The Gamification of Third Spaces

Working 80-hour weeks to finish my PhD thesis, I felt I had a solution to my dwindling motivation – a new laptop. My thesis was being written on either my gaming PC or a laptop with a 30 minute battery life, so I had limited viewing options to write the day away. But with better battery life, I could stare out different windows, drink delicious coffee and eavesdrop on interesting conversations while getting stuff done.

Without realising it, I had been craving a third space. The definition of a third space is quite simple: it’s a place you spend time in that’s not home and it’s not work. The examples people use for third spaces are places like cafes, libraries, community centres and more.

While the definition is simple, I’ve always been fascinated by what third spaces represent. A third space can be filled with old friends catching up, people reading with noise-cancelling headphones, and a group of friends alternating between chatting and writing their assignments.

But what if the feelings of a third space could be elicited through video games? Not only the feeling of closeness to others, but a space to do both work and hobbies. Is this even possible? Could this be used during times when physical third spaces are closed or with friend groups spread across the world? What would this even look like?

This is something I’d like to explore in this article. In particular, I would like to examine three main questions:

1. Can gamified third spaces help us feel close to others?
2. Can games help us and motivate us to get things done?
3. Can gamified third spaces motivate us to get things done…while feeling close to others!?

As usual, there will be a summary at the bottom if you don’t wish to read everything. I would also like to disclose that for the research and creation of this article, I reached out to a developer for early access to a game so I could explore the above questions. I am not paid or encouraged to promote this game, and I donated over twice the cost of the retail release to AbleGamers to ensure I did not profit from this transaction.

So let’s get right into it!

Contents

1. 1. Games as a Hangout Spot
      1.1. Linkin Park Numb.MIDI
      1.2. Hanging Out With Santa
   2. Games for Productivity
      2.1. Feel-Good Productivity
      2.2. Insert Fun Here
      2.3. Gamification? Not Really…
   3. Games for Productivity AND Hanging Out
      3.1. A Little Distraction as a Little Treat
      3.2. Looking for Group (of Study Buddies)
      3.3. Your Lofi Legacy
   4. Summary
   5. Credits
   6. References

Games As A Hangout Spot

Linkin Park Numb.MIDI

My friends and I have a hangout spot. It’s not exactly Central Perk from Friends or Cheers from Cheers, but it feels like home to us. In fact, it’s our ‘Home Point’.

This hangout spot is called New Gridania in Final Fantasy XIV. It’s a lovely, leafy hub that looks practically made for virtual picnics. But instead of living in rent-controlled apartments in New York, we live in Ireland, England, Germany and America. Many of us have New Gridania set as our in-game home location so we can quickly and easily teleport to see our friends.

One day when loading in to New Gridania, I heard the unmistakable MIDI rendition of Numb by Linkin Park.

It was MoshMosh!

On the Chaos Data Centre, one of the fun parts of chilling in New Gridania was MoshMosh. As a playable class in Final Fantasy XIV, Bards can fire deadly arrows at enemies while providing buffs to players with instruments such as flutes and harps. However, much like the beloved piano system in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Bards have the option to play around with these instruments and compose their own music.

Enter MoshMosh. MoshMosh was a group of travelling Bard characters who played concerts in New Gridania within the Chaos Data Centre. Without realising it, I had landed in New Gridania on a concert night. So I did what anyone would do when you see a group of catgirls playing Linkin Park songs on flutes – I told my friends.

At 7pm on a work night, my loved ones had assembled. Not only were we in a group call talking about our day, but we were all posing for ‘selfies’ to commemorate the concert, right down to organising ourselves by height so as not to block others.

I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to say that coffee shops are bad or concerts are replaceable, I just find immense joy in how immediate, accessible, and even cost-effective games are as a hangout spot, especially when paired with communication options like Discord (more on that later).

Games as a hangout spot offer something for everyone. A common misconception people have is that introverts hate people and extroverts are social butterflies, but this isn’t the case. These terms actually refer to how people recharge their energy: while introverts recharge through peace and solitary hobbies, extroverts love nothing more than socialising after a hectic day [1].

