Thu 31 Jan 2008
Many years ago. Many, many years ago when I was at college all entertainment was mechanical (apart from some Asteroids and a 3D Tank game). It was claimed, although I am not entirely sure that I ever saw it done, that the pinball machines could be gamed to give free credits by spinning a 2p coin up the coin-return chute. So, here you have this big mechanical “black-box” that you can game through a rarely used output channel to give you free credits. You get the machine to do something that it is not designed to do. You got more credits than the machine wanted to give you without the machine being aware. Gamed.
We roll forward several years and nothing much has changed but instead of using 2p coins and a particular wrist action of which Shane Warne would be proud, input/ output flibberty-gibbet buffers are over and under-flowed and … well, you get the machine to do something that it doesn’t want to do without it knowing. Gamed.
But these posts are not about machines mechanical or digital but about process, the gaming of process and how everyone either forms circles of plausible deniability to deny the fact or layer process upon process upon check upon process to reduce the potential for gaming. Every process can be gamed. Every check is a process. Every process can be gamed.
All in the game yo, all in the game
- Omar the best character on television. Ever.
February 6th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Hope to read more in future posts about how “every check is a process”. It’s not immediately obvious to me.
I understand the point about setting up a framework of metrics to monitor performance - this can lead people to deliver against the metrics rather than concentrating purely on value. Or, as you say, produce metrics by sleight-of-hand rather than delivering anything at all.
But analysing things in terms of process is just a way of analysing them. The laws of physics don’t create the universe, they just describe it. People will do their work in a given way and you can use process definitions to describe it, or even to describe the way you want them to do it.
Are you saying this has no value at all? We should not care *how* people do things, just concentrate on the results?