Why Do We Play Video Games That Feel Like Work?

In other words, work sucks primarily because it has been made to suck by a combination of extremely expensive real-estate in a down-town office and inattention toward the subject of how to make work fun.

The article calls this "the realities of work" and that the inherent difficulties and uncertainties are natural to the problems of the "real world" and must be accepted. But I beg to differ, there are tons of games that are extremely hard to play well (e.g. Sim City, Devil May Cry, etc.), yet still incredibly fun and addictive. And if you consider online games where interacting with other player can produce just as much uncertainty as real life, games are no less "real" than reality... yet they are fun while real work isn't.

Personally, I think corporations can take a page from video game design and analyze their own employees work flows and design it to be a more fun process.

  * Goals to be achieved that give the player a sense of purpose.
  * Rules that limit how the player can achieve said goals.
  * Feedback on the player's progress towards the goals the proves them to be attainable and motivates the player.
  * Voluntary participation by players aware of the rules and goals.

On the flip side, the Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Credits" features a dystopia in which most people spend their entire lives generating electricity by peddling on stationary bicycles to earn credits they can use to outfit a virtual persona. Let's hope that's not the logical conclusion of Farmville!

Compensation from work is much more distantly related to performance. A salaried or hourly person gets the same pay per time period regardless of being more productive than average or not.

Additionally that compensation is money which as at least one step removed from the actual reward.

And sometimes that reward is using the money to buy time off which is apparently a contradiction and requires complex understanding to justify the whole point of work. Games don't have profound contradictions in this category.

Also work compensation is sometime unfair paying inept or unproductive people who are good at office politics. Games obviously can't be unfair in this way.

Sometimes the rewards are immensely remote such as retirement. Game rewards often occur within seconds or at most hours.

Some rewards are just avoiding improbable miseries such as paying for an illness (if you have the misfortune to live in a society where this is a worry). Disasters in games are always no only unbelievable or impersonal but often humors eg minecraft's creeper or sim city's flood. No popular game has you grinding hard to save money just in case you become unemployable due to depression or cancer.

We play "labor games" for fun because they are the idealistic of what we really want to do but without that irritating intrusion of reality.

In contrast in real life it is hard to find out who actually wants the result you are just tasked to do, nobody knows how it should look like in the end and everybody has complains about the result no matter how it looks. That's why work feels like work and the same thing as a game feels good.

"The goal of Desert Bus was to, quite simply, drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada; a very very boring drive, as those of us who have done it know. There were a couple catches, though: in the game, your bus could not go over 45 miles per hour. Also, it veered to the right, just ever so slightly, so you could not simply tape down the accelerator button on your Genesis pad and leave the game alone; you had to man the wheel at all times. Oh, and did we mention the trip takes eight hours, in real time?"

“You saw nothing. It was just desert stuff going by, And there was a little green tree hanging from the rear-view mirror, one of those things that makes your car smell better? And it would just kind of drift in slowly to one corner of the screen. And you couldn’t take your hands off the controller, and if you did…it didn’t have a spectacular crash, it just slowly went into the sand, and then overheated and stopped, and then the game was you being towed backwards all the way back to Tucson.”

“And when you went from Tucson to Vegas and did the full 8 hours, you had bus stops, and the bus stops…you could stop and open the door, but no one got on. No one’s ever waiting for you. And if you went by them you weren’t punished at all, because nobody was there. It meant nothing. And a bug hit your windshield five times during the eight hours, and that was the only animation. It was just road after road after road. Eight hours of desert bus. And then when you got in - and I love this - when you got into Vegas and pulled in and stopped, the counter - which was five zeros - went to 1. You got 1 point for an eight hour shift, and then a guy came in and said, ‘Do you want to pull a double shift, Mac?’ And then you could drive back to Tucson for another eight hours for another point.”

I find this parallels quite well with my day-to-day software development job, although playing these games remove a lot of the mundane tasks of actual employment (meetings, repetitive tasks, reliance on others, communication issues etc). Both of these involve solving varied problems in different ways, though.

I concluded that I was simply doing what I enjoy, creative problem solving, and that I was just lucky enough to do what I intrinsically enjoyed for a living. I didn't think that my choice of leisure-activity was influenced by society's apparent changing view of free-time as "potential work time".

    >hours of "WHY DID I BUY THIS GAME?"
    >seconds of "I AM A GOD"

  A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since
  consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may 
  seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation
  involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial 
  stew of death and decay. But on a 7NC Luxury Cruise, we 
  are skillfully enabled in the construction of various
  fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One 
  way to 'triumph' is via the rigors of self-improvement
  (diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest time-
  management seminars), to which the crew's amphetaminic
  upkeep of the [ship] is an unsubtle analogue. But 
  there's another way out, too: not titivation but
  titillation; not hard work but hard play.

She kinda made the argument that if I wanted to progress in life I could follow the rules (work to get this degree), and that it should stimulate me as much as diablo 3. It's true that in both cases, there are rules. Except I thought that life/society/civilization is not really a game. Maybe if you want to improve the economy, you can use bits of game theory to reduce the cost of regulation and corruption, but I doubt that it's sane to imply that all real life is like a game. Maybe I should try to play by the rules, but it would be very tempting to cheat, that's one reason to avoid playing, to avoid the temptation of playing.

In video games the rules make sense, but in society it rarely does. Social stratification, social disintegration, my unemployment, etc.

I don't think video games are much simpler, or that simplicity has something to do with it. But the rules never contradict themselves. There can be games with rules that are pretty complex too, and those games are much more interesting because there is a logic to it.

Maybe an interesting game concept would be to make a game more realistic by introducing more contradictions inside it. Pollute the environment, increase poverty, deal drugs, corrupt politicians, etc, adding a "some people just like to see the world burn" aspect to it. GTA is already a little like that, except I don't see it going all the way through.

Work often has situations where the outcome is much less certain. We have a problem we don't know how to solve so we need to try various possibilities. This can be fun if there is room for experimentation and we can try some things that fail without failing overall, but in situations with tight deadlines and uncertain outcomes, where you have a limited chance to attempt something and you don't know whether it will work, this is a recipe for stress.

- You need to work to make money to buy food to eat. That introduces unavoidable stress into your work in the form that you know, if you don't work well enough, you'll get fired and then you'll starve. Or get your power cut. Or be kicked out of your house.

- You can always start again, no matter how badly you mess up. In a lot of workplaces, if you mess up a couple of times, you're fired and you can't try again.

In short, real work is less like Farming Simulator 2013 and more like nethack, but you only have one life.

Why do backbreaking labor outside when one can sit comfortably in a cool office staring at a screen? Because meaningful labor is invigorating, even in simulation.

The author also twists Adorno. Immediately before the quoted sentence ("the contraband of modes of behaviour proper in the domain of work… is being smuggled into the realm of free time"), Adorno says "free time must not resemble work in any way whatsoever, in order, presumably that one can work all the more effectively afterwards." Obviously work simulators try to very closely resemble work, and they don't try to hide this fact at all—no contraband smuggling here! That was written 50 years ago, maybe things have changed.

I think its the same thing with games - some games I play do feel like work, but I still enjoy them and I think the reason is because I choose to play when I want to. If I were told "you have to play this game now", then I'd probably hate it, but if I can decide for myself, then I enjoy it. Which games I would choose to play in a given moment depends on the mood I'm in.

I'm amazed at this level of obsession and dedication. If we could figure out how to turn this on or off for learning to code or figuring out math then everyone could do wonders.

plus in many cases it simply gives many something to do. never underestimate the number of people who have nothing to do and need an outlet

its not much work if your not bored anymore

So we like to play, because it improves our skills.