We picked up some Toy Story toys at a garage sale this weekend, which have become the center of Brighton’s life for the time being.
but to the people who had made those characters a part of their own lives.
Of course, the lawyers at Pixar will tell you a very different story.
People edit Wikipedia because it’s fun. What is the economic motivation to buy music or play WoW? The theory’s out there.
But what, exactly, is that theory? What makes Wikipedia fun? Is that the same thing that makes World of Warcraft fun? The same thing that makes gambling fun? The same thing that makes all three addictive, sometimes pathologically so?
As far as I can tell, there isn’t a single well-established theory of fun and games. There are some interesting ideas floating around, though.
The best known comes from positive psychology: the concept of flow, which is often considered the essence of what makes games and other activities fun. Flow is that state of sustained concentration (and associated elation) when all of your efforts are directly toward a difficult and significant task that is nevertheless within your capabilities. Different kinds of Wikipedia work are available that can test the skills of adolescent and professor alike and Wikipedians are free to choose tasks they think are significant, so it’s easy to make sense of why Wikipedia can be fun in terms of flow.
Fun is just another word for learning.
Games allow players to be producers and not just consumers. Along with the designer, the players actions co-create the game world.
In computer and video games, players engage in action at a distance, much like remotely manipulating a robot, but in a far more fine-grained fashion. Cognitive research suggests that such fine-grained action at a distance actually causes humans to feel as if their bodies and minds have stretched into a new space…a highly motivating state.
All of these aspects of games have parallels in Wikipedia editing. In the last case, Wikipedia offers not just the illusion of affecting the world at a distance, but a way to actually do so; writing on Wikipedia has the potential to affect readers across the world.
Neuropsychology puts flow and fun and learning (and addiction) into chemical terms: it’s all about the dopamine. All that talk about flow and motivation and fun gets boiled down to the release of neurotransmitters, especially dopamine, which is associated with pleasure, motivation, concentration, reinforcement, learning, and addiction. Sustained released of dopamine (or in the case of some addictive chemicals, dopamine re-uptake inhibition) both creates a sense of pleasure and elation and creates an association between the activity at hand and the dopamine jolt, motivating you to do that activity again (and again).
the best practices of commercial game design, particularly MMOs, are “predicated on…player exploitation” by “plugging into their pleasure centers and giving them scheduled rewards”. He suggests that the gaming industry may be engaged in “the intellectual and emotional equivalent of [Joe Camel]”.
That same principle is at work on Wikipedia, with people compulsively checking their watchlists to see if their work has been built upon or the comments replied to. But with careful attention to the principles of video game design, Wikipedia could probably be made much more compelling/fun/educational/addicting to a larger number of people.
This link just popped up on H-Net: “Scopes Trial“, as sung by Mr. Vance Randolph in Eureka Springs Arkansas, September 24 1959, from The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection.