It's important to distinguish the concept of games from that of play. And, as we'll see, both of them are important for understanding how to be effective in doing gamification. The thinker who best articulated this division was a French intellectual named Roger Caillois. And he described the opposition of the two concepts which he called Ludus on one hand and Paidia on the other hand. Ludus from that same Latin word that we talked about that basically means games, Paidia from the Greek for child, which we can represent as play. And Caillois looked at these as basically two different poles. Two opposites at some level. So what does that mean? Think about it. If you think just colloquially, what's the difference between play and games? Obviously, they're connected. But is there some fundamental difference? What do mean when we talk about play that's different from when we talk about games? Here's some quotes from philosopher's and game designers. First on the concept of play. The first one comes from the philosopher Friedrich Schiller who talks about play as the expenditure of exuberant energy. Santayana, another philosopher, says play is done spontaneously for its own sake. Lev Vygotsky who was an influential education theorist talked about play as creating a zone of proximal development. This was a essential element in Vygotsky's educational theories. Basically the notion is a child when he or she is learning, has a certain level that they have obtained, but they have a potential capacity that substantially greater than that. The zone of proximal development of a great teacher and an educational system that can reach beyond themselves and therefor move up, and advance, and learn. So Lev Vygotsky here says play. Which we normally we think of as the stuff you do when you're not learning, when you're not in class. He says play actually helps a child reach that zone of proximal development. And in play, a child always behaves beyond his average age. The final quote is from Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman two game designers who wrote an influential book called the Rules of Play, which I'd encourage you to look at if you're interested in getting deeper into these notions about what makes a game and how game designers think. And they say play is free movement within a more rigid structure. So what all these things are talking about, is that play is Freedom. Play is doing whatever you want, but it's within some structure. There are some limits. Inside this world, you can be yourself and try out anything and just goof off. But you're in an environment that constrains your ability to do that. Sound familiar? Sounds a lot like the magic circle that we talked about before in the work of [UNKNOWN]. Okay, that's play. think about the relevance of play to gamification. This idea of exuberant energy. This idea of doing something for its own sake. Really powerful. Gets to the heart of fun and engagement in some of things that, in a gamified system, we want to create for the players. The second term is games. So how are games different from play? Here's some quotes. The first is from Tracy Fullerton and her two co-authors, the authors of a major textbook on game design. And they say a game is a closed, formal system that engages players in a structured conflict and resolves in an unequal outcome. So, here we see something very different than we were talking about play. Play was exuberant and for it's on sake and so forth. Games are formal, they are structured and they produce outcomes. Similarly Sid Meier, a famous game developer. He wrote, most notably, the civilization series of games, says that a game is a series of meaningful choices. I love this quote. It encapsulates a lot of what's in the previous quote, but boils it down to the essence. There's a formal system. But that system, essentially, what it does is creates a set of choices, and the choices have meaning. Something happens based on what you do. The actions that you take produce different results. And the game, therefore, is about taking the right actions to produce the re-, the result that you're going for. Thmoas Mallaby is a an anthropologist actually, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who studies games and virtual worlds. And he talks about games as a domain of contrived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes. So here, the interpretable outcomes. This is is very similar to the concept that we saw up here about outcomes. The key point though that Mallaby had is this notion of contingency, randomness, chance. And it's contrived. The game manually puts that contingency in to create an environment where your choices are meaningful. Finally, here, Jesse Schell the game designer we met before from his DICE talk about gamification, he talks about a game as a problem-solving activity approached with a playful attitude. And hopefully, this notion of a playful attitude should look familiar. Relating back to what I described in the prior video about suits notion of lusory attitude, and it connects up the concept of games. The problem solving activity, the structure within a set of rules to get an outcome with the notion of play. So therefore a game looks something like this. It's a branching path where we have a set of choices, and each choice leads to various outcomes, and each choice we make might give us other choices, and other choices, and other choices. Some of them connect back up, some of them don't, And whatever we do, it produces some result. And in getting from one point to another, we start here and we finish here. And this is the goal of the game moving through that pathway taking the the path that we choose to take. Through this environment is play at some level. We have freedom in what we do. We could make a wrong turn and go down here, and not get to the result, but let's assume we don't. We eventually get to the finish line. We have that choice in what we do. The game design, the structure that is put into place is what gives us an opportunity to make those choices, feel that sense of freedom, actually have that freedom but being in an environment that allows our choices to have meaning and to feel meaningful getting to a result. So here' s an exercise that you might do based on what I've just described. Make a list of things in your life that involve play. And then make another list of things that involve games. And to make it more challenging, don't list activities that are primarily recreational or entertainment oriented. Try to think about things from work, or from school, or from your social life, or from your interaction with say the government, or with businesses. Think about things that are more play-like and things that are more game-like and what distinguishes them. Here's a few quick takeaways before we wrap up this segment for how the philosophical discussion that I've given you relates back to gamification. The first is to emphasize the concept of voluntariness. This was in [UNKNOWN] definition of games as voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles. And it runs all the way through. Especially for play, because play is free form exuberant action for no purpose. But even for games, the user has to feel the choices are meaningful and therefore they have to be voluntary choices. James P. Cars who wrote a delightful little book called Finite and Infinite Games, he's a professor at NYU says, and I'm paraphrasing, whoever must play cannot play. If you're forced to do something, it's not a game. This is a concept we'll come back to later when we talk about gamification in enterprises, and in the workplace. Second point here is that games involve learning or problem solving. If they don't, they're play. Play, again, can just be spontaneous energy. Games have some structure, some objectives. And at some level, there has to be a challenge, which is a problem to be solved. And finally, designing a game is a balance. We're going to come back to this when we talk about game design. And it's a balance at least in part between the structure, the rules of the game, and that open-ended, free-form, play like sense of exploration. Too much of one and the game's not any fun because the possibilities are too limited. Too much of the other and the game has no purpose and it's just wandering around without getting anywhere, which doesn't make the player have as much fun, typically, and really doesn't achieve the objectives of the game designer, or in this case the organization that implemented the gamified system.
