If you want to carry a brimming cup of coffee without spilling it, you may want to “change” your goal to instead primarily concentrate on humming. This is an example of a general pattern. It sometimes helps to focus on a nearby artificial goal rather than your actual goal. Let me call that strategy “gamification”. There is a business strategy, also named “gamification”, of adding game mechanics to a website in order to achieve various business goals. This is related but different. Here I’m referring to a strategy for problem solvers.
We sometimes fail, and sometimes one failure is very similar to another failure. That is, there are characteristic ways that we fail. One of the primary ways that we can improve is to learn our failure modes and create external structures (pieces of paper, software tools) that check, protect against, or head off those forms of failure.
For example, imagine this plan of checklist improvement:
Change your normal way of working to include an explicit checklist (that starts empty).
When you make a mistake:
Analyze what went wrong
Try to generalize the particular incident to a category
Add an item to your checklist.
This is very simple and generic, but it is reasonable to believe that if you carefully and diligently followed this plan, your reliability would go up (with diminishing returns because your errors are also your opportunities for improvement). I have not read Mayo, but her “error-theoretic” philosophy of science might be applicable here.
We can try to build a correspondence between failure modes, and game mechanics that attempt to cope for that failure mode.
Failure modes and their corresponding game mechanics
Overwhelmedness and Boredom/Apathy
In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow diagram with axes of challenge versus mastery, flow appears when both the task challenge (or difficulty) and the individual’s mastery of (or skill in) the task is high. If challenge is too high, you may feel overwhelmed and fail to make progress. An artificial, very easy goal may help. If the challenge is too low, you may feel bored or apathetic, and fail to make progress. An artificial, more difficult goal may help. Quests (see WorldOfWarcraft or almost any fantasy RPG) and Achievements are game mechanics that fit this general pattern of GoalSetting; easy achievements (see AchievementUnlocked) correspond to the overwhelmedness failure mode, and difficult achievements (see Nethack conducts) correspond to the boredom/apathy failure mode.
Failures of balance.
Sometimes it can be hard to maintain a good balance among multiple activities. For example, it is important to notice new good ideas. However, I tend to spend too much time pursuing novelty, and not enough time working on the best idea that I’ve found so far. There is a tradition of browser games (see KingdomOfLoathing) that enforce a kind of balance using a virtual currency of ‘turns’. You accumulate turns slowly in real time, and essentially every action within the game uses up turns. This enforces not spending too much time playing the game (and increases the percieved value of the game via forced artificial scarcity, of course). If I gave myself ‘explore dollars’ for doing non-exploration (so-called exploit) tasks, and charged myself for doing exploration tasks (like reading arXiv or wikipedia), I could enforce a balance. If I were also prone to the opposite problem (“A few months in the lab can often save whole hours in the library.”), then I might use two currencies; exploring costs explore points but rewards with exploit points, and exploiting costs exploit points but rewards with explore ponts. (Virtual currencies are ubiquitous in games, and they can be used for many purposes; I expect to find them able to be placed accross from many different failure modes.)
Lapsing from a habit
I might fail by lapsing from a good habit, of exercise, practice or measurement. A chaining appointment mechanic might help prevent that. For example, Farmville has a mechanic where players plant crops, but cannot harvest them until a longish real-time interval later (e.g. 24 hours), and ripe crops rot if they are not harvested. DontBreakTheChain is (see http://dontbreakthechain.com/) might be an even better correspondence. Sometimes people refine the chain mechanic with a Mario-style “two hit point” mechanic. (Mario is either big or small. If he is damaged while big, he becomes small. If he is damaged while small, he loses.) That is, a one-day break in the chain is recoverable, so long as it is only one day, and followed by “sufficiently many” consecutive successful days.
