OK. This is an attempt to come at 'pretending apps' from another direction.
(And, a big caveat upfront. I hate it, on the Today programme, when journalists and pundits bang on about something I know about. They always get it wrong. And I'm conscious that lots of people reading this know about games and play. Way more than me. So I'm bound to be getting it wrong, or at least stating the obvious. Apologies. You should stop reading now. This, I'm afraid, is how I do things. I learn by stating the obvious in public.)
We're seeing all sorts of people taking stuff from games at the moment. Mechanics like high scores, badges and leader boards are being extracted from games and sold to anyone who wants to get people to do things.There is, of course, some logic to this, these are often compelling things, and they certainly map well to how a lot of organisations see the world. I suspect many of these mechanics are so popular with brands and marketing organisations because they fit with traditional assumptions about how you motivate people - give them rewards. We've just swapped badges and mayorships for BOGOFs and Miles.
And this isn't stupid, people do like keeping score of things and getting little badges, it scratches an atavistic itch.
The problem is, up to now, we've mostly experienced these point scoring mechanisms in the context of well-designed games. They're part of a larger experience - properly thought through by people who know what they're doing. We like scoring points, partly because, up to now, all the contexts in which we've scored points have been fun.
However, as I've slightly grumpily encountered myself, not everyone who wants a game wants to pay for a game designer. It's a bit like advertising, everyone thinks they can do it themselves.
Which means we're going to encounter a bunch of crappy sorta-games foisted on us. Those rudimentary game schemes are going to be rolled out by everyone with a rewards card, CRM system, loyalty scheme or something that can be plotted on a graph. And they're going to be no fun. They're going to drive us all mad. This'll either lead to wholesale abandonment of the whole idea or a recognition that proper games design is necessary. Not sure which way I'd bet, but that's not really my main point.
My main point brings me back to Pretending Apps. Because there are lots of other things you can steal from games, many other aspects of gaming that people find appealing and some of them might be more easily and usefully extracted.
The aesthetic context, for instance, might be more worthwhile; the role you're given to play, the cues that let you imagine you're not you for a bit. They might be more rewarding to dig out, especially as that's what quite a lot of brands already do. They surround a product or service with cues that give it pretending power - that help you fit it into a fantasy version of who you are. While also doing whatever practical thing you wanted it to do. But they don't often think of it that way. They talk about heritage and authenticity and positioning. They don't often talk about their pretending power.
Anyway. So this feels like a thing. That while the wholesale export of games mechanics to the world might get a bit infuriating, the export of the cues about pretend identity might be more fruitful.
And it brings me back to toys again, because they do that very well.
Anyway. Sorry. I'm thinking about loud here, without really an aim in mind yet. Ah well.