Ludium I: Productive Fun

Ludium I, from the Arden Institute: a center for the study of synthetic worlds demonstrates how the division between work and play is not only artificial, but also detrimental to productivity. Get that? If they experienced such an acceleration of productivity by doing it pretty much all for fun (and pretend money and trophies and stuff), the separation between work and play actually makes work less productive.

This, from the abstract of the final report:

"Ludium I was an effort to develop and prove a radical new paradigm for intellectual gatherings. Abandoning entirely the standard speaker-audience structure, the ludium instead embedded participants in a game designed to generate both tangible output and emotional excitement and satisfaction - fun. It intentionally ignored the distinction between work and play, and sought to test the possibility that professionals engaged in a properly designed game would generate both entertainment and productivity at the same time...A selected group of academics and game designers were formed into five teams to play a competitive game of concept generation. The teams were tasked with developing proposals for using online game technology in university research; proposals were judged by a sixth team, with the best proposal earning a grand prize. In execution, Ludium I strongly confirmed the possibility that work and play can occur simultaneously: participants exhibited and reported very high levels of satisfaction, enthusiasm, laughter, and joy in the course of the event and on into following days, and they also produced a significant body of concrete output."

And they mean significant - an extensive online multimediafied documentary and a 144-page, downloadable, comprehensive report. I mean, it's enough to make you think. Maybe work is supposed to be fun.