DistractedByContextSwitch and YakShaving
There are various failure modes regarding the subgoal stack. On the one hand, there is a distraction failure mode when I switch contexts to achieve some subgoal, but become distracted, and forget, at least for a while, to pop the stack and return to my original goal. On the other hand, YakShaving is following your goal/subgoal stack too rigidly and too deeply. In either case, it may be valuable to keep your entire current goal/subgoal stack in a nearby external memory device (for example index cards or a todolist tool). Many games have a UI component that displays the next step of the the current quest. I don’t know of a game with a UI component intended to prevent YakShaving, but it is comprehensible—simply display the top of the stack as well as the bottom.
Deadline-sensitive work style
There are failure modes associated with deadline-sensitive rates of working. People tend to work differently when they percieve time pressure than when they do not percieve time pressure. You might call this failure mode Parkinson’s Law when you’re thinking of the pressured work as more efficient, HalfAssedCompletion when you’re thinking of the pressured work as lowered quality, or DeadlineBrinksmanship when you’re thinking of the tendency for all tasks, no matter how much slack they have, to have the same risk of crossing the deadline.
This can make scheduling and planning (which are already difficult) even more difficult. For example, a planner may prefer announcing an optimistic schedule, because they think that even with inevitable slippage, the optimistic schedule will be completed faster than a schedule conservative enough to avoid slippage.
Of course many games have timed goals, and the pomodoro technique and other forms of timeboxing are standard productivity concepts. The only refinement that this “game mechanic” suggests is making the countdown more visible and salient.
Conclusion
accumulating an explicit repository of failure modes can be valuable
game mechanics often correspond to failure modes
explicitly structuring your work habits with game mechanics can be fun, and perhaps productive.
Future work
There is an indecisiveness failure mode that I think of as “BuridansAss”. The parable is that the ass is as hungry is it is thirsty and is exactly positioned between water and food, and so dies without choosing. In my case, it is more cyclical—when I am trying to work on one thing, working on some other thing seems more valuable or more enjoyable. I don’t know of a game mechanic corresponding to this failure mode.
Another failure mode I’ve noticed is “Blub” (see Paul Graham’s essay). This is when I see something I don’t understand at all, and instead of paying it closer attention and/or storing it away carefully, I ignore it.
Failure Modes sometimes correspond to Game Mechanics
If you want to carry a brimming cup of coffee without spilling it, you may want to “change” your goal to instead primarily concentrate on humming. This is an example of a general pattern. It sometimes helps to focus on a nearby artificial goal rather than your actual goal. Let me call that strategy “gamification”. There is a business strategy, also named “gamification”, of adding game mechanics to a website in order to achieve various business goals. This is related but different. Here I’m referring to a strategy for problem solvers.
We sometimes fail, and sometimes one failure is very similar to another failure. That is, there are characteristic ways that we fail. One of the primary ways that we can improve is to learn our failure modes and create external structures (pieces of paper, software tools) that check, protect against, or head off those forms of failure.
For example, imagine this plan of checklist improvement:
Change your normal way of working to include an explicit checklist (that starts empty).
When you make a mistake:
Analyze what went wrong
Try to generalize the particular incident to a category
Add an item to your checklist.
This is very simple and generic, but it is reasonable to believe that if you carefully and diligently followed this plan, your reliability would go up (with diminishing returns because your errors are also your opportunities for improvement). I have not read Mayo, but her “error-theoretic” philosophy of science might be applicable here.
We can try to build a correspondence between failure modes, and game mechanics that attempt to cope for that failure mode.
Failure modes and their corresponding game mechanics
Overwhelmedness and Boredom/Apathy
In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow diagram with axes of challenge versus mastery, flow appears when both the task challenge (or difficulty) and the individual’s mastery of (or skill in) the task is high. If challenge is too high, you may feel overwhelmed and fail to make progress. An artificial, very easy goal may help. If the challenge is too low, you may feel bored or apathetic, and fail to make progress. An artificial, more difficult goal may help. Quests (see WorldOfWarcraft or almost any fantasy RPG) and Achievements are game mechanics that fit this general pattern of GoalSetting; easy achievements (see AchievementUnlocked) correspond to the overwhelmedness failure mode, and difficult achievements (see Nethack conducts) correspond to the boredom/apathy failure mode.
