This fantastic piece by Heather Chaplin says pretty much everything I've wanted to say about the gamification 'movement' and all of the entrepreneurs that are driving it. Enjoy your venture capital bucks, guys -- I'm gonna stay with the real world and just play video games for fun, okay?
7 comments:
As with several other 'fantastic' article trying to denounce using games for more than fun, people from the real world leave truly fantastic and telling comments.
And, as with those other 'fantastic' articles, found the body to be terribly boring in contrast to said comments.
At least, from the bits I read. Like I mentioned - terribly boring.
David -- This article is very specifically NOT trying to "denounce using games for more than fun." What's being denounced here is a specific way in which "game mechanics" are applied to non-games, at best best in a totally trivial way, at worst with a rather sinister result.
The gameification movement can also be seen as an offshoot of a general tendency in the self-identified Gamer community, which is to create a completely insular, all-encompassing and self-referential culture. To the extreme detriment of those who, you know, enjoy video games -- whether they enjoy them for escapist fun or more.
I think there are two factors here :
1. Quantifying and measuring 'success' is rewarding. If you define what success is and people believe you.
In this respect I can't really argue against gamification ( I hate the term too )
2. I dont think roleplay is always necessary. In Foursquare the badges I have are mine, not a characters in a virtual world. If reward indicators are strongly linked to a real valuable experience, then they mean something. If they are just rewards for rewards sake - they are meaningless. Its up to the designer.
Thanks for drawing attention to this article. It's everything I've wanted to say about gamification and more. I find it amazing that we're getting our Brave New World, and we're not even getting the incredible drugs that it took for Huxley's world to capitulate.
We seem to be satisfied with imaginary drugs.
I agree to some extent , a line has to be drawn between reality and fiction.
But why not make the trivial mundane tasks like taking out the trash etc more interesting and more rewarding in terms of emotion? You wouldn't get money for it anyway (in most cases :), and you'd lose the frown while doing it.
You do things in life out of 2 reasons : because you like/choose to and because you must. Let's make the "must" list shorter.
Ona related note : Don't know if you've seen this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmKwF_Si734
I really liked the article, but it also posed a rather insidious question: Are there corporations that are still trying to enslave people? Because this is what it's implying.
Intangible rewards do work, though - to a point. There has to be a way out; like at the first three crusades. People flocked in the name of god, but came back in the name of cash because they could sell themselves as mercenaries to the highest bidders.
Gaming is different, though because it taps the same nerve as gambling addiction, so this is actually a pretty serious concept.
If people want to put us in virtual worlds to make a system where they get real money and give virtual payment that has no real value, that is the same thing as slavery. At the same time, we're already detached enough from reality by dint of facebook and twitter. You gotta draw a line somewhere.
This is an interesting article - thanks for putting it up. I wasn't aware that there was controversy surrounding gamification. The comments were even more interesting than the article.
I think it's clear that gamification can be used to abuse people, keep them willingly in the dark and trick them out of their time and money. It already is, in a sense, if you consider what WoW does to a lot of people. But it's not so clear that by offering game-inspired incentive schemes, social justice gets thrown out the window.
One problem with gamification, of cousre, is so-called slacktivism. People can gamify third world hunger all they want, but if all it does is make them feel good, then that's actually worse than not doing anything and feeling guilty about it. I can see this being a serious problem - if playing some web game is more fun than donating money to Haiti, Haiti is going to starve while Westerners rack up points. Not good.
Another issue is tapping into things like the Skinner Box. If companies cut paychecks and get employees to swallow it by tapping into evolutionary wiring to get them hooked on some company points system, we've taken a big step back in terms of economic security and progress.
This is why, in my opinion, we need to study this mental wiring all the more carefully, and introduce legislation specifically to prevent corporations from entrapping their employees into psychologically addictive schemes to the detriment of working conditions and pay.
A lot of companies use game-like systems to work customers as well - think of Subway, where for every eight sandwiches you buy, you get one small sandwich free. My suspicion is that the prices on sandwiches are actually higher than they would be if Subway had no such schemes, to compensate, but they are using this scheme to entice people to become long-term customers. A lot of people don't have the economic literacy to see these practices critically.
But I don't see the notion that using systems inspired by games to manage real-world issues is necessarily authoritarian. Sometimes, it's really just a matter of perspective - Italy found that people committed fewer traffic violations when violations make you lose points from your license, rather than gain them - as anyone who knows what hit points mean can tell you (how many games have you gain damage points?). Whether this was taken from games is debatable (I don't believe it was), but it could have been, and similar insights could also be gained.
Extra Credits has an interesting video up on taking incentive systems from games and applying them to education, which, in a society where a lot of kids are actively hostile towards an education system that is supposed to help improve their prospects (whether it succeeds is another issue), is something we desperately need to look into.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/3167-Gamifying-Education
And, as someone in the main article's comments said, we already have the world's most complex example of gamification pervading every aspect of our lives - money. Money is nothing more than imaginary points that have been agreed upon as exchangeable by everyone. Additional point schemes parallel to money, therefore, are a serious potential for abuse because they cut participants out of the majority point system (if 20% of your paycheck is in company points only redeemable at company stores, you're basically 20% cut off from the wider economy) - but points in things like driver's licenses or health insurance are not parallel to currency, so it's not as obvious that they detract from people's economic livelihood.
All in all, this seems to be a difficult issue that needs consideration and study.
I ought to do a blog post about gamification at some point...
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