Issue 47 - All Play and No Work, A Speculative Fiction

[The Escapist Staff]

Corvus Elrod"As she did every Monday morning, she thought about the stories her mother told of her days as a loan officer. She knew if her job today was anything like Mom's, she wouldn't be so successful." Corvus Elrod takes a speculative look at the future world of gamers.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Patrick

If work, and learning, can be made interesting by re-thinking your job as a game, whats a game designer supposed to do to keep their day-to-day craft intruiging?

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Cybercat
http://protoshell.com
Make games about work?

Hehe, no game designers will still have a job making games about things impossible to do with real life and letting people run wild in fantasy realms or futuristic gun toting shootem-ups. It's hard for me to work "normally" as I can't just pound away at the keyboard like others, I have to give myself "rewards" just like she does.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Wrecklass
http://wrecklass.googlepages.com
I recall a meeting in which an HR director tried desperately to get people to consider their jobs as games. She honestly wanted to figure out how to make incredibly boring jobs entertaining. She overlooked one important difference between game playing and work: In a game, if we do badly, we may lose the game. In work, if we do badly, we will probably lose money.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: rt

perhaps most importantly....

games can automate the little nuances and delays and mindless busywork that you have to do, but can still screw up at - serving customers, filling out forms, making calls. These are things that we could potentially improve, all of which are encompassed in the story's fiction, but can't quite do yet. The nature of our current state of technology makes it that way. It tends to be a lot of busywork and a little bit of interesting thinking. Our original natural state was to do physical labor, but that ain't happening anymore.