I was prompted to write this after seeing this article over on Autoblog (great site for car fanatics btw).

The thought of making something more fun by making it into a game is not new. Often times, parents and teachers will encourage children to treat chores or assignments like a game. For example, my parents, who saw how much I loved video games, would often tell me to treat doing the dishes (by hand for all you youngin’s) like a game. As gamers, we know the pleasure a person can receive just by getting numerical praise for our accomplishments. Some people value real world incentives more, but the simply adding a score to something as mundane as recycling your bottles makes it more interesting, which may be incentive enough for more people to participate in the act. I wonder what other places this kind of thinking could be applied. Maybe have a display on your houses’ sinks to show your homes total water consumption. Maybe seeing those numbers every day rather than on a monthly bill would make people conserve more H2O.

But I also wonder what the long term effects would be. If a machine like this stayed in place for years, would it always be the most used way of recycling your garbage? Would the creators of the machine need to come up with a new iteration of the game every couple years to keep people from becoming bored and going back to the standard “non game” recycle bins?

Maybe some things couldn’t have games applied to them. Let’s think about it; if driving to work became a game in which you received achievements for driving safely for every X amount of miles, would it change peoples perception of driving safely? Would it incentivize people enough to do it? If sex was like a game, would it become less pleasurable while trying to beat your high score? Wait, don’t answer that. Maybe gaming needs to be kept separate in some situations.

If everything was like a game, what would be the point of games?