This is where the paradoxical element of third spaces can come into play. The person reading a book with noise-cancelling headphones may be looking to recharge in the company of others in the same way that introverts can enjoy social yet passive activities like being in silence with talkative people [2]. People working in a cafe may want to feel productive while basking in the company of others.

So when it comes to events like MoshMosh, extroverts who have had a hard day can jump online with friends irrespective of time, location, costs such as gas and more to quickly recharge their batteries. For introverts, online games can offer methods of communication that are less draining such as typing in private party chat when wanting to be close to friends [3].

Hanging Out With Santa

When studying for my undergraduate degree, I came across the ‘rich-get-richer’ hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that online forms of communication like social media serve to help people who are inundated with friends make even more friends, while people who have smaller social circles remain with small social circles [4]. However, I think online gaming is a great way to buck this trend.

I’m going to bare my soul here and share something that’s very, very stupid. My friends and I have an inside joke called Organization III. Based on this scene of Organization XIII from the Kingdom Hearts series, we use the Chair Mount in Final Fantasy XIV to sit in a triangle formation while we talk.

One night in December, Organization III was more than likely talking about some dumb stuff on voice chat. In the distance, we saw a player dressed as Santa approach us. We went about our business as it’s fairly common for players to inspect other player’s wardrobes, but then something happened.

Santa brought out his Chair Mount.

All three of us cheered in voice chat. We instantly broke out of our triangle formation and made room to form a square with our new chaired comrade – Organization IV was born. We got talking to Santa, and it turns out he was killing time waiting to do a dungeon in the game. It was his first time playing through the story, and as a DPS player, he was cursed to endure the worst waiting times of any class type in the game. He wanted to progress with the game’s story, but so far he had spent 40 minutes waiting around for the game to provide him with a tank, a healer, and another DPS player to help him.

This simply won’t do for a fellow Organization IVer! Together we formed a tank, a healer and two DPS players, so we told him to leave the queue and we would help him immediately. We had a great time and added Santa to our friend list, leaving him that night to progress the story while we had giant smiles on our faces.

I have ironically been working on this article in physical third spaces to provide financial support where I can, and a few weeks ago something happened that couldn’t be more perfect for this section of the article. While listening out for my coffee order, I saw a man standing between two tables. While facing one table, he gestured to another while saying “Come meet my cousin!”.

In a physical third space, it might be a bit weird to sit yourself down and start talking to someone. You might come away with a new friend, but it’s hard to ignore that it’s a bit of a social taboo. But in this instance, the two tables were connected through a shared bond – Guy Who Knows His Cousin.

In my experience, these social taboos don’t seem to exist in the world of gaming. In a gaming space, we all have the shared identity of Person Who Enjoys Video Games. We don’t have to wait around for Guy Who Knows His Cousin to bring people together, we can just start talking to people if we like their in-game outfit or if you’re doing the same content together. In fact, World of Warcraft received a bit of backlash when introducing its dungeon queueing system as people missed the ability to stand outside dungeons and form parties by talking to people.

The ease of making online friends through games can have wonderful outcomes, as demonstrated by a piece of research I love sneaking into each of my articles [5]. In a study of 912 players of online multiplayer games, around 75% had made close friends from online games. Nearly half of participants went on to meet their online buddies offline, and nearly a third of the gamers sampled said that they had met a significant other through playing games!

While I attended a digital concert with my online friends in the previous section, many of us from that screenshot are meeting up for a physical concert in September – and I just can’t wait.

Games for Productivity

One of the articles I’m most proud of is my article on How Video Games Can Help You Study. In this article, I provide tips inspired by video games to make your study time most effective – and to leave you with more time for games of course!

Despite this article being five years old, one of the things I discovered during the research phase stayed with me. While I took a more metaphorical approach to the creation of the article such as treating your study notes like preparing for the final boss, other examples I came across were more literal – people wanted video games to help them study.

