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I want to learn about gamification but all I see is same-ification

Youth culture and the iron-cladding of backsides

Something for the Weekend, Sir? “You don’t know you’re born,” they would say to me during my first holiday job.

“You don’t know you’re a sad, blubber-arsed freeloader coasting towards retirement,” I’d reply… in my head, of course.

Out loud, I would complain that they were being unfair, and I would be slapped down with that most frustrating of clichés “Life’s not fair!” and told not to be so sensitive.

Being repeatedly accused by some fat old wrinkly bastard of a catastrophic failure to realise the incident of one’s birth, even some 15 years after the event itself, gets boring very quickly when you’re young.

It’s a classic put-down delivered by old gits at work who believe they have acquired a wealth of life experience but have, in fact, simply made a ghastly mess of their shambolic careers and try to defend their last 40 years being a complete loser by projecting their utter failure onto the next generation.

Any attempt to challenge their opinion is treated as a tantrum and further evidence of youthful sensitivity.

“You need to iron-clad your arse if you want to get on here,” one bulbous-nosed old pissed bastard would frequently tell me, which is advice that I will never forget simply because I still don’t know what he meant.

Another line from oldsters was “Don’t talk to me with that tone of voice!” but I suppose that’s what you get when you’re a kid who gets his kicks inhaling helium balloons.

Welding metal plates to my butt and dissuading me from breathing monatomic gases aside, another annoying thing that older people tended to do was express the number of times they’ve done something more often than you on the Hot Dinners Scale. For example, I might ask for help wrenching loose a rusted nut and some twat would wobble over and say “Give it here,” followed, quite unnecessarily, by “I’ve wrenched more rusted nuts than you’ve had hot dinners.”

The Hot Dinners Scale is only slightly related to the Joliet standards for measuring short distances by the length of double-decker buses or describing the size of a large area by the number of football pitches it could contain, or a much bigger area in comparison to the size of Wales.

Incidentally, this came into play earlier in the week at the UEFA Euro 2016 championship when Wales beat Russia to go through to the next round. The general response by bemused Russia fans on social media was to draw attention to the relative sizes of the two countries. “We just lost to a country size of a Mega Khimki shopping mall,” moaned one Russia fan, failing to appreciate the convention.

Wales is, of course, so small that it could fit inside Wales.

Anyway, back to my formative experiences with older people who claim to know better. I freely admit that some older people were genuinely helpful as I was growing up, especially when directing me to the one thing that really mattered to those born in the mid-1960s: music.

On that note, let me express gratitude to my mother for exposing me to so much reggae, my father for quietly but definitively revealing the significance of Led Zeppelin, and my older brother (now a crusty globetrotting barrister of international renown and mixgod of growing notoriety) who indoctrinated me in prog rock.

I was just a little too young to understand what punk was all about while it was happening but I got into the subsequent new wave big-time, partly thanks to my free-living eldest brother (now an IT manager in Australia) who would leave singles littered about the place on his infrequent visits, introducing me to the late-1970s delights of Lene Lovich, Devo, Ian Dury and er... Ivor Biggun.

It was around this time that McDonald’s opened its first “restaurant” in Leeds, which I visited in its first week to see what the fuss was about. I can’t say it was the worst beef burger I’ve ever tasted – I have visited McDonald’s many times since then, you see – but I do remember thinking that while the place seemed to be intended to attract young people, many of whom were still into punk back then, it had to be the shiniest, squeakiest and most un-punk shithole ever.

So it’s with considerable dismay that I see McDonald’s hijack a minor punk anthem for its current ad campaign. Here’s the Buzzcocks original, complete with helpful subtitles for Donald Trump.

Youtube Video

With recollections of growing up under the questionable influence of oldies firmly in mind I attended Amazon’s Game Developers’ Day earlier this week.

Thankfully no one found out that I am neither a developer nor particularly interested in computer games. The reason for the former is that I am not clever enough; the reason for the latter is that I lack patience.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved going to arcades as a teenager and worked my way through my share of 8bit and 16bit home consoles through to the Playstation era, nailing my PC faves Doom and Quake on the way.

But it waned after that. Modern games with their convoluted backstories, casts of thousands, tedious cut scenes and mile after mile of unnecessary scenery just annoy me. I have other things to do. Not better things, just things that are less stultifying.

Such as listening to music.

This, of course, is the Old Git inside me talking. The yoof of today couldn’t give a toss about music but is mad about gaming, not least on their smartphones.

Given what I hear on Kiss FM and see on MTV, I can appreciate why they don’t like music very much.

But ah… there goes Old Git again. Old Git says that everyone in the entertainment industry today is a talentless waster weaned on ringtones and web porn. Not like in Old Git’s day when we had upstanding entertainment celebrities who you could trust – such as Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and Stuart Hall.

On the other hand, for every Jonathan King and Dave Lee Travis, you had a Tommy Vance and John Peel, so it wasn’t all bad.

Still, vast swathes of digital media development seems to be devoted to gaming and Old Gits need to get a better hook on it. Gamification is what I need to introduce into my publishing projects to keep them on track, so I infiltrated Amazon’s event to rub shoulders with people who understand these things.

What I learnt was that, despite a fair racial mix, it turns out 99 per cent of game devs are men. This isn’t entirely an idle statistic either: I reckon of the 200 or so people who attended, two were women.

Surely any kind of obvious homogeneity within an industry is a sign of insularity that risks producing bland results.

I overheard one programmer relate how, while working on one of the more famous football game titles a few years ago for a certain major international tournament, was introduced to the company’s lead developers in Japan who had completed most of the international footie team characters already.

They had designed the entire Cameroon team with white faces.

I knew programmers didn’t get out much but I can only assume Japanese programmers must be locked in basements.

So this is what gamification is all about? Doing the same old thing again and again but with better water particle effects, backed by $100m and determined by a roomful of blokes? No wonder I went off gaming.

And that’s what kids of today want, is it? Not music but identikit games? Sod ’em then. These gamers deserve all they get, if you ask me. Old Git says they don’t know they’re born.

And no, Old Git, I’m not being too sensitive about this. No, my arse does not need to be protected by iron.

Down with iron-clad backsides! Put a stop to armoured arses!

Death to all butt-metal!

Youtube Video

Alistair DabbsAlistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. After a short period of revisiting new wave, prompted by a long period listening to the late-1970s Bowie albums (he predicted it all!) immediately after the great man’s death, he has returned to listening to his beloved industrial metal and would like to apologise for acting his age.

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