Free to Play: Customer Product Employee

03/10/15

There's a truism I've read a couple times: "if you're not the customer, you're the product". And it's something I've been thinking about whenever I think about Free-to-Play. Though, I think free-to-play, FTP, or freemium as some call it, doesn't fall into this dichtomy too often. The players are the customers, freemium just catches a lot of flak for trying to trick their players into playing through what may be considered underhanded trickery.

But the "customer or product" dictomy does still exist in many ways, I suppose. I do believe a lot of games out there have ads that can be turned off by paying, for example.

But really, I wonder, could there be a third option? Could free to play games use their players as employees? One man's tedium is another man's passtime, and add gamification and it could be considered good fun. Never mind the various creative endeavors that people engage with in games. How implausible is it to make a game that has players create a sellable value, and actually translate that to how funding is derived for the game?

Could such games exist that actually pay the players to play?

I know there are such games that provide real value. One such example that I read of repeatedly is the protein folding game. This is an important, hard-to-compute problem that is being massively solved in parallel by human beings.

Personally, I think it would be quite possible to make learning to code be a "pays-to-play" game. There's lots of coding out there that needs to get done, at all skill levels. Even entry-level coders could probably solve some real-world, albeit small and low-priority, problems as their improved their craft.

I think there's a lot of things that could pay to play. I think, perhaps, it could be a future of employment. I mean, I see "gamification" rising in employment, but the problem is that the gamification seems really shallow, from what I see of it. It reminds me of the "cowification" explansion to Cow Clickers that made fun of just that. Gamification needs to go beyond mere Skinner-Box methodologies. It needs to get at the heart of what needs to be done, it needs to be interactive such that it can place the player in positions that are challenging but not impossible, and it needs to adequately teach the player through play.

These are the types of games I'm interested in trying to make, but I still have a lot to learn before I can really implement any such thing. First thing I should do is gamify my own game-making routine. Try to design an engaging workload that really identifies what I can do and where I can stretch myself and create problems from there that address my growth needs.

I need to gain experience at game-making. But even more, I need to gain experience at efficient experience and accomplishment cultivation.