{"id":149,"date":"2009-04-06T10:58:10","date_gmt":"2009-04-06T10:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/?p=149"},"modified":"2009-04-06T10:58:10","modified_gmt":"2009-04-06T10:58:10","slug":"gaming-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/gaming-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaming the world"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking recently about how gaming principles could be applied to everyday activities in order to make them&#8230; well if not quite fun, at least palatable. My friend Emma has a really inspiring (and funny) blog in which she documents her ongoing weight-loss journey, and I found her <a href=\"http:\/\/everdecreasinggirdle.blogspot.com\/2009\/04\/playing-games-with-ourselves.html\" target=\"_blank\">recent post<\/a>, in which she describes how she applies gaming principles to the process of losing weight, very interesting.<\/p>\n<p>It also reminded me of an older <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.avantgame.com\/2009\/01\/i-need-to-game-ify-writing-my-book.html\" target=\"_blank\">post by Jane McGonigal<\/a> on how she is using gaming principles to make the process of book writing more engaging.<\/p>\n<p>When I&#8217;m approaching a piece of work that I know I&#8217;m not going to find overly engaging (e.g. writing a report, searching for papers for a literature review) I tend to break the task into chunks (e.g. writing 500 words, searching five databases) and &#8216;reward&#8217; myself for completing the chunk with five minutes of something more interesting (important stuff like Facebook, Twitter or another level in the new CSI game). On reflection, I realised that I&#8217;ve been doing what I would advocate as being very poor educational game design &#8211; offering extrinsic rewards that are not related to the overall learning task.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not entirely sure what I should learn from this&#8230; perhaps my method of making disengaging work less tedious isn&#8217;t the most efficient or educationally sound approach, but it works for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking recently about how gaming principles could be applied to everyday activities in order to make them&#8230; well if not quite fun, at least palatable. My friend Emma has a really inspiring (and funny) blog in which she&#8230;<br \/><a class=\"read-more-button\" href=\"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/gaming-the-world\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[92,107],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts","tag-engagement","tag-play"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p71sY0-2p","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}