Want More Engagement? Make Work a Game

If you were a boss (or teacher) looking for more engagement, you could throw money (or cupcakes) at the problem, but it turns out that there may be ways better ways to get results. At least that's what author Tom Chatfield concluded in his recent TED talk. Rather than simply try to bribe employees, Chatfield suggest employers use lessons learned from gaming to motivate workers.
His argument makes a sense. Just think of the hours of unbroken engagement gamers devote to the likes of World of Warcraft without so much as changing out of their pajamas. How much more would employees get done if they could channel even a small proportion of that sort of engagement at the office? So how can it be done? Chatfield has several ideas:

• Use an experience system. Don't have grades, for example: give students an avatar or a profile that levels up steadily based on things like attendance and performance. Everything should count in some way towards this precisely-measured, steady individual progression: a far more intimate, involving and nuanced way of measuring progress over time than most conventional means.
• Multiple long and short-term aims. You break something down into many parallel tasks. You don't just to say to someone, do 5,000 sums, or 100, or even 50: you create a whole spectrum of larger and smaller objectives that help people take ownership of their progress, and keep them feeling they are progressing and succeeding - as well as targeting particular sets of skills.
• Reward for effort. People should be credited for everything they try and do. Don't punish failure. Instead, reward and reinforce, and make everything count towards a clear measure of progress. As I've said elsewhere, one of the most profound transformations we can learn from games is how to turn the sense that someone has "failed" into the sense that they "haven't succeeded yet."
• Rapid, clear, frequent feedback. This is absolutely central to all forms of learning and engagement. With many of the most intractable problems in the world today, like global warming and pollution, it can be almost impossible to learn or understand something when consequences and feedback are distant from causes. Showing a clear link between things, and allowing people to experience this experimentally, allows learning to take place: you need to be shown and to experience exactly how an action plays out, what it caused, whether your attempt worked or not.
• Uncertainty. This is the real neurological gold mine so far as gaming is concerned. Dopamine elevates when you get a little prize for doing something, but what really lights up the brain is the unexpected reward: the one that couldn't be predicted. The right amount of well-calibrated uncertainty can create intense engagement.
• Other people. If games should remind us of one crucial aspect of our evolutionary natures more than any other, it's that reward is not just money or personal achievement points; and it's not just solitary individuals slumped in front of screens: it's the intense validation of doing something in comparison and in collaboration with others.