Getting lost in the flow of OSS

The myth is that people play games because they want to avoid challenging work. The reality is, people play games to engage in well-designed, challenging work. The only thing they are avoiding is poorly designed work. In essence, we are replacing poorly designed work with work that provides a more meaningful challenge and offers a richer sense of progress.
And we should note at this point that just because something is a game, it doesn’t mean it’s good. As we’ll soon see, it can be argued that everything is a game. The difference is in the design.
Really good games have been ruthlessly play-tested and calibrated to the point where achieving a state of flow is almost guaranteed for many. Play-testing is just another word for iterative development, which is essentially the conducting of progressive experiments
.”
Dr Jason Fox
in his book, “The Game Changer.”

Reflect with me for a moment – when it comes to your OSS activities, in which situations do you consistently get into a state of flow?

For me, it’s in quite a few different scenarios, but one in particular stands out – building up a network model in an inventory management tool. This activity starts with building models / patterns of devices, services, connections, etc, then using the models to build a replica of the network, either manually or via data migration, within the inventory tool(s). I can lose complete track of time when doing this task. In fact I have almost every single time I’ve performed this task.

Whilst not being much of a gamer, I suspect it’s no coincidence that by far my favourite video game genre is empire-building strategy games like the Civilization series. Back in the old days, I could easily get lost in them for hours too. Could we draw a comparison from getting that same sense of achievement, seeing a network (of devices in OSS, of cities in the empire strategy games) grow rapidly as a result of your actions?

What about fans of first-person shooter games? I wonder whether they get into a state of flow on assurance activities, where they get to hunt down and annihilate every fault in their terrain?

What about fans of horse grooming and riding games? Well…. let’s not go there. 🙂

Anyway, enough of all these reflections and musings. I would like to share three concepts with you that relate to Dr Fox’s quote above:

  1. Gamification – I feel that there is MASSIVE scope for gamification of our OSS, but I’ve yet to hear of any OSS developers using game design principles
  2. Play-testing – How many OSS are you aware of that have been, “ruthlessly play-tested and calibrated?” In almost every OSS situation I’ve seen, as soon as functionality meets requirements, we stop and move on to the next feature. We don’t pause and try a few more variants to see which is most likely to result in a great design, refining the solution, “to the point where achieving a state of flow is almost guaranteed for many
  3. Richer Progress – How many of our end-to-end workflows are designed with, “a richer sense of progress” in mind? Feedback tends to come through retrospective reporting (if at all), rarely through the OSS game-play itself. Chances are that our end-to-end processes actually flow through multiple un-related applications, so it comes back to clever integration design to deliver more compelling feedback. We simply don’t use enough specialist creative designers in OSS

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