Engagement with Government through Technology & Gamification

Lewis Shepherd

lewiss@microsoft.com@lewisshepherd

The phenomenon, not the word

Commenter "Neil" on a blogpost about the trend/buzzword “gamification”, Oct. 14 2010:

"I really hate the word itself. The suffix is twice as long as the root! A lexical disaster."

Gamification derives from a game-designer approach, “game mechanics”

• Rules-based• Attempt to architect optimal behavior

& activity, through scoring• Multiple layers of feedback-loops and

positive/negative reinforcement; Maslow!

In Enterprise settings…

• traditional approach extended to enterprise use: BlueShield, Coca-Cola, hundreds of others

• just as used in software games, extended to software companies:–Microsoft, SAP, IBM

In Government settings…• Attempts to apply term &

concepts to government have often followed that enterprise model – – “behavioral economics”

“Nudging” from the top

• Top-down, authoritative, prescriptive • Author Ian Bogost has written:– "Gamification is Bullshit" – It’s "exploitationware" designed to manipulate

and lie, in age-old ways.– Extrapolated to government, runs counter to Tim

O’Reilly’s original expression of Government 2.0 as a Platform

TJ letter about the kind of government where "every man … feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day."

Taking the reins which citizens already hold

What about understanding & extending the democratic, bottom-up paradigm?

Instead of government incenting citizens, citizens incent government… and those who want to govern.

Citizen scoring of optimal behavior by government entities/representatives

• In political campaigns: already active in implicit ways – Debate participation: 2012, 27 Republican primary

debates– Tracking polls– No different from counting your Facebook "Likes" –

the same exultation • How many of us admit to posting something

(photo, book reference) primarily to shape your external reputation or image?

“Gaming the System”

• Pandering politicians!– The more babies you kiss, the more votes you

earn– The Larry Sabato rule of "How to work a room"

What are the analogues for citizen-government implementation of traditional Gamification techniques?

• Incentives/Rewards• Competition• Progress Feedback• Goal hierarchies

Executive government

• Federal level (i.e. President)• Local (e.g. mayors of San Jose, San Francisco)

Legislative government

• National/local blend within a representative republic; tie to the constituent (voter=scorer)

Judicial government

• Citations• 5-4 vs 9-0 counts• appeal/overturns statistics (9th Circuit)• Laughs per term!

• Oddity of lifetime appointment; results?

Judicial government

• Traditional critique demands televised sessions– Public commentary on Affordable Care Act

(Obamacare)– Electrified national debate

• But little feedback loop on government via TV– Argentine model instead– Positive/negative reinforcement on court actions

One traditional critique of Gamification

• "Difference is, life is hard, real world can't be gamified"– Success is easily structured/designed for the

gamer, and achieved by the gamer– Real world success is heavily random and hard

• In traditional government use of Gamification (topdown), same thing– only used in tangential areas (the public urinal)

because of complexity, difficulty

More promise in bottom-up citizen-government gamification• Complexity is inherent and a central part of

the response• "Finger on the pulse of the nation"

What would explicit supportive actions to encourage Bottom-Up Gamification be?

• Using gaming mechanics to make the citizen-control-of-government a more compelling experience

• Explicit rewards– Until now, largely financial; • Lincoln Bedroom sales; • Ambassadorial appointments; • Solyndra

Using technology for government gamification from below• Social network sites– Direct engagement with politicians on Twitter– Politicians/Agencies keeping track of Twitter

follower numbers, Facebook likes

Recognize distinction from actual Gaming world between 3 types of games

• PvP, competitive player games (global leaderboards, etc.)– This is where much enterprise "gamification" has focused; ranking,

badges etc• Single-player games (challenge scales to evolving/learned skill

of the user)– This is where small-ball government "gamification" has focused

(social steering)• Cooperative multiplayer games (MMOGs)

– Gamification mechanics require deep understanding of the social interactions within the system

Among these 3, I'm talking about “Cooperative multiplayer democracy”

The Invisible Hand of Politics

• Adam Smith on "invisible hand" controlling macroeconomics– Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, called

Smith's Invisible Hand "the possibility of cooperation without coercion"

• Macropolitics controls Government; the hot breath of the people – The Founding Fathers were game designers, particularly at

the Constitutional Convention– Constitutional Amendments are merely game versions.

We're now up to “version XXVII.0”

We need many more game mechanics for democratic control of government

• something that rivals "big-donor reward system,” for the hot breath of the people– Already the system responds – usually – to

incentives like • GDP growth• Unemployment rate• Murder/Crime rates

“Politics is a good thing.”

popularized by Prof. Larry Sabato, University of Virginia

Followup:

lewiss@microsoft.com@lewisshepherd

Engagement with Government through Technology & Gamification