All the talk about the “Gameification” of video games in the Dead Island review Jason posted yesterday reminded me of a great TED Talk I watched about a year ago. In it, Tom Chatfield discusses the seven ways games reward our brains, from random rewards to purposeful tasks to receiving rewards on a schedule. And at the end he spends a few minutes talking about how these principals might be applied to the world around us.
I’m excited by the possibilities of applying these theories to real life (non-virtual) situations, if only because I’ve seen how video games have motivated me in ways that seem meaningless and silly to anyone who hasn’t experienced online gaming.
If you’ve got 20 minutes to spare, I think it’s definitely worth a watch.