My friend Jack made a game called A Hole New World. Your goal is to dig the deepest hole in the world. That’s it.
This game was exactly what I needed this summer. I was thinking about the role of work, I had just left my job, I was attempting to do this research and writing thing, I wasn’t good at it yet, and I was feeling a bit hopeless about producing something of value. I was bashing my head against a specific problem: beyond ensuring survival and money, what is the point of work? Was there any point?
I wasn’t really getting anywhere, but the game was my relief from wracking my brain. The goal of the game is to dig holes, but it turns out it had emergent complexity – simple rules that let you actually develop some complex strategy. I threw myself into playing hours of this game. I have never been a gamer before, and I quickly became enchanted. I became a digger of holes. I yearned for the smell of (virtual) dirt in my nostrils, and believed in my little gnome’s ability to achieve our shared goal of the deepest hole in the world.
Games create an immersive world with a unique set of rules. It’s called a magic circle: its role is to create “new reality, where plastic pieces or digital media products start to represent something very specific, as they fall under the spell of rules.” [0] It’s not so different from a workplace, where the set of rules within the company and its culture are almost an alien world unto themselves. As a part of my research, I read a textbook on game design called “Rules of Play” by Salen and Zimmerman. It was through games – and game design rules – that I felt like I could understand what non-economic satisfaction in work might look like.
Introducing CRAMP
I call this new framework, the result of so much of my research, CRAMP. Of course, taking care of myself and my family’s future is important, don’t get me wrong. But I’m a vocateur. I want something more. The result of my exploration for answers to the non-monetary satisfaction from a job was this:
CRAMP works by providing a set of elements that can be important in a job. Every element of CRAMP might not be present in every job, nor might all of them be important to you to the same degree. Your desired mix of CRAMP in a specific role can change over time.
Here’s what each dimension of CRAMP means:
Community
I’ve waxed poetic (or at least, waxed…prose) about Community in the past:
Isolation of excellent people makes a firm less than the sum of its parts. A lone aspiring vocateur will (usually) burn out or produce lower quality work. A network of great people around them is key to improving their happiness, idea quality, longevity, and productivity. Vocateurs need to be emotionally committed to their work – so committed that even their subconscious is chewing on work all the time. Without a community, it’s a lonely path. Excellent workers need community to survive. Game play has always been a social interaction.
Community has always been especially important to me. It’s probably one of my top 2 of the CRAMP framework. I prioritize the coworkers and presence of confidants over almost everything else.
Recognition
Recognition isn’t just a pat on the back. It can be the feeling of winning and getting the trophy, it can be in additional compensation, praise, or even more scope. One of the most important parts of recognition can simply be feeling that other people (in the world, in your company) value and appreciate your work.
Game design has a few different types of recognition and rewards:
Rewards of Glory. Glory rewards are all the things you're going to give to the player that have absolutely no impact on the game play itself but will be things they end up taking away from the experience. A good example is an excellent side quest that rejuvenates the hero’s motivation. This is like a work conference, or social status.
Rewards of Sustenance. Rewards of this nature are given so the player can maintain their avatar's status quo and keep all the things they've gained in the game so far. An example is a healthpack. This is like compensation, bonuses, or benefits.
Rewards of Facility. Rewards of facility enable a player's avatar to do things they couldn't do before or enhance abilities they already possess. When well handled, they should increase the number of strategies and options that players will have for playing the game. A good example of a facility reward might be a magic orb that lets an avatar walk through a stone wall. A work example might be an increase in scope (which is not as cool as a magic orb!)
We often pooh-pooh the recognition and social status that can come from work, calling it a false reason to love the job. But really, a reward system is essential to sustaining motivation. In game design, rewards shape good and bad behaviors but also “shape a player's sense of pleasure and overall play experience.” There’s at least a minimal level of reward that is essential to anyone’s work experience, even if it’s not the center of what they value.
Autonomy
A friend was telling me about their current job at Google – every time they attempt to pitch a new project, the executives tell them to wait in order to ensure they aren’t taking too much risk. It can be maddening to feel like you don’t have control over your own destiny. Anyone who has worked in corporate bureaucracy knows that the ability to feel like our efforts can lead to action is rare and precious.
Games are often about agency and control, about making choices and seeing the results of those choices in the magic circle. Without leaving enough room for a player to have control, the game no longer becomes fun. Game designers ward against too much control, manipulation, or uncertainty, which can take choice away from a player. “Good game design offers players choices that are both meaningful and interesting. The choices players make must matter, and they must be engaged in the outcome of those choices,” they say.
Maximizing autonomy can mean working alone: autonomy maxxers are ideally humanities emeritus professors who can do whatever they want, whenever they want it. But everyone else trades off autonomy for additional impact. The most insidious of roles are those where the original autonomy contract becomes invalid as the role continues to change.
Mastery
Mastery is the feeling of learning and getting better at your domain. Learning fast at a set of skills in a way that allows you to take a set of goals, determine how best to reach them, suffer a real risk of failure, and then have a chance at repeated attempts or success.
Games are incredible at teaching users skills. In the famous talk “How to Build a Princess Saving App,” a game designer describes the way games can teach users skills in contrast to the ways apps do it. “Most apps say here are some tools. Games say here is how a human being is going to turn a set of tools into useful repeatable skills,” It turns out that games are carefully tuned machines that hack into human being’s most fundamental learning processes. Games are exercises in applied psychology at a level far more nuanced than your typical application.
At work, getting smarter at your job or domain can be a challenge – the company isn’t necessarily incentivized to have employees needlessly get smarter. But it’s in my top two favorite and most important factors in a job.
Purpose
One of the most important concepts in game design is “meaningful play.” It refers to the way that games make the goal of the game worthwhile to the player within the magic circle. There are so many ways that a game has to work to make the player truly care about their goal. The book suggests that meaningful play often involves a narrative dimension. When players are emotionally invested in the unfolding story of the game and their actions contribute to the narrative, the play becomes more meaningful. This emotional resonance can lead to a deeper connection between the player and the game world.
Companies try to “purpose launder” their missions very often: my favorite example is when Microsoft used to give their employees a “Ship It” award every time they delivered software on time. Inscribed on the plinth was the mantra: “Every time a product ships, it takes us one step closer to the vision: a computer on every desk and in every home.” Microsoft might have cared about the mission, but Microsoft really cared about winning the battle of the PC on every desk being a Windows PC. The sense of genuine purpose doesn’t have to be altruistic – it just has to be meaningful.
As someone who’s both a recipient (whilst an employyee) and engineer of CRAMP (whilst an exec), I see game design as a tool to balance the incentives between the organization and the individual. Firms have to make a profit, which does not always intersect with any of the items on the CRAMP framework. Firms who aspire to provide CRAMP (maybe to retain employees in a competitive labor market) must shape incentives beyond the default forces from the business model. Stripe didn’t need to have a strong writing culture – leaders intentionally decided to prioritize writing as a tool for winning the game within Stripe. This culture propagated to all of the ex-Stripe founded firms, including LLM champions OpenAI and Anthropic.
At its worst, incentive shaping feels manipulative. At its best, it makes work as exhilarating as the game: fun in and of itself, while accomplishing shared goals.
Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. The MIT Press, 2010.