JRFC 26 - Jobs are Quests

[jbenet]

Video games excel at giving us things to do-- the whole notion of quests is really well constructed and manages to create a sense of meaning, responsibility, reward, and urgency. (Plus, we're all so conditioned by now to respond well to this...) I wish life "jobs" had more of that. In particular, there's a large amount of work that is primarily -- or could be -- done by contractors.

Maybe we could turn job postings into handing out Quests with clear rewards. And they could weave the storyline of our times, our world, our problems, and our efforts.

[jbenet]

@dominictarr

[jonathanmarvens]

@jbenet

How could something like this actually work effectively, though? Can you elaborate please?

- Jonathan

[dominictarr]

the big differences here is that quests in "the real world" have much more ambigious success conditions. so you need an umpire or something and hello complexity.

[NeoTeo]

So perhaps you could have something like TDD where part of the problem definition involves writing a test for success. Pass or fail.

[jbenet]

Interesting examples of trying new things:

• https://medium.com/job-portraits/scientist-sought-to-help-solve-the-reproducibility-crisis-3842bd805271
• https://medium.com/job-portraits/experiment-is-hiring-a-product-designer-to-change-the-world-of-science-dfa58739c55e

[NeoTeo]

I love how these turn the usual employer's wishlist on its head and becomes a kind of pre-interview, answering questions from both perspectives (including those you'd be too nervous/scared/etc to ask at an actual interview) and giving a much better idea of whether you'd actually like to work there. These seem like untraditional approaches to traditional job situations whereas I read your suggestion as (additionally) changing the way we partition and distribute work and motivate the adoption of a new kind of work methodology based on collecting these "Quest cards". Perhaps I'm reading too much into it :)

[jbenet]

No, you read into it correctly. I'm just pointing out another experiment.

[RichardLitt]

I sort of did this recently, too: https://trello.com/b/LoZkhd9Y/richard-s-public-ideas

[christabor]

Is the goal to gamify trite or boring jobs so people are more interested in doing them?

As noted, trying to weave the details in would be a hard goal, but if you at least knew what the inputs and outputs were, it might be tractable.

Inputs: requirements, experience level, pay, etc

Outputs: end goal- a task or tasks, a feeling, a product, a change in existing product, infrastructure etc.

Then you could weave the story in between these two input outputs in a more convoluted but interesting way.

The only big caveat I see is making the job fun but not creating a bunch of uncompetitive busy work. Someone would have to pay for all that. Also, if it is interesting, there becomes a market for it, and the market becomes competitive, which means the more interesting stories take more time to complete and the economics are questionable.

Seems like starting with user stories about both sides of the equation would be a good idea.