As of writing, the search term ‘idle games for studying’ produces over 14 million Google search results. This term produces forum threads of people asking for and providing recommendations for games they can play in the background to help motivate them to study, focus their attention while studying or both. Recommendations that people make include Cookie Clicker and AFK Journey.

With so many people asking for video games to help with their productivity levels, is this an indication of the downfall of civilisation itself, or is it just basic human psychology? Let’s unpack this.

Feel-Good Productivity

Between my job, my website and other tasks like writing book chapters, I find myself constantly exploring the most effective and uplifting ways to keep myself motivated. To this end, it felt like a no-brainer to pick up a book titled Feel-Good Productivity by Dr Ali Abdaal [6].

Dr Abdaal is a physician with a passion for helping people to be their most productive selves. While I’ve greatly enjoyed reading through the book, something that Dr Abdaal said struck me as so simple yet so clever, I just had to include it here.

In the book, he describes a time he struggled to find the energy and motivation to do something he really didn’t want to do. Having recently rewatched Mary Poppins during his procrastination, he remembered a verse from the song A Spoonful of Sugar:

In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun
You find the fun and snap!
The job’s a game

This led him to a very simple thought process: what would this task look like if it were fun? This is a thought process that he has taken advantage of and has encouraged others to take advantage of since. If you have to do something and it’s just not fun, imagine what you can do to make yourself have more fun in the moment.

When games bring so much joy to our lives, it’s easy to understand why someone’s first thought is to add video games to the mix. Hell, Dr Abdaal himself references a bunch of video games in his book and fondly talks about playing games like The Legend of Zelda.

Another theory that might explain why people turn to games for motivation and perseverance is something called Self-Determination Theory [7]. This theory argues that for people to be motivated to achieve something, there must be three key components present: we must feel in control, we must feel a sense of accomplishment for working towards and completing it, and we must feel personally connected to it in some way. Imagine a student who hates Physics but is required by their school to complete a Physics test. If they add something like a video game to their Physics study sessions, this can help to bring the element of connectedness when the student hates the topic.

Insert Fun Here

I wrote my first research paper in my second year of university. After spending three years reading about psychological research, I was both thrilled and fascinated to finally be in the driver’s seat and writing my own introduction, methods, results and discussion sections. I think it’s some of the most fun I had at university and opened my eyes to what I wanted to do in my career.

I got the second lowest grade possible on that paper.

I’m throwing myself under the bus here to show just how unrewarding life can be. I worked so hard on something I really wanted to do well at and even put me on a different career path, but the ‘reward’ from that hard work was one of the lowest grades in my university life.

But my experience is far from unique. Workers typically have to work four solid weeks to reach the joy of their paycheque, and that says nothing about poor college students who spend years of their lives working towards one piece of paper. Recognising how mundane life can be, psychologists find themselves recommending small wins and little victories to get us through the week or even the day [8].

What I find fascinating from my earlier research on games and studying was the focus specifically on idle games. People are working diligently towards a future that may or may not pay off for them, and they want their time spent in the pursuit of this to unlock fun little rewards and amass in-game currency for them.

One app that I used for this purpose was Forest. Forest is mainly used as a focused productivity tool which prevents users from opening blacklisted apps such as Twitter or Discord. But for someone like myself who doesn’t have a problem with maintaining focus, I used it for a different reason. When you successfully complete a productivity session, your digital garden is populated with little trees of your choosing. I enjoyed seeing my digital garden grow due to my hard work, so I can completely understand why people would want to see some type of win or reward to digitally represent the days, weeks, months and years they were putting into their future.

Gamification? Not Really…

Before I move on to the next section, I want to speak about something that has been frustrating me in productivity spaces.

I previously mentioned my interest in productivity, and part of that is building a library of digital and physical tools to keep me productive and organised. One such tool that I use daily is Notion. For someone like me who isn’t conventionally creative and is highly indecisive, I love the convenience of duplicating someone’s Notion setup and customising it to my liking.

