Voluntary Participation in Games and Life, and How Everything in Life is a Game, Too.
Including play.
The three core game elements — goals, rules, and feedback systems — come together in the fourth major game element, voluntary participation.
“Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave the game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
The definition above speaks mainly of a multiplayer game. However, equally for single-player games, including real-life projects and activities you turn into fun games for yourself, you have to knowingly and willingly accept the goals, rules, and feedback approach. The balance of the combination of these three components determines how “safe and pleasurable” the activity appears to you.
The brilliance of living life gamefully is that you are both the designer and the player of your real-life games, and you can adjust their design in such a way that you experience them as the most fun games in the traditional sense.
Before we continue with the next level in this book’s game, let’s “dissect” some real-life activities and consider if they have all four core components.
First of all, games, in the traditional sense, are real-life activities. They are part of our lives. But we already mentioned them having the four components: goals, rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation.
But what about play? It is a part of our lives too. And it is becoming increasingly popular in various areas of our lives, both for children and adults. You hear nowadays more and more often, “Be playful!”
I was surprised to hear many game and gamification specialists drawing a line between games and play. One of the arguments for that line is that play does not have rigid rules as games do. I can’t entirely agree with that because the lack of rules is a rule already. And games have an infinite possibility for rules, many of which can be flexible and “bendable.”
Here is another argument proving that any play activity is a game, too. Play is often used for learning or in the corporate world for finding solutions to complex challenges. An example of such a play is LEGO Serious Play.
“LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is a technique where people use LEGO® bricks to follow through a series of structured exercises during which they build things that represent metaphorically their personal or business challenges.” — “What is LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®?”, Serious Play Pro
I found a couple of other definitions of LEGO Serious Play online. All of them, as the one above indicates, include goals (resolution of “personal or business challenges”), rules (using LEGO bricks and following “a series of structured exercises”), and a feedback system (the created models, personal epiphanies during the process of building, and sharing the results of the exercises with the peers).
But any other play process — whether performed by children or adults — also contains all four components. “Just relax” is a goal, too. “You have one hour” is a rule. “How did it go?” is a feedback system. And your agreement or refusal to play, or playing for a bit, leaving, and then coming back, reflects voluntary participation.
I find it quite apt that the words for “play” and “game” are the same in some languages. In German, it is “Spiel,” and in other languages, both words have the same root, such as Romanian or Russian. It doesn’t matter whether you just play or play a game in the latter two. The word is the same. And even in English, you play a game.
The same core structure of games applies to everything we engage in in our lives. Take an employment contract. You will find all four core components there, too. The goals are outlined, the rules too, and you have a regular meeting with your supervisor for mutual feedback. Voluntary participation is visible through the signatures in the contract and the fact that you don’t do your work twenty-four-seven but interrupt it for other activities, including a short break.
Nowadays, modern workplaces allow you to do your work when it is most suitable for you, and you feel most efficient. There might be hours you need to respect, which make up a rule or a set of rules in your job’s game. But you have a say, so that you can play your work’s game to your best abilities. And if you or your boss are not satisfied with the game and its flow, then changes are made, whatever they might be.
The examples above were more on a larger scale of projects, jobs, or activities. But relating games to everything in life also applies to the smallest steps in our lives.
Take a physical step when you go somewhere. You might not be thinking of it, but there is a goal in terms of the direction you take, the rule to walk on your two feet instead of crawling, and the pace you adhere to. The feedback is your awareness of whether you move toward the goal you envisioned or away. Your voluntary participation will determine whether and how you engage in the game, which is the next step.
This fundamental truth of everything in our lives mirroring games and their core structure, be it on the scale of a whole life, a specific activity or dream we envision, or the smallest step we take, can help us see life in a whole new light.
Even validating what we just did becomes much easier and more realistic and valuable when we realize that it is a game on its own.
And if it is only a game, it is manageable, adjustable, and playable.
About this article:
It is a modified excerpt from Actual Real-Life Role-Playing Games: A Gamefully Philosophical View on Life and How to Design and Play It.
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