of gaming better than computer gamers where the math is obscured by a program -- can thrive. Not everyone agrees.
[h=3]"Game Design is NOT Gamification!"[/h]
Gabe Zichermann reminds us that gamification is still new:
Game designers aren't exactly welcoming this new discipline:
Fear of what, exactly? Many game designers fear that gamification has gone too far, a soulless facsimile of actual gaming. Jesse Schell, former Creative Director of Disney's Imagineering VR Studio, worries about gamification become so pervasive that you get +10 points just for eating cereal. Ian Bogost is less kind:
The apparent ease of video game implementation, which sometimes obscures the checks and balances of the underlying game system, can create some a superficial gaming experience. And just as video games can be poorly balanced, gamification implementation can have many of the same flaws.
Tabletop gaming can help. Chris Hardwick and Dan Cordell, who met while working on The Witcher 3, and decided to start their own game design studio, Wickerman Games, explained how the tabletop gaming experience "shows its math":
Gamification can similarly learn from tabletop gamers.
[h=3]Role-Players and the Game of Life[/h]
The business world has increasingly come around to the gamer's way of thinking, adapting the elements if not the intrinsic mechanics of gaming into everyday work. Gamification opens a new path for gamers to thrive in the business world as developers, as testers, and as participants.
We may not always be able to put our game experience on our resume, but as gamification becomes more common, a tabletop role-player's gaming skills might come in handy. Mastering levels, experience points, and achievements may soon be the key to a successful career. For the other articles in this series please see:
Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, and communicator. You can follow him at Patreon.
[h=3]Does ANYONE Like Their Job?[/h]
Gallup reports engagement numbers on a daily basis. The average hovers around 30% in the U.S., but -- good news everyone! -- it hit a 31.5% high in 2014:
At 31.5%, employee engagement is at its highest level since Gallup first began measuring the performance indicator in 2000. As Gallup has reported, public perceptions of the economy and job market are increasingly positive following improved GDP growth and lower unemployment. Workers' improved engagement levels could be a reflection of the country's improved economic conditions. Engagement began to drop in 2008 during the financial collapse and continued to fall in 2009, not showing any signs of improvement until 2011, and then reaching its current peak in 2014.
In 2015, the number slipped. Only 30% of employees are engaged at work. Fortune estimates that number is even lower with only 13% of employees engaged. Much of the damage was wrought by the pernicious belief that "maximizing shareholder value" is the goal of every company. Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post explains:
Indeed, you could argue that much of what Americans perceive to be wrong with the economy these days — the slow growth and rising inequality; the recurring scandals; the wild swings from boom to bust; the inadequate investment in R&D, worker training and public goods — has its roots in this ideology.
The drive to fulfill shareholder demands has caused some undesirable side effects. The New York Times posits what the problem is:
Demand for our time is increasingly exceeding our capacity — draining us of the energy we need to bring our skill and talent fully to life. Increased competitiveness and a leaner, post-recession work force add to the pressures. The rise of digital technology is perhaps the biggest influence, exposing us to an unprecedented flood of information and requests that we feel compelled to read and respond to at all hours of the day and night.
The antidote to this malaise seems to be to make work feel less like work. It's not a secret: Psychologists have known for decades what makes human beings happy, and by proxy what makes an employee happy. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) consists of three basic needs. When these three needs are met, a person is happier and engaged in the task at hand. Those needs encompass competence (being good at what you do), relatedness (being connected with others), and autonomy (having control when and how you do something).
The elements that make D&D so popular are the same elements that make gamification engaging. Co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax, explains the secret sauce in Role Playing Mastery:
However, role-playing games, by their nature, call upon the participants to develop a deeper involvement in the activity than another type of game might require. Many of those with the time and inclination to indulge in such a demanding but fulfilling pastime become avid players. A role-playing game, instead of being an idle activity only engaged in when the weather is wet or cold, quickly becomes one of highly active and eager participation. This deep involvement and commitment shared by all enthusiasts is indeed a contributing reason for the popularity of role games.
Tabletop gamers have been experiencing the benefits of SDT for years: D&D fulfills all three of the theory's needs and businesses are finally taking note.
[h=3]Competence: 20th-Level Managers
[/h]
One of Dungeons & Dragons' earliest innovations and a contributing factor to its enormous popularity was how it addressed the SDT need of competence. D&D introduced levels, ability scores, and hit points, all attributes that are ubiquitous today in all forms of gaming. Jon Peterson explains in Playing at the World:
Dungeons & Dragons also linked to role-playing games a set of common mechanisms adopted by virtually all of its successors. It established the goal of personal progression, a character’s improvement through experience, as the ostensible substitute for victory; the game is otherwise without win conditions. Its manner of measuring progression, through experience points and levels, set a widely-followed precedent, one that now admits of innumerable variants.
