Anti-gamifying the job search process

I like to play games, but there seems to be a pattern to when I play them. Aside from the obvious, that I play triple-A titles in my preferred genres (SF/FPS) when they come out, much as some people see every movie in their favorite genre, I don't play games often.

Jane McGonical's Reality is Broken is one of those books in which she tries to explain how video gaming points to a better world, one in which people don't suffer for making mistakes, but still have an opportunity to master a skill. She asks, "Who are gamers" and gives us this pithy answer:

They are nine-to-fivers who come home and apply all the smarts and talents that are underutilized at work to plan and coordinate complex raids and quests...

That explains much of the conflicted feelings I have about my current job search, and the scope of the position I'm looking for: I don't ever want to work someplace where, at the end of the day, I feel a need to do something else to fully engage my talents. If I do, I'm working at the wrong place.

An aside about Simon, the game

As an aside on the previous post, I noticed that the newest iteration of Simon has four pucks, one for each color; they intercommunicate with a modified bluetooth protocol, so it's possible to make the challenge of Simon harder by spatially re-arranging the colors. Well, that's more interesting that Guitar Hero.

Beyond ignorance but before expertise: 100 Hours To Competence

I've always been queasy about gamification. I appreciate the mash-up of documentation pointers and authority markers that are the hallmark of the best gamification implementations, such as the one at Stack Overflow. On the other hand, I've never understood the mechanical skeumorph games, like Guitar Hero, where the objective is to mimic a skill that, on its own, would be much more satisfying (and more demanding) then mastering a weirdly-shaped Simon interface and its various patterns. (And if you think about it, that's exactly what Guitar Hero is-- an upgraded version of Simon.) I'd rather master the skill, rather than emulate mastering the skill.

And here's the weirdest thing of all: Competence is easy.. You can learn to do anything in three months. You will not be an expert, because that takes 10,000 hours, but you can become competent, even conversant, in any topic you care about with 100 hours of serious study: one hour a day, every day, for three months.

And while those skills may fade if you don't keep applying them, the neural networks they build will serve you well for decades. Want to learn French, or Japanese? 100 hours. Want to learn how to program? 100 hours. Want to learn how to play guitar? 100 hours.

It can't be 100 hours in a row. You can't master the guitar in four sleepless days, or even eight sleep-filled days. Those brain cells take time to grow, and need reinforcment to sustain themselves. But you can go from being incompetent at the guitar or Frnech to understanding basic music theory and sufficient finger skills to play a lot of different music in 100 days, or listen to French radio and read pulp novels, in 100 days.

Oddly enough, Jerry Seinfeld has a technique called Don't Break The Chain, which is perfect for this kind of thing. Tim Ferris's matrix of learning is a good start for figuring out if and how you want to spend that hundred hours (what else are you gonna do... play video games?), and not just for language training.