My guest post for the Government of Ontario’s Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation is now live. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. A snippet:

Craigslist, by putting classified ads online, turned billions of dollars in print revenue into millions of dollars in digital revenue. Newspapers are only now starting to bounce back, but will forever be shadows of their former selves. Kodak, The Yellow Pages, Blockbuster, and of course, the entire recording industry followed like lemmings off the same cliff. These companies all sold access to information—and the internet suddenly and permanently changed the rules about how and where information could be purchased and consumed. Consumers were better off and enjoyed a lot more value, value that incumbents weren’t able to capture.

Read the full article.

Before the internet, most information was what economists call a “medium-sized dry good”—that is, it was not liquid, was easily shipped, had a long shelf life, and above all else, was a physical object. No one ever stood up in a room and shouted “information is a medium-sized dry good!” but entire industries were built on this assumption. And suddenly it was no longer true. The resulting bloodbath left newspapers, publishers, and record labels drained of profits and relegated to the sidelines of industries they once defined.

The internet came online deleted an age-old, fundamental assumption about the world. Information was no longer a thing in the traditional sense, it was now something new that could be accessed from almost anywhere.

And this is just the start. We’re about to be disabused, in a very short order, of a great many fundamental assumptions about how the world works. Not to overstate the case, but it’s only going to change everything, forever.

Compared to the changes we’re about to see in the next few years, the invention of the internet is looking quaint by comparison. Specifically we’re about to be hit by 3D printing, automation, biotech, cleantech, DNA sequencing, nanotech, and a ton of other stuff hasn’t yet even been invented.

If you’re not familiar with 3d printing, all you need to know is this: in a few years almost everyone will own a magic box that can create any object out of thin air. It’s a fair to say that most companies today don’t assume that their customers own a magical box in their home that can spit out made-to-order goods overnight. These companies are going to get very lean, very fast, and probably lash out just the same way the record industry did, we’re going to see all sorts of really weird laws about file formats and what you can do with your 3d printer. Of course it’ll be easy to jailbreak your 3d printer, and then people can print whatever they want, including guns. We’ll have removed the need for physical continuity between design and production, and will be able to essentially teleport objects onto people’s home. That changes a great many assumptions about how the world works.

Next, though it sounds funny to say, robots are coming for our jobs. If you work with your hands, soon there will be robotic hands that can do it better faster and cheaper than you. If you work with your brain doing anything even remotely dry, IBM’s Watson will probably put you out of work. This leads to all sorts of questions about what we want the future to be like, given that we’ll have increased economic output, but decreased employment. It’s pretty interesting to put this in the context of the 99%vs1% debate, but I’ll leave it there lest I accidentally look like a Marxist.

Genomics is going to give everyone insight into and eventually control over their DNA. And of course we’ve now got prosthetics that interface directly with the brain, it won’t be too long until we stop designing them in the image of human limbs and start doing some really wild stuff. If you can plug an arm into your brain, there’s no reason you can’t plug the internet in too.

Energy is very exciting. Whether or not we’ve hit peak oil, there’s a bunch of cool stuff being commercialized that’s very promising, like biogas, solar, and thorium. Given that energy is the ability to do work it stands to reason that if we succeed, it will unlock the ability to do an incredible amount of work very cheaply (especially if you factor in robotic labour).

These changes are coming, and either individually or in concert, they’re going to disrupt each and every industry. Kodak, EMI, BlockBuster and The Yellow Pages might look stupid in retrospect, but they were just the first flies to drop. The really exciting stuff is only just about to begin.

Fair warning: this is early thinking, and this post is heavy on theory. I’ve tried to keep it not-dry, but it’s required to set up my argument.

Story structure: I’ve taken courses on this stuff, but it never clicked as relevant to the real world until I read Dan Harmon’s essays on how to tell a story. Here’s a choice excerpt:

Behind (and beneath) your culture creating forebrain, there is an older, simpler monkey brain with a lot less to say and a much louder voice. One of the few things it’s telling you, over and over again, is that you need to go search, find, take and return with change. Why? Because that is how the human animal has kept from going extinct…

Stories are the oldest metaphor through which our brains make the world intelligible. Explicitly, the eight steps:

1. A character
2. has a need
3. and so they go
4. and search
5. until they find what they needed.
6. They take it with them
7. and return home,
8. having changed.