Something that I see constantly is ‘gamified’ Notion setups. A person will design a Notion layout where completing a task or a study session awards them with a certain amount of points. Built into this Notion setup is an RPG-like merchant where they can exchange their accrued points for rewards.

These setups are horrible and are everything that scholars like Dr Abdaal warn against. Want to purchase 20 minutes of Netflix time? Sorry, that’s 20 hours of studying. Horrible. Cruel. Barbaric.

It goes without saying that this is neither gamification nor optimal productivity. There is an army of research showing that people who are well-rested and well-engaged with other hobbies and interests perform best academically [9-12]. This next section will hopefully show you much healthier ways of gamifying your productivity, and it doesn’t require you to work 16 more hours to ‘earn’ the ability to watch the next X-Men ‘97 episode.

Games for Productivity AND Company

We’ve covered how games can fulfil components of third spaces such as allowing us to socialise while also covering why people have the desire for games and gamification to help us get things done. In this section, I will marry these together and explain how video games can help us to get things done while keeping us connected to others.

To help with this, I think it’s a good time to describe the game I will primarily be using as a case study. This game is Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, a “gamified focus tool” that allows you to create your avatar, decorate your environment and unlock your own study buddies to get things done in your own little space. In the interest of fairness, I will also mention that a game called Chill Pulse was released while working on this article, but I am less familiar with this.

A Little Distraction as a Little Treat

The world of productivity is always trying to find what helps people to be super productive. This can vary widely though, from making every task as fun as possible to making you suffer for 20 hours for 20 minutes of fun. Despite this variation, there are some productivity tools that stand the test of time.

One of the most prevalent productivity techniques in the past decade or so has been the Pomodoro Method. The premise is simple: for every 25 minutes you work, take a 5 minute break. These values can be customised though, such as taking a 10 minute break for working 50 minutes instead. This method is so popular that Spirit City even has a built-in Pomodoro Timer.

I have mixed feelings about the Pomodoro Method. I appreciate how valuable it can be for students who find themselves studying 9am-7pm for a test and aren’t sure of the best way to structure their time, but the method can be easy to poke holes in. What if you’d just rather focus on getting the task done? What if you’re drained and really struggle to focus during those 25 minutes? What can keep me going then?

This is where I’d like to share an interesting study from Adler et al. [13]. In this study, participants were asked to complete six different tasks such as Sudoku puzzles. The researchers compared task results between two different groups: a group who had to submit the answers to one puzzle before moving to the next, and a group who could click between puzzles at their leisure. For the second group, they measured the number of clicks between the puzzles along with their results for these puzzles.

The study resulted in an inverted U-shape when it came to correct answers and clicking around. It turned out that the people who occasionally clicked around and let their minds wander got the most correct answers compared to those who couldn’t click around and those who frantically clicked around. This leads me to the very serious naming convention of ‘a little distraction as a little treat’.

The researchers argue that little distractions help minimise the burnout we feel when we focus on one task for too long. And because it’s just a little distraction, this doesn’t use up as many cognitive resources as if you were disengaging from one task and moving over to another constantly [14].

I mentioned that one of the flaws of the Pomodoro Method is that sometimes we simply don’t want to take a break, we want to motor on and get the task done. As I find myself juggling more projects and the time outside of meetings becomes more precious to me, this is how I feel. A few weeks ago, I took advantage of the little distractions that Spirit City offers while powering through to get a task done.

The game contains study companions for you to unlock based on certain criteria. For example, the game will give you some hints that if your avatar knits by the fireplace on a rainy night, maybe a little friend will pay you a visit. Toggling these hinted conditions takes around 10-20 seconds to do, then it’s a matter of time of waiting for your little buddy to say hello.

These 10 second distractions were honestly really helpful for me when powering through a task at work. They were small and satisfying enough to avoid my brain feeling frazzled from the task at hand while also allowing me to keep my train of thought, something I probably would have lost from a Pomodoro break. Experiences like this help me appreciate why people search for things like ‘idle games for studying’, it felt great to unlock little things in the game while working hard to achieve my goals.

