“Fun is not the enemy of work.” That’s the slogan of Natron Baxter Applied Gaming, a boutique game development firm that’s developed gaming experiences for the World Bank Institute, Institute for the Future (where I’m a researcher), and many other organizations. When I first heard that motto, it echoed something Douglas Rushkoff talked about on his blog and in his 2005 book “Get Back In The Box” — essentially that fun shouldn’t be a “reward” for miserable work.
“In psychology, it’s called ‘extrinsic motivation,’ and it only works for a short time,” Rushkoff writes. “The net effect is to make the thing you’re doing for that extrinsic reward less appealing – more like work. ‘Compensation’ becomes precisely that: compensation for doing something you don’t want to be doing.”