Play is Work

Games are a type of work if you think about it. We invest our time in games. We give games our attention and our mental capacities. But why do we do that?

What makes play work? The answer is that great work is also great play. Great play makes us more productive. That means that great games can also help us become better, and more productive, individuals.

Let’s examine game play as work, and why we continue to play games, despite difficulties to the contrary. Part of why we continue to play is because we enjoy the feelings of “competent engagement” that we get from games. This allows us to get more serious about our work. It also affects how we approach game play.

More productive

So if play is like work, do games make us more productive? Turns out that they do. Playful activities are intrinsically more motivating and can help you become more productive in the workplace.

So it’s no wonder why employers are turning to games to help make their workplace more gameful and engaging. If games are already dominating the attention of some employees, then it makes sense to incorporate aspects of games into the work environment.

If you look closely, then you can see this already happening in some workplaces. Think about a sales team that tracks their monthly, quarterly, and yearly sales goals. That could turn into a competition where individuals are striving to outdo one another.

This feedback system could easily be gamified where management adds challenges. Those challenges could include sales goals. They could also support their sales team by providing them with new ways to source leads and earn some significant wins.

Bernard Suits defines games as "a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." That doesn’t sound very much like work. Work is overcoming necessary obstacles for us in order to attain something in return.

So before we dive deeper into productivity at work, let’s first determine why we play games to begin with.

Why we play

Games foster intrinsic motivation. That is the desire for us to play because we enjoy the process. The three parts of intrinsic motivation include competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

Competence comes from our ability to take part in and affect the game. This means that we have the ability to do something. Autonomy addresses peoples’ abilities to act independently from others in making their choices. Relatedness reflects how choices made affect the game and its outcomes.

These intrinsic motivations are also present in active and productive workplaces. Employees who are most productive are also competent: they can do the job that’s assigned to them. High performing employees can also work autonomously and execute their own actions according to their own agenda. This affects their relatedness and how their actions affect themselves and the whole workplace.

So how can someone associate “play” with “work.” It’s because play is inherently intrinsic. We are capable; we are autonomous; and we are relatable. When we are playing we are the most productive workers.

That’s why the opposite of play is not work. Great play IS great work. The opposite of play is depression, and it’s something that we should work to avoid to have the most active and engaged workforce possible.

Competent engagement

So what makes play work and what makes work play? The key here is to be competently engaged. If we feel competent at something and we feel that we can have an impact on the environment through our actions, then we are engaged.

Part of what makes games so engaging is that it is an easy way for us to demonstrate our capacity and our competency. We keep playing because demonstrating that competency is addicting. So addicting that we’ll keep playing games until we demonstrate mastery by “beating the game.”

This feeling of mastery, this inherent feeling of demonstrating our competency, is exactly what Raph Koster describes in his book A theory of fun for game design. It’s the ability for us to experiment and demonstrate our mastery is what makes games an inherently pleasurable activity. That activity is work.

That’s why even hard work can become engaging, motivating, and addicting. We can volunteer to spend long hours to just hit the top of the leader board. But whether that is in Dance Dance Revolution or part of our sales meeting is a matter of venue and location.

Getting serious while working

So what does that mean for games? We can play while we work because play is work. Games are serious business, and should be taken as seriously as our work.

That serious attitude demands that we become part of a larger community where thousands band together for our love of work and play.

And that is why we love games. We love to work. Games are about training their players to solve complex problems, to develop their competency, and display their mastery over these challenges. There is no better definition of work than games.

This article addressed how play is really work in a games-based learning environment. If you’d like to learn more about play in gamification then check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

Dave Eng, EdD

Managing Partner

dave@universityxp.com

www.universityxp.com

References

Betts, B. (2013, October 28). Does play have to be the opposite of work? Retrieved August 7, 2019, from https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/does-play-have-to-be-the-opposite-of-work/

Dizik, A. (2016, July 8). Can gaming at work make you more productive? - BBC Worklife. Retrieved August 7, 2019, from https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160707-can-gaming-at-work-make-you-more-productive

Holzman, L. (2016, April 05). What's the Opposite of Play? Retrieved August 7, 2019, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/conceptual-revolution/201604/what-s-the-opposite-play

Koster, R. (2014). A theory of fun for game design. Sebastopol, CA: OReilly Media.

Odgis, J. (2017, May 11). Gaming: "The Opposite of Play Isn't Work-It's Depression". Retrieved August 7, 2019, from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gaming-the-opposite-of-play-isnt-workits-depression_b_5914a76ce4b01ad573dac209

Suits, B. (2014). The grasshopper: Games, life, and utopia. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.

Cite this Article

Eng, D. (2019, August 20). Play is Work. Retrieved MONTH DATE, YEAR, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/8/20/play-is-work

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