I couldn’t help but think about other instances of little distractions as a little treat. I thought about times where I’ve studied with people in a group, shown them something like a little doodle I made on my notes months ago, then we went right back to studying. But is this something that video games can help us to emulate? Well, let’s take a look.

Looking for Group (of Study Buddies)

My favourite physical third space has a big circular table in the corner. I love this table as even during the weekend, you see groups of young people working hard at this table to carve out their future and achieve their goals.

I came across Spirit City during this year’s Steam Next Fest. I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you that someone who reads books on productivity in their spare time took an interest in this game, so I paid a visit to their Twitter and saw the tweet that is directly responsible for this article:

Productivity Night in the Discord, now made even better with @SpiritCityLofi!

Enjoying awesome vibes while letting our productive little avatars work side-by-side! 😊💜✨ pic.twitter.com/oUxWPF60sD

— Luca Nassu 🔥 💜 Horror Vtuber (@Luca_Nassu) February 7, 2024

This tweet made my brain tingle. This was basically the digital equivalent of the big circular table, and these people didn’t need to be in the same class or the same university, they just knew the streamer. It made me so happy knowing that even the demo for the game was being used to bring people together to get things done – a gamified third space.

But are there any benefits to doing this? If it’s 7pm and you have an essay due the next day, surely it would be better to just start typing rather than opening a game, picking a digital study location, opening a Discord server, joining the voice call and sharing your screen?

Well, there actually are benefits to doing this. Going back to Dr Abdaal’s work on productivity, he mentioned taking advantage of digital writing groups not only to provide focus and structure to his writing schedule, but also to meet new writing friends and to share advice with each other.

Dr Abdaal’s experience has been replicated across research. Research has found that being part of a study group throughout the academic year is associated with higher scores at the end-of-year assessment, particularly when groups meet regularly and hold each other accountable [15]. However, the authors go on to explain the role of students supporting each other in their specific topic and teaching each other the material. This presents a bit of a problem – are study groups only effective if they’re composed of members of the same group?

This doesn’t always seem to be the case. A study by McCabe and Lummis [16] explored the role of study groups and what people get up to while they’re in study groups. These groups didn’t exist just to quiz each other on the topic material, they also helped people to do solo activities such as making flashcards. But the benefits of doing these solo activities in a group setting included an increase in motivation to study and social factors such as getting to spend time with friends. These findings were then replicated in an online-only study group, once again finding that online study groups were brilliant for motivation, focus and making new friends [17].

In this section, I’ve mainly shared research on the benefits of study groups. However, I think it is a bit reductive just to limit this to studying. For example, Spirit City itself allows players to do a range of activities, including knitting, reading and writing. If a friend’s birthday is coming up and you need to finish that scarf you’re knitting for them, can online productivity groups help you in the same way?

The answer seems to be yes. From my review of research looking into activities like writing and knitting, groups focusing on these activities tend to yield the same benefits such as increased motivation and feeling closer to others, particularly when it allows them to meet new people [18-20]. For a writing group, surrounding themselves with fellow writers even helped them to feel happier and more confident in their writing ability [18].

So let’s revisit the example from the beginning of this section – why should we bother opening up a game and sharing our screen in a Discord channel instead of just getting to work? Well the research shows that we’re more likely to feel motivated to be productive when we do this, we get to connect with others, we can make new friends, it can make us feel good about our abilities, and can even lead to a better outcome (e.g. higher grades) as a result of doing this. Sounds good!

Your Lofi Legacy

I want to end on quite a sweet yet important point. Whether it’s Spirit City or Chill Pulse, it’s hard to deny that these games lean into the aesthetic of Lofi Girl.

Lofi Girl is a 24/7 stream on YouTube that plays relaxing music while playing an animation of the titular Lofi Girl studying. The channel has accrued over 14 million subscribers and almost two billion views, so it’s no surprise that these games invite you to create your own Lofi Girl-esque presentations while being productive. I want to speak a little bit about the psychology behind this.

