Читать книгу Engaged - Amy Bucher - Страница 44

People experience things they want to do differently than things they have to do, even if the activities are pretty similar. Remember Farmville, the Facebook game that swept the nation around 2010? At its peak, it had almost 84 million players who would log in every day to . . . plow their fields. Performing basic agricultural maintenance tasks like harvesting crops earned players experience points and game currency that enabled them to expand their farms (see Figure 3.6). Which, of course meant more farm chores to perform.

FIGURE 3.6 Farmville players enjoyed logging into the game every day to clear their fields of debris and fill their coffers with Farm Bucks.

Contrast that with a worker who goes to an office every morning and fires up the computer to review data in spreadsheets. Performing basic accounting maintenance tasks like updating revenue projections earns the worker their paycheck. While the worker may show up every day, they’re not particularly jazzed about it, and spend most of the workday checking the clock in case it’s time to go home.

Farmville and work have a lot in common. They both require daily effort, the completion of tedious and sometimes dull tasks, and they’re impossible to “win”; there’s always something more to do. Yet people were incredibly engaged with Farmville and experienced fun playing it, while there’s broad evidence that many American workers are disengaged from their jobs. Could it be that when people elect to do something for their own reasons, it’s more fun?

NOTE BROCCOLI OR SPINACH?

The Picky Eater Project is a six-week program for parents to introduce finicky children to a wider variety of healthy foods. One of the tactics within the program is to involve the children in shopping for ingredients and preparing recipes. The creators of the Picky Eater Project have found that kids are much more likely to try foods they had a hand in bringing to the table. Even though the choice of foods had constraints—kids shopped at a farmer’s market, not a candy store—providing the choice led to more effective behavior changes.