Is gaming the future of work?
If you tell people (as I have frequently over the past few months) that you think the future of work will feel increasingly like a video game, they will probably tilt their heads and give you a funny look. What does that even mean? Well, it’s an idea that I can’t get out of my head, and I finally feel ready to put a few thoughts down on paper.
Gamification and work: a messy history
The gamification of work has been a startup fad for years, one that has largely come and gone.At this point there are dozens (maybe hundreds) of HR SaaS platforms that attempt to use game mechanics to influence outcomes and incentivize employees to do things that the employer wants them to do.
You see this across employee engagement, performance reviews, training & learning, peer recognition and more. There are even gamified recruiting platforms that incentivize employees to refer people in their network for open jobs in exchange for ‘points’, redeemable rewards, and advancement on a leaderboard.
Incentivizing hiring referrals through gamification
Some form of gamification is at the heart of most work platforms as well.Marketplaces like Upwork have effectively gamified reputation, creating lock-in for their platform in the process. If I have 4.9 stars across 200 projects, of course I’m not leaving Upwork!
Upwork gamifies reputation, effectively locking you into the platform
The biggest networks, such as LinkedIn, have used similar gamification techniques. On LinkedIn, your value to the platform effectively depends on the robustness of your profile. That way, the thousands of recruiters and salespeople who buy expensive subscriptions can easily find you and reach you. So, LinkedIn has a bunch of techniques to encourage you to make sure your profile is complete, verify your skills, and connect with others.
The downsides of enterprise gamification
A lot of this gamification was…super corporate. I don’t mean that pejoratively; it was rooted in companies deploying gamification to solve their own problems. Low employee engagement? Reward them for being engaged. Not enough candidates in the pipeline? Create a game to make employees refer more people.
And on and on it goes.
None of this is bad per-se. Just about every tech company tries to gamify actions to incentivize the behavior they want to see. However, I’d argue there are particular downsides to this gamification of work. In 2015, Nir Eyal wrote a post explaining some of the pros and cons of gamification. The critiques range from the idea that gamification ‘invites coworkers to stab each other in the back’ to the argument that ‘mandated play isn’t really play’.
Farhad Manjoo poured cold water on the whole concept of gamification, basically arguing that employees aren’t dumb and are not going to play games just because employers want to make boring activities ‘fun’. Companies wield a lot of power when they gamify things, and it’s pretty easy to see how this can go wrong. Although these games may not start out coercive, there are plenty of examples where game mechanics combined with financial incentives can turn predatory (see Axie Infinity, or the critiques of the ways Uber convinces it’s drivers to keep driving).
From corporate gamification to work-as-a-game
I’m not particularly interested in these old models of corporate gamification. What I’m interested in is this idea that the way people work is changing, and there are parallels between the way people play video games and the way people want to work!
Imagine you’re a freelance product designer. You have a book of business, a few bigger clients you like to work with, and you’re on several freelancing platforms. Business is good, albeit unpredictable. But it’s worth it for the flexibility. The biggest challenge is that the work can be lonely. You’re constantly a lone wolf, jumping onto projects and then leaving them.
What if you could become a member of a tight-knit freelance superteam? You could have the best of both worlds.
Not to get too carried away, but imagine you jump into a communal build portal. Think the pre-game lobby of fortnite. You see other people looking to work on projects. You can team up with other builders (your clan), or join a brand new team. You surge onto a new quest or project with your clan, say the redesign of a new app. Maybe it’s a milestone based project, or perhaps the compensation is hourly. You work with your team to complete the project. You get that experience of working as part of a freelance squad, picking up new skills and building connections with others. Once you are done, you can move onto the next thing.
The Fortnite pre-game lobby, but for freelance work?
This is obviously a stylized vision. There are plenty of complexities to all of those steps — trust, team formation, quality of deliverables, and many more. But I think we’re starting to see this happen, and all the preconditions are there for work to feel increasingly like a video game:
Our lives are increasingly digital
The corporate/employee bond is largely frayed, with employees feeling less loyalty to any one company
This in turn is driving people to want to control their own destiny by freelancing
But freelancing can be a lonely endeavor, particularly for full-time freelancers.
You can see various people pulling at the threads of this exciting future of work.
Packy McCormick wrote about this idea of Liquid Super Teams, the idea that groups of talented people can come together and flow in and out of projects as part of a fractional team.
Bounty platforms like Replit make it easier than ever to post tightly-scoped projects that anyone can bid on, and they appeal to a particularly young audience that likes completing tasks and earning rewards.
Buildspace has built an ecosystem that blends working, learning and building in an incredibly compelling way.
Rabbithole founder Brian Flynn had a tweet about making work as liquid as tokens
Where do we go from here?
I love the notion that work can feel almost like a video game to people….if that’s what they want! That’s the key: people need to be doing it because they want to, not because some platform is coercing them into it. I’m incredibly excited by this problem space: can you attract the most talented freelance builders who want to work as part of tight-knit teams on massive problems for interesting startups? And will companies pay a premium for those builders?
It’s a particularly human challenge. Unlike bounties (discrete, small tasks, well-scoped), we’re talking about all the messy coordination problems that come from forming teams on-demand. I really believe in this future. Freelance work isn’t going away, if anything it’s picking up steam. The amount of interest in fractional work I see from younger people is astronomically higher than what I saw when I was in my late teens and early twenties.
The future of freelance and fractional work is being written. The question now is will it be games, or more of the same?