In 2022, the Lofi Girl streams were temporarily taken down due to a false copyright strike. This led to the 24/7 livestreams being converted into videos over 21,000 hours in length. I remember when this happened, and I fully anticipated a litany of jokes about her slacking off, not working hard enough etc.

The complete opposite happened.

On Reddit alone, a picture of Lofi Girl in graduation robes sits at over 31,000 upvotes. Everyone was celebrating how hard she had worked during her streams and were cheering for her fictional success. It was honestly such a charming time.

Back in my article on the psychology of MMORPGs, I talked about how we can use our in-game avatars to practice the parts of ourselves that we aspire to be [21]. While it’s easy to apply this to things like being chivalrous to maidens in high fantasy games, I believe it should also apply to our ever-changing world. A nationally representative study of over 2,000 adults in the United Kingdom found that almost half had a ‘side hustle’, with Millennials and Gen Zers being most likely to work outside of job/university hours to make ends meet with content creation, business development and more [22]. More and more of us have a 5-9 outside of our 9-5, and it can be exhausting. So if our video game avatars allow us to practice socialising and confidence skills, surely they can also be avatars for productivity?

I love the idea of games like Spirit City allowing us to create productivity avatars that inspire us to get things done and achieve our goals — our own personal Lofi Girl. As showcased in previous sections, we can use additional tools such as Discord to project our productivity avatars, placing them on our screen for a group study session to hold each other accountable.

Summary

• A third space is a place that’s not quite home and not quite work – think of a library or a cafe. People use these spaces to hang out with friends, get work done, or maybe even both. This article explores how video games can be used as digital third spaces to achieve these same things.
• Video games like online role-playing games are perfect for conveniently hanging out with friends. While this allows extroverts to remain connected to their loved ones, communication methods like typing allow introverts to still remain connected to friends while they relax and recharge their social battery.
• Video games are brilliant for making new friends, allowing us to bypass awkwardness and social taboos to say hello to people who share our hobbies and interests. Research shows that players often make close friends from playing games online, even going on to hang out with these people offline and even forming romantic relationships with them.
• Online searches such as ‘idle games for studying’ produce millions of results, with threads of users asking for ways to incorporate games into the hours they spend working and/or studying. Self-Determination Theory argues that we’re motivated to achieve things when we feel in control, when it provides a sense of achievement, and when we feel personally connected to it. The desire for gamified productivity can stem from wishing for a fun and engaging way to be personally connected to a task. This can also be due to the psychological benefits of adding small wins to our daily lives, such as unlocking something new in a game while we work.
• Research suggests that when getting lots of work done, it’s helpful to add little distraction tasks that prevent concentration burnout and fatigue. In gamified focus tools such as Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, this can include tasks like unlocking digital companions.
• Online study/work groups provide a range of benefits such as better academic performance, increased motivation, social connections and more. However, it’s not just talking about work that leads to these benefits, even doing solo tasks like making flashcards in a group can increase accountability, motivation and performance. Gamified focus tools can be used to bring people together while also keeping them focused and accountable, such as sharing their screen with others.
• Gamified focus tools lean on the aesthetic of Lofi Girl, a 24/7 YouTube study stream playing an animation of a girl studying. As Lofi Girl is a glorified queen of productivity, these games allow us to make our own avatar similar to Lofi Girl. As research shows how in-game avatars allow us to practice components of our ideal selves, these games allow us to create productivity avatars that motivate us to get things done. These avatars can be important to us in times when more of us are working 5-9 outside of our 9-5.

Credits

A big thank you to DECosmic for designing my header image and to LoopyGc for drawing the header art.

This hard work would not be possible without the support of my wonderful Patrons. I would particularly like to thank my Platinum Patrons: Albert S Calderon, Kyle T, redKheld, Austin Enright, Shaemus, DarrenIndeed, Thomas Meszaros, Tobias Svensson, and Pot. Thank you!

 

References

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[20] Ruland, G. B. (2010). Stitching together: An exploration of women’s sociality through an urban knitting group. Masters Thesis: Georgia State University. 

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