Re:Soviet gamification
by alive-or-not on Saturday March 02, 2013 @04:26PM
(#5311133)
The Soviet economy was based on money a lot less than US or even socialist Denmark. An average family would have enough savings to buy pretty much everything they wanted (excluding luxury stuff, like holiday abroad or a limousine), but the only place they were legally allowed to buy most stuff were state-owned companies. A family would have to wait say 15 years in a queue to buy an apartment, 7 years for a car and a couple of years for a TV, vacuum cleaner or a washing machine. This is one place where a high achiever could "cash" on his hard work, as he may be allowed to buy stuff w/o waiting. Generally reputation, favors, networking played a bigger role in Soviet economy and hard work could help with those.
Nice article BTW ;)
Part of my argument, though I make it more clearly in an expanded, short-paper version of this essay [1], is that the "gamification" part devolved into just regular old Stalinist command-and-control: production quotas and such, with a thin facade of worker autonomy and "voluntary" competition spread across it. That's one of the things people worry about with modern gamification as well, that a "game" that's a mandatory part of your job is not really much of a game, and more like old-fashioned, top-down control than the gamification consultants' uplifting rhetoric would like you to believe (e.g. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/19/local/la-me-1019-lop...).
[1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2115483