viz.

(Image Credit: Techanbob)

Typing, for me, has long been tied up with game playing. Before keyboards were tools for productive labor they were complex controllers for beating monkeys in vine races to bananas and outrunning pirates to the buried treasure. When I first encountered computers in the early 90s my parents, and later the public school I attended, took care to teach me how to type. I was told stories about aging businessmen that floundered when forced to type their own memos and warned about the impending importance of touch typing. So, in what seems to be a fairly common experience, I spent afternoons at home and computer sessions in school playing lots of Mavis Beacon. This ongoing utilitarian interaction with games, though, wasn't an early form of gamification.