Code, Software and Serious Games

Last week, as I mentioned in class, I was away at the Game Developers' Conference where, among other things, there was a summit on serious games. I went over there for a couple of sessions, and have my notes typed up for all of them, but I'm going to limit myself to posting one at a time because apparently Blogger has trouble with these things.

That said, the first session I attended was picture-perfect for this class: linking software development to serious games. Well, except that it's more from a developer's perspective than our MCM view on things; it was still an interesting session. This one has two parts, but I'll only cover one of them for today.

These two guys worked for a company whose business is "building gaming into day-to-day work." They presented a product of theirs called "Bug Hunter" which offers incentives for employees to report and repair broken code. They explained the basic philosophy behind their game, which is to entertain and reward people but NOT challenge them as it gets them to work on some aspect of their job. There's a pretty complicated interplay going on here, as they also have to consider competition/cooperation among players, ways to curtail cheating, and the overall impact on the company.


Bug Hunter: A Productivity Game for Software Testing

• Windows Defect Prevention Team: Robert Musson and Ross Smith
  
• building gaming into day-to-day work
  
• philosophy: let everyone win, simple prizes, align the game to the job, simple games
  
• let everyone win: getting people into the game more important than challenging them
  
• simple prizes: enough incentive to play but not enough to cheat
  
• align the game to the job: get ppl to focus on core elements fo their jobs
  
• simple games: simple interfaces using existing tools
  
• purpose: motivate behavior, facilitate education, (foster) team working
  
• design: set the goals, set the rules, determine organizational impact
  
• issues: unhealthy competition, conflicting organizational messages, conflicts between players and non-players
  
• Bug Hunter: person who discovers a bug enters information, others vote on its location, resolution, root cause, etc.... quality of information determines how many points they get
  
• sample prizes: latte coupons --> prize booklets --> prize lottery (allows anybody to win, even if they don't play often) ... also give players accolades, e.g. expert, hero, legendary
  
• cheating is not really productive, as the program doesn't recognize it (and it's so hard to falsify a bug that you may as well spend your time actually finding one?)
  
• if you want to test a certain area, e.g. wireless, you can add point multipliers for reports on that kind of code
  
• http://www.defectprevention.org/Pairs.aspx : vote on various game elements, incorporates Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki) and Thin-Slicing (Gladwell) ... HINT: try the candidates one, it's silly