Work has its own levels, including titles, offices, vacation, and of course pay. The more an employee has of any of these, the more it is indicative of competence. Of course, in real life progression is not nearly as neat and competence often has nothing to do with level.
D&D's "clean" progression, in which every character advances commensurate with experience, is what Peterson reports as being revolutionary at the time the role-playing game debuted:
... many initial reactions to Dungeons & Dragons heralded this quality of the game as a remarkable one. From this response, we can glean that the system of stratified progression, as packaged by Dungeons & Dragons, appeared novel, perhaps even disruptively innovative, to its early audience. No small part of the game’s appeal derives from this innovation, and thus the development of progression holds a special interest for posterity.
In short, people like the idea that the harder you work, the more you gain. Dungeons & Dragons provides what careers so often do not -- a clear path of stratified progression.
[h=3]Relatedness: Getting the Party Started
[/h]
Dungeons & Dragons has relatedness in spades; it is the very foundation of the game. Although computer games have made it feasible for a solitary experience, at heart a role-playing game involves gaming with other players. This is reflected within the game itself in the form of a party. Gygax explains in Role-Playing Mastery:
Role-playing games are contests in which the players usually cooperate as a group to achieve a common goal rather than compete to eliminate one another from play. Chess, board games, cards, and miniatures games all pit individuals or teams against each other. Role games, in contrast, bring players together in a mutual effort to have their characters succeed or at least survive against the hostile “world” environment.
Peterson points out how revolutionary this was for gaming:
The cooperative model of Dungeons & Dragons, the way the game pits parties against non-player adversaries controlled by the referee, is one of the game’s signature qualities, yet for all that, the earliest rules pass over these coalitions in silence, aside from the notes on alignment already discussed in Section 2.8. Little in the history of two-player, or at best two-sided, wargames prefigures it.
Teamwork is a critical part of how work gets done, but work teams are not successful 60% of the time. Of course, all of these issues plague D&D groups as well, the difference being that the typical adventuring part acts as a fast-failure testing ground for players. D&D reinforces the importance of cooperation for survival and if the party fails, they roll up new characters and start again.
[h=3]Autonomy: Let Me Tell You About My Character[/h]
Of all the elements of SDT that work sometimes lacks, autonomy is likely the biggest challenge. Workers are often expected to be part of teams as part of the daily grind, but they do so by sacrificing some autonomy. Gygax clarifies how autonomy creates engagement:
The difference with role-playing games is that they ask all the participants to exercise this creative ability. When another person creates a make-believe situation and simply displays it before an audience (in the form of a book or a TV show, for instance), the audience simply absorbs the creator’s imaginative output but seldom if ever has the opportunity to add its own imagination to the product. Role games, on the other hand, require participation not only in the mechanics of play but also (and to a far greater extent) in the subject matter of play. All participants actually have important and demanding creative roles in such games, and their imaginative input is increased as long-term participation evolves.
This creative freedom to actively shape a story sets RPGs apart from other games, as Peterson attests:
Role-playing games, however, aspire to an ideal where anything can be attempted, where the player can direct that a character attempt any action that one can plausibly contend a person in that situation might undertake— the referee, a role missing in Monopoly and most comparable games, decides the result...Ultimately, this study will conclude that freedom of agency is as much a necessary condition for inclusion in the genre of role-playing games as role assumption itself. To play a character is to dictate the actions of an imaginary person, and self-determination is inseparable from personhood.
Or to put it another way, the very act of playing D&D is an exercise in self-determination theory. Imagine if work was nearly as engaging!
[h=3]Let's Get Engaged[/h]
Companies invest nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars globally in trying to get employees to be more invested in their jobs. It isn't working and may well be focusing on the wrong people:
Some research even suggests that the best performers are actually less engaged than weak performers. According to Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, employees who provide the least value often are more engaged than those who provide the most value. His paper, "Job Performance is Not a Predictor of Employee Engagement," identifies research that shows that in 42 percent of organizations, low performers are the most engaged. In almost half the companies surveyed, the least-able workers scored much better than their high-performing peers on three measures of engagement: the likelihood that they would give 100 percent, recommend their company to others, and think their bosses treat them fairly.
