(2019-05-20) Hon The Mapping Problem

Adrian Hon: The Mapping Problem. But here’s the sting in the tail: the Mapping Problem means that even if we’ve solved the Mopping Problem, we haven’t solved the Violin Problem, or the Ironing Problem, or the Bin-Emptying Problem. These are all completely different.

Last year, someone from Samsung’s strategy team asked to talk to me about whether “gamification” could be a possible use (if not a killer app) for a hypothetical augmented reality heads-up display.

“But isn’t Zombies, Run! popular? Couldn’t you do that for other things?”

The Mapping Problem came to me at a games conference when I was asked if I could make mopping the floor more fun.

after the third or fourth or eighth or ninth time you tap the “I’ve mopped, yo!” button, you realise that it’s meaningless

I would try to make the act of mopping more fun.

This cannot be achieved through points and badges alone. It requires real-time motivation, either through gameplay or storytelling, or both.

Basically we need to wait for an affordable augmented reality heads-up display, which is a few years out. I honestly don’t think it’s possible to make an effective mopping game without this technology, any more than it’d be possible to make Zombies, Run! without GPS-enabled smartphones.

I’d argue that any gamification that extends to the physical world (real world) (as opposed to entirely digital activities like, say, gamifying online language learning) falls into this category where practically every solution requires some kind of custom interface technology

If you’re creating the next Fortnite or Mario or Grand Theft Auto, you don’t need to invent or harness an entirely new interface; but if you want to make the best game to teach you the violin, you have some very basic interface questions to answer

What’s the gameplay for our mopping game? Take your pick! Maybe it’s wiping away bugs crawling around the floor; or it’s a colouring game; or a game of Snake; or you’re sculpting a 3D landscape. There are lots of possibilities, the important thing is for the game to organically encourage you to cover the entire floor in a way that isn’t too rote or tiring. The point is, the game doesn’t just reward you for having mopped, rather, the act of mopping is the game.

But here’s the sting in the tail: the Mapping Problem means that even if we’ve solved the Mopping Problem, we haven’t solved the Violin Problem, or the Ironing Problem, or the Bin-Emptying Problem. These are all completely different.