Failures of balance.
Sometimes it can be hard to maintain a good balance among multiple activities. For example, it is important to notice new good ideas. However, I tend to spend too much time pursuing novelty, and not enough time working on the best idea that I’ve found so far. There is a tradition of browser games (see KingdomOfLoathing) that enforce a kind of balance using a virtual currency of ‘turns’. You accumulate turns slowly in real time, and essentially every action within the game uses up turns. This enforces not spending too much time playing the game (and increases the percieved value of the game via forced artificial scarcity, of course). If I gave myself ‘explore dollars’ for doing non-exploration (so-called exploit) tasks, and charged myself for doing exploration tasks (like reading arXiv or wikipedia), I could enforce a balance. If I were also prone to the opposite problem (“A few months in the lab can often save whole hours in the library.”), then I might use two currencies; exploring costs explore points but rewards with exploit points, and exploiting costs exploit points but rewards with explore ponts. (Virtual currencies are ubiquitous in games, and they can be used for many purposes; I expect to find them able to be placed accross from many different failure modes.)
Lapsing from a habit
I might fail by lapsing from a good habit, of exercise, practice or measurement. A chaining appointment mechanic might help prevent that. For example, Farmville has a mechanic where players plant crops, but cannot harvest them until a longish real-time interval later (e.g. 24 hours), and ripe crops rot if they are not harvested. DontBreakTheChain is (see http://dontbreakthechain.com/) might be an even better correspondence. Sometimes people refine the chain mechanic with a Mario-style “two hit point” mechanic. (Mario is either big or small. If he is damaged while big, he becomes small. If he is damaged while small, he loses.) That is, a one-day break in the chain is recoverable, so long as it is only one day, and followed by “sufficiently many” consecutive successful days.
DistractedByContextSwitch and YakShaving
There are various failure modes regarding the subgoal stack. On the one hand, there is a distraction failure mode when I switch contexts to achieve some subgoal, but become distracted, and forget, at least for a while, to pop the stack and return to my original goal. On the other hand, YakShaving is following your goal/subgoal stack too rigidly and too deeply. In either case, it may be valuable to keep your entire current goal/subgoal stack in a nearby external memory device (for example index cards or a todolist tool). Many games have a UI component that displays the next step of the the current quest. I don’t know of a game with a UI component intended to prevent YakShaving, but it is comprehensible—simply display the top of the stack as well as the bottom.
Deadline-sensitive work style
There are failure modes associated with deadline-sensitive rates of working. People tend to work differently when they percieve time pressure than when they do not percieve time pressure. You might call this failure mode Parkinson’s Law when you’re thinking of the pressured work as more efficient, HalfAssedCompletion when you’re thinking of the pressured work as lowered quality, or DeadlineBrinksmanship when you’re thinking of the tendency for all tasks, no matter how much slack they have, to have the same risk of crossing the deadline.
This can make scheduling and planning (which are already difficult) even more difficult. For example, a planner may prefer announcing an optimistic schedule, because they think that even with inevitable slippage, the optimistic schedule will be completed faster than a schedule conservative enough to avoid slippage.
Of course many games have timed goals, and the pomodoro technique and other forms of timeboxing are standard productivity concepts. The only refinement that this “game mechanic” suggests is making the countdown more visible and salient.
Conclusion
accumulating an explicit repository of failure modes can be valuable
game mechanics often correspond to failure modes
explicitly structuring your work habits with game mechanics can be fun, and perhaps productive.
Future work
There is an indecisiveness failure mode that I think of as “BuridansAss”. The parable is that the ass is as hungry is it is thirsty and is exactly positioned between water and food, and so dies without choosing. In my case, it is more cyclical—when I am trying to work on one thing, working on some other thing seems more valuable or more enjoyable. I don’t know of a game mechanic corresponding to this failure mode.
Another failure mode I’ve noticed is “Blub” (see Paul Graham’s essay). This is when I see something I don’t understand at all, and instead of paying it closer attention and/or storing it away carefully, I ignore it.