(2011-06-20) Benson Interview Pirates Zombies And The Cyborgification Of Humanity

Full Interview with Buster Benson: Pirates, Zombies and the Cyborgification of Humanity. I build lots of little side projects and most of them only end up ever being useful to me and these are way to too complicated to ever be useful to anyone else. The ones that are simple enough that I can imagine other people using them, I generally try to make them into real projects

I’ve been a follower of Dennis Crowley (SP) and Jane McGonigal for years, I used Dodgeball back in the day and I met Jane many years ago and I’ve always been a fan of big games and real world games that were so awkward to play because we didn’t have the right tools to really implement them, but I have been interested in Gamification for many many years before it was a word

I sort of see a general trend in the world in making things more entertaining (entertainment), rather than useful. Thats closer to the thread that I was following. With gamification, your tapping into parts of our brain, very deep motivations, that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.

Rather than giving someone every single way to accomplish a goal, like on 43Things, you just let people cheer each other. That has a much more solid impact on their motivation than giving them every single tool available

You can think of a smart phone as a very large step towards the cyborgification of humans. Our senses are beginning to become tied to the objects that we carry around with us now. We all know where everyone is, we know who’s around us, we know the map of where we’re currently navigating, we know our altitude, our speed. All this data is represented within our brains to some degree, in terms of balance, equilbrium–and we can start think of other ways to extend our senses to make our engagement with the real world more interesting, more useful and faster and more connected. I think those are a few really big things that will sort of bring us closer to that.

Gabe Zicherman is obviously one of them. I met and really liked him. Jane McGonigal, Dennis Crowley, Raph Koster, Jesse Schell are all people that I see as my mentors in that area. I also love Will Wright and the creator of Mario Brothers, Shigeru Miyamoto. There’s a definition of games that Jane McGonigal mentioned, that “a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Gamification comes in and removes the ‘unnecessary’ part.

We’re no longer only trying to overcome obstacles merely because we want to, or because it’s fun, but we’re also trying to overcome real obstacles: how to be healthier, how to learn, how to stay connected with our friends and family.

if you can find businesses or games that tap into what the players naturally want, already–and this is the area that I’m most interested in exploring–it’s always health, its a mastery of a skill, creation of habits, improvement of life, improvement of happiness, all those things that we’re trying to always do. This helps me avoid the whole other side of the gamification conversation which is all about loyalty. I’m really only interested in the portion of that conversation thats about helping people and empower them to do what they already want to do. (BadAss)

That’s how HealthMonth came about. People can come up with their own rules they want to follow for a month, then they win by following those rules. There’s no point in trying to game a system like that.

If you're in a game and the rule is, turn in all your free coke bottle caps and you’ll get a free coke, all these people collect these bottle caps for weeks and eventually get a free coke. In reality, the value of that coke is alot less than all the effort required to get it. I call those types of players ‘zombies’. (NPC)

On the other end of the spectrum are people that cheat the system in order to get something that the game has somehow made easy to get. For example, within the Coke game, you can go to the recycling center and collect a thousand bottle caps and get a bunch of free Cokes. I call these types of players ‘pirates’. (Reality Hacker)

Now, there are some games that have no preference about these two styles. They allow all kinds of play to happen. GroupOn is a perfect example. You don’t really know who’s winning in this situation. Is GroupOn winning? Are the businesses winning? Is the customer winning?

explain HealthMonth

you come up with your own game rules

You can choose to play with between one and fifteen rules. Its a self defined game.

The interesting part is that even though your all playing different rules, your all playing together.

There’s a way to collectively forgive each other by playing the game.