Learning from Sim Refinery

This excerpt from an old Will Wright talk on SimCity and simulation game design has broken me of my naivete around using game-like interfaces for work tasks:

Then there was the oil company who wanted "Sim Refinery", so you could use it to lay out oil tanker ports and petroleum storage and piping systems, because they thought that it would give their employees useful experience in toxic waste disaster management, in the same way SimCity gives kids useful experience in being the mayor of a city. They didn't realize that the real lessons of SimCity are much more subtle than teaching people how to be good mayors. But the oil company hoped they could use it to teach any other lessons on their agenda just by plugging in a new set of graphics, a few rules, and a bunch of disasters.

And there was the X-Terminal vendor who wanted to adapt the simulator in SimCity into a game called "Sim MIS", that they would distribute for free to Managers of Information Systems, whose job it is to decide what hardware to buy! The idea was that the poor overworked MIS would have fun playing this game in which they could build networks with PCs, X-Terminals, and servers (instead of roads with residential, commercial, and industrial buildings), that had disasters like "viruses" infecting the network of PC's, and "upgrades" forcing you to reinstall Windows on every PC, and business charts that would graphically highlight the high maintanence cost of PCs versus X-Terminals. Their idea was to use a fun game to subtly influence people into buying their product, by making them lose if they didn't. Unlike the oil company, they certainly realized the potential to exploit the indirect ways in which a game like SimCity can influence the user's mind, but they had no grip on the concept of subtlety or game design.

Point being, if you sacrifice fun it's no longer a game. Two other good quotes from that talk:

• "There are several tightly coupled parts of a simulation game that must be designed closely together: the simulation model, the game play, the user interface, and the user's model."
• "The digital models running on a computer are only compilers for the mental models users construct in their heads."