This book helps us to discover why people universally love games and how businesses can apply game design concepts to make work more enjoyable and motivating for everyone.  The truth is that we spend most of our life at work, feeling increasingly unhappy about how the work happens. Using a combination of studies and stories, the book explores why our current approach to work is painful and outdated and how games give us a playbook to fix that.

Did you know that we, on average, play 8.5 hours of games per week? While this varies slightly from East to West, we spend nearly one day per week immersed in this enjoyable problem-solving experience. And while there are an endless number of games, they fall into a few categories that closely link up with our deep personal motivations. What is also interesting is that motivations are enduring and have stayed with us since childhood.

What if by finding out the games you played when you were young, we can uncover your deep personal motivations and help to find the best match for your work?  Games carry many similarities with work in that both involve creative problem-solving, which requires deep focus. Games appeal to our innate desire for control by providing the freedom to choose a game and switch to a different game when we feel bored. We discover that games are engineered and refined to appeal to our core motivations, which, together with clever design, helps us achieve a state of flow.

Covid and the subsequent disruption to status quo of work, was the largest freedom of work choice experience across the world. Having tasted the choice in their work, successive waves of people all over the world started rebelling against the factory-style work first by great resignations, followed by a great job reshuffle. We need a better way to make work enjoyable and engaged or risk a downward spiral of decreasing productivity and economic stagnation.

Gamification by itself does not work, as it misses the point that we as individuals have different needs and motivations. Hence a one size fits all approach does not work. Imagine if you were a person that enjoys tennis and we put you in front of a slot machine for the next three years, 8 hours per day, your satisfaction is likely to be very low. The book addresses the points of pain and opportunity around making work more engaging. It offers practical insights into how we can tap into the intrinsic motivations to create a more satisfying work experience.