Play as an Alternate Reward System at Work

Long-term goals can be hard to get excited about working towards — especially when they’re not exactly your goals. So how about making the little steps toward accomplishing certain ends immediately enjoyable? Maybe by introducing play?

A couple examples:

1. Retail giant Target uses games to improve cashiers’ throughput. The game system is tied into the checkout lane and is scored on a per item basis against a target time per item; different items take different amounts of time to ring up and bag up. (Here’s a bit more.)
2. An engineering manager talks about constructing work games to appeal to programmer geeks with whom he works. As he states: “It’s also why we love games — they’re just dolled up systems — and the more you understand this fascination with games, the better you’ll be at managing [geeks].”

I suspect playful interfaces can be incorporated into a variety of work settings. That being said, we must be cautious to properly develop such technologies with sensitivity to good user experience and workplace psychology. As some of the comments in the links about Target’s system reveal, not everyone found the game to be enjoyable. I can certainly forsee playful systems twisted into oppressive quota regimes.

(examples via kottke.org and Samuel Bowles)