Borrowing more from Harmon:

Q: Why do stories have to follow this structure?

A: It’s not that stories have to follow this structure, it’s that, without some semblance of this structure, it’s not recognizable as a story.

And my technical interpretation of this: A story is a structure that is used to impose order on a collection of no fewer than eight events in order to deliver an intellectual or emotional payload.

So why does this matter, and how does it relate to games/”gamification”?

Well, if stories are the fundamental metaphor for how we understand everything, it follows that it’s the fundamental metaphor for how we understand our lives, and the activities that make up our lives. If we take, for example, something that you hopefully do everyday, brushing your teeth. You (1) don’t want cavities (2) so you decide to brush your teeth (3) and you go look for your toothbrush and toothpaste (4), find it (5) and brush your teeth (6), then go to bed (7) with a clean mouth (8).  It’s not sexy, but it’s a story and it makes sense and is relatable.

This applies equally to big, life changing sequences of events: You (1) want to get a job (2) so you enroll at university (3) and take a bunch of courses (4), then finally get your degree (5) (and are massively in debt (6)) you then leave the alternate reality of being a student (7) and are now “educated” (8).

I apologize for the boring examples. I just wanted to establish that you can find this pattern at every level of your life.

It’s also present in myths, movies, books, and, of course, video games.

Consuming media therefore is the delivery/execution of two stories: there’s the story you’re reading (Bilbo leaves the shire to destroy the ring and save middle earth) and there’s your personal story (I was bored so I read a new book and now I’m smarter).

This manifests in videogames too. There’s a category of game that has a rich in-game plot, structured exactly as you’d expect. Games like Portal or even Gears of War. Then there are games where it’s all about the player’s story, games like Team Fortress 2, or FarmVille.

When people talk about “gamification” and “game mechanics” they’re talking about things like set collection, random reward schedules, appointments. These are all things that have existed forever. For example, random reward schedules have always been with us in meatspace, we call them lotteries or slot machines. Appointment “mechanics” are pretty old too, often called “limited time sales” or “happy hour.” “Game mechanics” are not new to games; games just implemented old tricks in new ways.

In the context of a game, these elements are used to push the story forward: in Diablo, “the grind,” where you kill tons and tons of demons and are randomly given gold, that’s just something to keep you busy while you (4) search for whatever the current quest item is. Similarly, in the context of the game, you want to collect a set of armor, because, in the context of the game, it helps you work through the story with more agency because you’re less likely to die.

What “gamification” tries to do, is take these signposting structures that make sense inside the context of the game and apply them to arbitrary behavior. Getting a badge for a comment is a completely meaningless event in the context of me visiting some blog I’ll probably never see again. Instead of focusing on just haphazardly applying “game mechanics” to their products, companies need to ensure that they’re designing a customer experience that is easily intelligible as a story, only then can they choose what psychological tricks they’re going to use to give people a sense of context and agency in that consumer story.

Take Starbucks for example. Any loyalty program is basically two things: a badge (the card), and points (the points). In the context of being a Starbucks customer, you (1) want coffee (2) and so you set out (3) to find a coffee shop that reflects your values (4) you find Starbucks (5) and pay a huge markup for hot water and beans (6) then return home (7), no longer sleepy/having saved the world through fair trade (8). Having a gold status card reinforces the ongoing participation in, repetition of, and value of, that story. The points provide signposting and reward you with the very thing you seek (coffee) as a consequence of seeking it. This is “gamification” done right, except you’d never call it gamification.

What we really need is “storification,” although that’s also a stupid buzzword. Instead, recognize that your customer is going to remember their interaction with your product, service, and brand, as a story, and that many of the steps will occur outside of your control. You should therefore use all the tools at your disposal to make the story powerful, memorable, and repeatable. More on this later, as I figure it out.