游戏化，即为了让非游戏的应用软件更有吸引力而把它变得像游戏，不应该把游戏任务简单化，而应该让它更富有挑战性。

未来协会（Institute for Future）的游戏研究主任简·麦格尼格尔（Jane McGonigal）出了一本以游戏化为主题的新书《破碎的现实：游戏何以改变世界》（Reality is Broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world），她认为网站创始人以及其他想让网站游戏化的公司，都应该把游戏任务变得更有挑战性，这样用户在达成目标时才会更有成就感。

Jane McGonigal

这一主张与麦格尼格尔对游戏的定义有关，她在日前的旧金山“游戏化峰会”（Gamification Summit）上论述了这一观点，“游戏就像我们主动招惹的绊脚石”，她认为用户玩游戏就是想要获得“良性刺激”，这是一种激发我们最佳表现的积极压力。

麦格尼格尔曾发明了最多富有创造性的游戏（游戏邦注：例如《无油世界》，该游戏旨在唤醒人们降低石油使用量的意识），她相信游戏化能够积极改变人类的行为，反过来又将极大地造福现实世界。但她担心如果人们只是从游戏中学到了推行奖励政策这种皮毛，而没有汲取其中的精髓，就有可能让游戏化变得毫无意义。

她将人们玩游戏时所获的快感称之为“游戏乐趣”。她说，“许多游戏化的东西都只是加了一层点缀，但那并不是游戏的本质”。

为了让她的演讲更有趣，麦格尼格尔在现场和大家做了个游戏。她让现场观众发短息到同一个号码，并按它的指示操作，然后鼓励观众在演讲中数次大喊“阿门”。

她表示，许多游戏模糊了工作和玩乐之间的界限。例如，在《FarmVille》中，为了推动游戏进程，用户就得像完成工作任务一样，不得不去收集许多东西。大家都知道，有些工作很困难，而一些好游戏通常都有难度。游戏的最终目标就是要让玩家战胜困难，并最终获得快感。

麦格尼格尔的这种理念与玩高尔夫球也很相似，高尔夫在球进洞的过程中，得经过很多不必要的障碍。这一点很有意思，因为如果一个游戏太简单，就会变得很乏味。

她说，“在现实生活中，我们可能只是将球扔进一个洞里，但为什么把它变得困难些，就变成游戏了呢？”

这和积极压力的产生有关，它激发了我们的动力，让我们争取表现优异，避免让我们感到厌烦、乏味。她注意到，玩家在最热门的角色扮演类游戏《魔兽世界》中投入的时间累计已超过593万年，想升到最高等级WoW的玩家则至少得上游戏中耗上600小时。

在写书过程中，麦格尼格尔的头部受到了一次重创，导致她无法读书或写作，她感到很沮丧。医生告诉她，头部伤害使她产生沮丧的情绪，如要痊愈，就必须以积极的心态去应对。

于是她发明了《Super Better》这款游戏，帮助病人恢复健康，她认为这个游戏拯救了自己的生活。除此之外，她还通过创办自己的公司Social Chocolate，让这款游戏实现商业化运营，同时还开发了其他的游戏为人们还来更多积极作用。

她表示，一款好游戏可以让人产生积极的情绪，克服沮丧心理，让我们觉得自己是社会群体中的一员，获得更高的自我认同和成就感。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Game guru Jane McGonigal says “gamification” should make tasks hard, not easy

Gamification, or making a non-game application more engaging by making it game-like, should not make tasks easy for people undertaking them. It should make them harder.

Jane McGonigal, game research director of the Institute for Future and author of a new book on gamification, “Reality is Broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world.”, said the opposite is true: Web site owners — including those of major corporations — should make tasks challenging, so that the sense of achievement upon completing them is greater.

The assertion is related to McGonigal’s definition of a game, which she talked about at the Gamification Summit today in San Francisco. She said that “games are unnecessary obstacles that we volunteer to tackle.” When people play games, they are trying to achieve a feeling of “eustress,” a kind of positive stress that motivates us to perform our best, she said.

McGonigal, who has spawned some of the most creative games in the history of the industry (such as World Without Oil, a game aimed at getting people to reduce their use of oil), believes wholeheartedly in gamification’s ability to make big changes in the behavior of people who in turn can create big changes in the real world. But she worries that gamification efforts fall short when they adopt the mechanics of a game, such as giving rewards for certain behavior, without adopting the spirit of a game.

The good feeling you get when you play an engaging game is what she calls “gamefulness.”

“Lots of things have the bells and whistles, but not the heart of a game,” she said.

McGonigal actually created a game to go with her speech, to make it more fun. She had people in the audience send text messages to a phone number and do what it suggested. Ultimately, the game encouraged audience members to yell “amen” at various points during her speech.

She said that a lot of games have blurred the line between work and play. FarmVille, for instance, requires you to collect a lot of things in order to progress, much as you do for work. The common notion is that some jobs are hard work, and some of the best games are hard to play. The ultimate goal is to get gamers to conquer the game and get to a kind of euphoric feeling at the end of it.

Golf fits the definition of McGonigal’s idea of a game, since it creates unnecessary obstacles to putting a ball in a hole. It makes sense. If a game is too easy, it becomes boring.

“In real life, we would just drop a ball in a hole,” she said. “Why does it become a game when we make it harder?”

It has to do with creating that feeling of eustress, which drives our motivation and performance and keeps us from getting bored or uninspired. She notes that users have invested more than 5.93 million years of time into playing World of WarCraft, the popular online role-playing game. Getting to the highest level in WoW takes 600 hours.

While McGonigal was writing her book, she suffered a bad head injury. She was getting depressed because she couldn’t do things like read a book or write. Doctors were telling her that the head injury itself was making her biochemically prone to feelings of depression and she needed to pull out of it with positive feelings in order to heal.

So she created a game. Called Super Better, the game was aimed at helping patients recover from an illness. She credits it with saving her own life. McGonigal has created a company, Social Chocolate, to commercialize that game and to launch others that lead to real world benefits.

Games that are done well create a feeling of urgent optimism, which is also the opposite of depression. It makes us feel like we are part of a social fabric, that we’re blissfully productive, and that we have achieved something bigger than ourselves with epic meaning, she said.（source:venturebeat）