Engagement processes focus on all the wrong things by using the same old structures that caused disengagement in the first place. Enter gamification. Gamification expert Yu-Kai Chou outlined eight elements of gamification (Meaning, Accomplishment, Empowerment, Ownership, Social Influence, Scarcity, Unpredictability, and Avoidance) he calls Octalysis. Role-playing games have all of these elements, and many of these attributes have filtered to gamification through computer RPGs:
If you’ve played RPGs (Role-Playing Games) before, you would know that a lot about leveling up is simply killing the same monsters over and over at the same place for HOURS. In the “real world,” this is often defined as Grunt Work. No one likes to do grunt work. But these kids who have no discipline are sacrificing sleep and risking being grounded to do it. Why? Because they are excited about bringing their character from level 18 to level 19. Because they want to get that extra +5 strength, and perhaps be able to beat that boss once they reach level 20. They do it because they see the big picture of WHY they are doing it, and they like the sense of Development and Accomplishment and Pride, as well as Progression and Self Actualization that leveling up gives them. They want something enough that anything that stands in the way, be it grunt work or not, is worth doing, and doing quickly.
Despite the appeal of gamification, 80% of gamification efforts fail. Gartner explains how businesses confusion the artifacts of gaming (badges, levels, point systems) with actually implementing good game design:
While game mechanics such as points and badges are the hallmarks of gamification, the real challenge is to design player-centric applications that focus on the motivations and rewards that truly engage players more fully. Game mechanics like points, badges and leader boards are simply the tools that implement the underlying engagement models.
Although there is significant risk, there are also some notable successes. It's a big business, with some projections estimating the market at $5.5 billion by 2018. It seems like a place where gamers -- and role-players in particular, who know the mechanics of gaming better than computer gamers where the math is obscured by a program -- can thrive. Not everyone agrees.
[h=3]"Game Design is NOT Gamification!"[/h]
Gabe Zichermann reminds us that gamification is still new:
Game design is a relatively new discipline that has no official body, union or certification process. Its practitioners, like many tech professionals, have developed their skills mostly on the job. The best game designers bring together psychology, sociology and a sense of playfulness with a creative spark to create games. In other words, the process has been shrouded in mystery; the best work made by a privileged few who managed to get into the club while the getting was good.
Game designers aren't exactly welcoming this new discipline:
So why do game designers hate gamification so much that they'll resort to Wikipedia bombing to remove the subject, repeatedly scream obscenities on Twitter and plaster Facebook, Tumblr and Wordpress with tirades about how this movement "takes the thing that is least essential to games and represents it as the core of the experience"? In short, fear.
Fear of what, exactly? Many game designers fear that gamification has gone too far, a soulless facsimile of actual gaming. Jesse Schell, former Creative Director of Disney's Imagineering VR Studio, worries about gamification become so pervasive that you get +10 points just for eating cereal. Ian Bogost is less kind:
More specifically, gamification is marketing bull***t, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bull***t already reigns anyway...Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity. That may be true, but truth doesn’t matter for bulls***ters. Indeed, the very point of gamification is to make the sale as easy as possible.
The apparent ease of video game implementation, which sometimes obscures the checks and balances of the underlying game system, can create some a superficial gaming experience. And just as video games can be poorly balanced, gamification implementation can have many of the same flaws.
Tabletop gaming can help. Chris Hardwick and Dan Cordell, who met while working on The Witcher 3, and decided to start their own game design studio, Wickerman Games, explained how the tabletop gaming experience "shows its math":
We think video game developers certainly can learn a lot from tabletop games. They’re often just mathematical abstractions of reality, a certain element of chance is introduced via the die rolls, and usually in a pen and paper game the result of that die roll determines how well the task went. For example, if I rolled a natural 20, the lock basically fell apart in front of me. Perhaps I rolled one less than the target number, but the GM has decided to allow me to open the lock, at the expense of losing my lock picks because they’re now broken.
Gamification can similarly learn from tabletop gamers.
[h=3]Role-Players and the Game of Life[/h]
The business world has increasingly come around to the gamer's way of thinking, adapting the elements if not the intrinsic mechanics of gaming into everyday work. Gamification opens a new path for gamers to thrive in the business world as developers, as testers, and as participants.
We may not always be able to put our game experience on our resume, but as gamification becomes more common, a tabletop role-player's gaming skills might come in handy. Mastering levels, experience points, and achievements may soon be the key to a successful career. For the other articles in this series please see:
- D&D Goes to Work Part I: Adventures in Resume Writing
- D&D Goes to Work Part II: Professional Game Masters
Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, and communicator. You can follow him at Patreon.
