Shifting the Intranet. Peterme has a recap of J.C. Herz's presentation about Networked Experience Design at last week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.
"In it, J.C. argued that people designing any system that exploits a network would do well to study the 'social ecology' of online gaming, where the interactions between players are supported by the elements of the game environments, and spurring various cultural developments. (I put J.C.'s 'social ecology' in quotes, because a Google search suggests its standard use is quite different than hers. I believe "information ecology" is the more apt term.)
Lexicon aside, J.C.'s models of the gaming ecology offered insights that could be carried into other milieus. She began by breaking down the four types of gamers:
1. Achievers - they want to win, kick everyone's @ss, be seen as the best
2. Explorers - they're modeling the system, they tinker with it's boundaries, winning is secondary to being the most knowledgeable
3. Socializers - they're earning administrative privileges, they run the system, they help newbies get up to speed, etc.
4. Spoilers - they're the class clowns. They're here to, as we used to say in my college co-op, f*ck sh*t up.
J.C.'s point here is simple. An online game has to provide multiple ways to win, or, perhaps a more accurate term is 'succeed', because success means different things to these different roles. Not everyone has the same goal, motivations, etc. People want to take different roles....
The most obvious beneficiary of J.C.'s modeling would be corporate intranets. Those four user types, the use of experience/knowledge as status, the forming of meaningful groups--all of these are important within companies, and an intranet design that explicitly represented these elements could prove to be exceedingly powerful. Employees getting rewarded for sharing the most information (thus earning the most 'cubes'). Employees maintaining group identities, not just with their department, but with other meaningful groups (basketball players, people carpooling from a certain location, etc.) Even a system that allowed the jokester a place for carrying on. Intranets need to respond to its users not just as employees, cogs in a company's system, but as people, social creatures interacting."
Peter provides further links if you want to read more about J.C., but this is definitely food for thought for me. I think I'm probably the only full-time employee in my organization that plays video games, and yet I can still tell which co-workers fit into each of the above types.
The concept would work pretty well for our extranet, too, because our member libraries could assign value to specific information (which is way too scary a concept for most people), which would help generate "emblems of status." Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a programmer (or we don't have enough money to hire one) to build these types of elements into the stuff I'm currently working on.
One of the things I forgot to explicitly say last night was that as the Net Generation grows up "information shifted," managers, information architects, and techies building online systems are going to have to recognize the paradigm shift and deal with this when these kids enter the corporate work force. As they grow up with news aggregators, online gaming, online social interactions (communities), pervasive computing, and ubiquitous connectivity, your knowledge management system, content management system, and work flow had better take these factors into account. Further, they should take advantage of how these kids consume information and feed it back into the system. [The Shifted Librarian]
11:27:40 AM 
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