The Gameful World: approaches, issues, applications

bought back memories, but it would have been more interesting to know what twenty-first century psychology can offer safety research. Systems thinking in Human Factors is not new, neither is Dekker’s critique of reductionist and experimental approaches to understanding people and the systems they are part of (see de Greene 1978, 1980, for example). However, whilst de Greene expressed surprise that the automation of 1980 had not made systems operable by people of lower skill levels (as Taylor would have expected) I was left wondering what our high risk industries have been doing for the last 30 years and whether they even know what questions to ask about safety. After reading ‘Safety Differently’, it seems that the case for ergonomics beyond ‘knobs and dials and comfy chairs’ has still to be made. Are the cabins of modern airliners userfriendly? Do designers use a participatory approach with pilots when new aircraft are designed and who put all these confusing modes into them in the first place? Like many systems thinkers before him, Dekker says a lot about the complexity, non-linearity and inter-connectedness of systems, but has little to say about why systems are complex in the first place and whether they are more complex than they need to be. So, the book is thought-provoking in unexpected ways. Systems writers often succumb to the lure of their own rhetoric and Dekker is no exception. In Chapter 6, on methods, we are told that qualitative research is ‘relentlessly empirical’ (whereas, quantitative research, possessed by the ghosts of Newton and Descartes, isn’t, presumably). In fact, there are plenty of quantitative methods that are descriptive, synthetic and empirical. What is really surprising is that the target audience of this book has to be told about things like mixed methods research in the first place. After making a great effort to read the first few chapters of ‘Safety Differently’, I recalled Francis Bacon’s complaint that Scholastic Philosophy was nothing more than: