Gaming/Meeting Notes 2019-02-11

Gaming

Date

Monday, 11 February 2019 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm iCal

Meetup Event

https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/256359263/

Location

*** Room 1300 *** -- Conrad Grebel University College, 140 Westmount Rd. N., Waterloo, Ontario Map

Event Announcement

Gaming/Announcement 2019-02-11

Are you a gamer? Wouldn't it be great to play games during work? Are you a game designer? What role does gamification have in Non-Profit organizations? Can gamification make a SysAdmin's life easier? What value do games have in the Non-Profit sector?

Join our round-table discussion on Gaming, and share your views.

--Bob Jonkman & Marc Paré

• Gaming/Meeting Notes 2019-02-11

Resources

• TechSoup Canada Catalogue

Meeting Notes

Encouraging Gaming

• Gamification of Disaster Recovery
  • Playing a role playing game
  • Roll the dice "Your mail server has failed"
  • Good for scenarios
  • Needs a Dungeon Master who understands security

• Gamification of server uptime
  • One SysAdmin has a server with 1000 days uptime
  • Challenge other SysAdmins to do it too
  • Ensures SysAdmins will coddle the server to ensure uptime

• Movie effects for computer screens
  • Don't look like reality, more like computer games
  • But tools are trying to look like games
  • Want more customers to use their products
    • Security products (eg) are hard to use
    • Making the UI easier, more exciting to use
    • Trying to keep the user on the device as much as possible
    • Targetting today's users who are gamers
    • Try to concentrate attention on the things that need attention

• 12 hour operator shifts
  • Very tiring, trying to spot "hacker" anomalies in gigabytes of data
  • The job doesn't get done, staff doesn't care after a few days
  • If the system had been gamified it might have made the job better
    • But mostly it seems a management problem for having 12 hour shifts
  • But gamers are in front of monitors that long, don't have the apathy problem

• Can World Of Warcraft design be used to analyze logs?
  • Players are unknowingly doing the work while playing the game
  • But what gets attention is based on what the player finds fun
• May be similar to using spare CPU cycles to do bitcoin

• Have a reward attached to success
  • But in some cases there's no control, so success is not based on work but luck and gamification won't work

• Games are visually appealing and attractive
• Competition is appealing

• Re-Captcha has gamified proofreading
  • Spread out the work to millions, make it fun
  • Purpose for captcha owner may not be access control, but OCR improvement, traffic AI optimization

• "Sex and violence moves the world forward"
  • Porn has driven technology: Hi-res, accurate skin tones; VHS technology; video streaming
  • And the military has pushed technology too

• Sometimes gamification gets in the way
  • "You have won this case number 54321!" is just annoying
  • Trying to fool employees backfires, recognized by employees
• But maybe if the gamification could be switched off

• An experienced worker can do more without gamification
  • But his attitude was that life is one big game

• Young people develop new skills that older people don't have
  • This affects how they approach gamification

• "War Games"
  • Using games to make serious tasks go better
  • Also, how much control do you turn over to the computer?
• Has become reality - military drone operators

• US Military had an RPG for recruiting
  • Very realistic, eg. speed for loading a rifle
  • Intent to get people familiar with army life before recruiting them

• DARPA Challenge
  • Started as a monetary reward for specific goals
    • 100 metre autonomous vehicles in 2004
    • 100 km autonomous vehicles in 2005 (xxxxxx check dates!

• People in finance and politics use gamification
  • eg. "First Past The Post" is a horse racing analogy

• Different rewards are effective for different groups
  • eg. Grade 3 kids may be influenced by a reward of bubblegum, but not Grade 8 kids

• Bread and Circuses
  • Roman Warriors went from lean survivalists to entertainment
  • Games became a distraction, so young people no longer wanted to be warriors

• Games in any environment have limits and rules
  • The objective is to be attained by following those limits and rules
  • The effects games have on social cohesion and morale are defined by those limits and rules
  • Not just rote and repetition, but applying strategy

Preventing Gaming

• User Friendly cartoons about Doom on the LAN

• SysAdmins wanted to prevent smart phones, more work to provide bandwidth

• Security concerns with using personal devices in work
  • Accessing corporate data with personal devices

• But people found these devices made their work more fun

• Is there any way to run a corporation without using some kind of gamification?
  • Boring, routine jobs need it
  • But some people just aren't suited to that kind of work
  • People who can remain focussed on routine work are scarce, but may not benefit from gamification
  • People have to be interested in the objective

• Gold Farmers are playing a capitalist metagame

• It should be possible to roboticize the work to make gamification customized
  • But then it is probably possible to automate the work directly, no longer requiring a worker

• There are programs to monitor online behaviour to identify mental health issues

Categories of motivation

1. Mastery of skill
2. Exploratoin/ Discovery
3. Competition
4. Cooperation

• How does cooperation and collaboration help with work?
• Competition:
  • Nobody wants to be the laggard in the group
  • Competition is a loaded word in our society
  • But a notion of competition, argumentation with the aim of improvement, everyone winning

• Gamification needs a goal, objective
  • eg. politics - getting people informed

• Gamification is not Learning
  • Competing against other players
  • Or against your previous score
    • Someone has to know all the answers in order to mark your score
    • How can we solve problems that have not already been solved?
    • That's not gaming, that's learning
  • If you're moving into an unknown area you don't know what rules apply, what the goal is

• Self-directed, independent study courses are a form of gamification?
  • No, that's exploring, learning challenge; vision quest
  • Minecraft: No predefined goal
    • Possible collaboration, also competition
    • Used in education, "kids learn without knowing they're learning" (but not accepted by all educators)
    • Letting kids play games, and maybe learning, is too haphazard, it's not education

• "Everything is a game", "Life is a game"
  • But that makes the idea of a game useless.

• When outside things are gamified, are people just being conditioned? Or are people learning?
  • eg. the Army game

• Making games highly addictive
  • Are people conditioned to play again and again, spend money
  • Are corporations just games? Employees buying into it again and again.

• Being fooled into learning can lead to a real interest in the subject
  • Movies, books can lead to further research. Reality is more interesting than fiction.

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