Gamification of Dull User Experiences

There has been one thing this year which I have really been putting off, and that is my Final Project. It’s an individually marked piece which is worth twice the amount of the other modules, yet I have spent the least amount of time on it. Illogical I know, which is what im aiming to fix.

My original thoughts before starting the year was to work on some new age game controlling device which would use usually ignored input schemes to control games. I wanted to do a bit of hardware hacking, maybe a bit of soldering and Arduino to make something really cool. Unfortunately I really dont think this is going to happen. My ideas for this topic are very sparse and have no real meaning or thought behind them. My original thought process was to go look at existing non-traditional input devices such as sonar or muscle-tension technology and submerge data inputs from them into some sort of related game.

But we dont want that; It’s just not all DAT. After discussing thoughts with peers there has always been one thing on my mind which I have always wanted to achieve, but never found a way to properly introduce it… Gamification. And I quote, from Wikipedia of all places:

Gamification is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences.

There has been many successful applications of Gamification in the digital and physical world around me. For example, my first knowledgable encounter with the subject was an iPhone App called Epic Win. This App takes the ordinary To-Do list and gives you a completely unimaginable perspective of it. Within hours of using it I was motivating myself to do challenges I was previously unwilling to do, atleast until I turned the chore of ‘Hoover the Living Room’ into a 200 point bonus towards unlocking some epic loot. Not only is this gamifying a digital To-Do list, but its also reimagining a physical challenge by taking a negative activity and giving it positive outcomes.

So this brings me onto the topic of the post… Gamification of Dull User Experiences. As I sit here now I already wish my thoughts had been invented, almost a personal reward for writing blog posts. At the end of the day you are either a writer, or you are not. If you are the latter, you probably dislike the entire experience altogether. The entire experience of writing this blog post has given me cravings to do everything but the task at hand. Whether it be checking the lives of other people on social networks to see if they are doing something marginally more exciting than myself, or watching paint dry.

I think Microsoft tried to do this sort of experience previously and helplessly failed; maybe merging a bad form of gamification into a help system was a bad idea. If you haven’t got the reference by now I am referring to that paperclip which we have all come to love hate. I aim to take a similar approach but from an entirely different angle. Rather than hounding the user with useless information and animations, I have a plan of engaging the user with their work in an entirely new way. Almost through the use of adapting an auto-correct engine I could pick up formatting, spelling and words from what people type and reward them for producing torrents of textual content.

Before I get carried away and engrossed with this idea, I’ll give it thought and come back another time to expand upon it!

…or completely go against it.