O'Reilly makes an interesting distinction early on that "Games are among the oldest 'social interfaces.' The rules and tokens of a game provide a set of affordances and an environment in which people interact. In fact, people will make up their own games with whatever elements they find handy"(37). This led me to question the nature of games and to what degree elements of a game are prevalent in nealry all aspects of Web 2.0. I think society likes to make distinctions regarding what constitutes a game or gaming that would separate things like console gaming from checking statuses on facebook, but I'm wondering if the difference is not so much in what constitutes a game as it is what is overtly marketed as a game. What I want to explore within that is the idea that our online identity (and perhaps all identity) is a logical outcome of the gaming like procedural structure of the web and social interaction.
There's obviously a lot to unpack here so I want to take a moment to clarify how I'm using these terms. When I say that all social interaction, but espeically online social interaction is a "game," I mean that there are elements that are procedural, entertaining, rewarding (whether through badges or other means of rewards), and nonsensical. I think this last part of my definition can be the most important (and potentially most upsetting) since it hinges on the idea that things that are "serious" are less game-like. People may balk at this idea both because cynics and nihilists may claim that nothing is ever truly serious or meaningful and all action is part of a fantasy we've constructed and therefore game-like, but others may say that things they find serious (like checking how many likes are on their status posts or looking for an article online) should not be trivialized through being labeled as a game.
I think the potential resistance to this idea would come from
O'Reilly's ideas around constructed identity online: "There is a
growing belief that a person's identity belongs to him and not to the
software or service in which the data has been created. The
proliferation of socially enabled sites that do not interoperate means
people must recreate themselves at each and every site they go
to. In some cases, this isn't an issue, since the context of the
community dictates what persona to persent" (81). There's obviously
other issues going on here, espeically the idea of a company "owning"
your identity, but I think it's also useful to think about both how
constructed user identities are game-like and how the creations of
these identities may cause resistance to the stigma of taking part in a
game. Sites like Deviant Art or Comicvine pretty much require users to
make up a name and use an avatar other than their actual picture and
name so it's easy here to see how the fantasy elements of this
interaction seem a lot like the users are participating in a
role-playing game. Facebook presents a different issue since the user
generally uses pictures of him or herself and tries to comment using
her or his own voice.
This identity, however, is still constructed, and arguably construted for the purpose of participating in the procedural, entertaining, and nonsensical elements of facebook like tagging, poking, liking, and even commenting. If we are able to accept at least some of this as being like a game, I think we can reconcile O'Reilly's discomfort with the term "viral." He thinks this distracts from ideas of "healthy, sustainable, postive expansion"(209), but perhaps we can make this look less negative by offering the idea that what makes a social site good, is what makes it a good and infectious game, therefore allowing the term "viral" to be less negative when focusing on effectiveness. In this regard perhaps facebook has been more succesful than myspace because it makes a better virus, we're more infected by it.
Obviously there's a lot more that continues to need to be unpacked
for this theory to make much sense, but I still think that if we start
to observe nearlly all digital social interaction as part of a game
then we may better undersatnd how to create the best gaming context to
interest our targeted audiences for our sites, though I'd love to hear
what others think.