Meet Mr Gamification: He's got a NUDGE or two for you Do you ever get invited to talk and wish that Steve Bong was there instead of you? That’s what happened to me last weekend. The subject was "gamification" at the Battle of Ideas. Things got really strange, really quickly – I think you’ll find what is coming up to be quite eye-opening - but I’m sure Steve would have taken it all …
Maybe I don't understand what everyone else means by gamification, but Stack Exchange seems to be working ok. And the Google image labeller thing worked quite well (I believe)
Oh, and my kids have to solve maths problems to gain extra time on the computer, otherwise it logs them out, though I guess that could count more as child abuse than gamification :)
Yes, that's one of the problems with this article - it's not a critique of "gamification" (so broad a term that it's nearly impossible to mount a coherent critique), but of people who pretend that gamification is something more than a nebulous collection of a huge array of very different projects with very different purposes and very different outcomes.
Games as incentive systems for rewarding certain kinds of labor do indeed work very well. In other cases they're a poor fit and often a complete failure. Treating gamification as a single entity is an intellectually unproductive fiction. Of course, it can be a financially productive one, so it will continue.
The moment you add goals or scoring metrics to a simulator, that is gamification.
If I'm in an aircraft simulator learning to operate all the controls, there's the obvious goal of "not crashing the plane" among others and there are scoring metrics dealing with whether or not I make the right choices when adjusting or setting controls.
How is that a game?
Gamification is just stimulus-response-reward dressed up in new clothes.
That's simultaneously too broad and too narrow. All labor is stimulus-response-reward, even if the reward is relief from negative sanctions (e.g. not getting beaten); that doesn't mean all labor is experienced by participants as a game. On the other hand, the clothes aren't new, even if this particular term is relatively recent (Wikipedia claims Nick Pelling coined it 2002).
The moment you add goals or scoring metrics to a simulator, that is gamification.
You don't even need that. Goals inhere in the player, not the game; the game can suggest them, but the player has to adopt them. (That's why players can create their own "challenge" scenarios for various games, for example.)
Defining the "gaming" category of incentives is probably as fraught as, say, defining aesthetic or other subjective qualities. But it's certainly not as simple as "element X makes a task a game"1.
Andrew's certain that "gamification" means something more than "making a task available in a form that many participants will consider a game", because he needs an axe to grind. Fine; that's our occasion for speaking here, after all. But it's a reductive and homogenizing definition of the term that's not justified either etymologically or by the actual range of its use.2
1Pace Mark Twain, lack of obligation isn't the magic attribute, for example.
2Mind you, I'm not arguing it's a good term. It's cacophonous and vapid.
@Michael Wojcik
"Mind you, I'm not arguing it's a good term. It's cacophonous and vapid."
Which is exactly why governments and government agencies are funnelling money into it. The more completely devoid of real meaning a term or concept is, the more our politicians love it.
"Accurate simulators have been helping people learn for a long time. Flying instruction has used these since the 1960s. I would put a medical simulator in the same category.
Gamification means something completely different."
Are you sure? If it works they'll want to claim it.
"Britain doesn’t do ideology (as Orwell noted) and it doesn’t really have intellectuals – and maybe it isn’t poorer for the absence of either."
Britain didn't do the ideologies that Orwell had in mind, much; or, Britain had the good fortune not to lose WW I and put those ideologists in a position to take over. Britain has always had as much ideology as any country you care to name. The lumpen commentariat of The Register tempts one now and then to joke about the "intellectual" bit; but Britain has, and has had, intellectuals in large numbers. I've got books by a fair number of them.*
As for gamification, is "gammon" to obsolete as slang to allow us to speak of "gammonfication"?
*About 40 years ago, somebody did a poll to identify the 100 most respected intellectuals in the US. I remember hardly any names from the list, but I do remember a Harvard dean's definition of intellectual: "A scholar living beyond his scholarly means." I would be content to say a person of intellectual interests, able to pursue them with some success, and I would leave it at that.
Back in the sixties shows like petticoat junction, beverly hillbillies, green acres, the red skelton show were supposedly canceled because because they were old fashioned clean family viewing and some one wanted to change peoples opinions of right and wrong.
Red Skelton was told his show was cancelled because he didn't have the collage age demographics. So after his show was cancelled he wen on a very successful college tour.
Conspiracy theory maybe, but I know some hard core liberals who thought it was a good things that those shows were replaced with show like all in the family.
That was CBS that cancelled all of those shows, not for ideological reasons, but financial ones.
Those shows brought in plenty of eyeballs, but the eyeballs were either too young or, mostly, too old to fall into the demographic they wanted to attract.
And the reason they wanted to attract that demographic was because they could charge more money for ads to advertisers wanting to reach that demographic because, out of the total available pool of advertisers, more of them wanted that demographic, therefore supply and demand.
If the big three carmakers and big food companies and makeup companies and all the others primarily selling to young to early middle aged singles or marrieds with children were competing to buy the ad slot, you could sell it for more than if only a handful of denture cream and laxative companies were.
Could also have gone with pedant, (statistical) boffin, or "that's mine with the copy of Ad Age in the pocket", but "explanation of elementary advertising strategy" works as well.
I humbly submit that you have misspelled our wonderful new word. there should be an I between the N and the F thus; Gamificationified.
Doesn't it make you feel warm and fuzzy inside to know that no matter how puerile, nauseating, demeaning, stupefying and demoralizing a neologism we can spell it correctly!
Re "new psychology": There's nothing particularly "new" about it, except some of the terminology. Just take a look at David McRaney's book You are Not so Smart (a collection of short essays adapted from his blog, and worth reading if you're not familiar with the "anecdotes of irrationality" Andrew mentions). Many of the studies he cites are from the past decade, but they're building on older work; and he also cites a lot from as far back as the '70s and '60s.
Re political engagement: Dent may make some decent points, but as Andrew presents her argument, it's terribly naive. We have a little thing called "rhetoric" which has existed since humans started communicating, and which ably demonstrates that this Habermasian dream of purely rational communication guiding our communal political decision-making is utter fantasy.
Re psychology as a science: There is scientific psychology - methodologically sound, statistically significant, repeatable experiments, as in most of the studies McRaney cites. True, psychology isn't going to be a physical science the way physics and chemistry are; its subject of study is less amenable to simplifying partitioning and there are various difficulties with experimentation. But this sort of psychological research can still be (and is) conducted in a manner which is empirical and involves robust protocols for accounting for subjectivity, fully in keeping with modern scientific epistemology.1 Of course, there is also slapdash and methodologically flawed psychological research, and a tremendous body of psychological speculation and what is at best philosophy of mind. That's not scientific at all, though some of it may have other uses.
That doesn't mean that attempts to turn the results of scientific psychological research into a sort of psychological engineering2, as in "behavioral insight" and "choice architecture", are themselves scientific, of course. They are also rhetoric, pure and simple. And while rhetoric does lend itself to any number of schemata and systems, they're always highly subjective, arbitrary, and informal, and will remain that way until we have a complete formal model of human cognition - which will almost certainly never happen, thanks to limits like the phenomenological horizon.
1I realize it is a central tenet of Reg ideology to dismiss all of psychology without any trace of pausing for critical reflection. But the Reg ideology is not the royal road to rationality either, charming though it may be.
2Or "operationalizing" it, if we wanted to use a term that rivals "gamification" for a grating collection of suffixes. We don't.
Though I only discovered the term recently, I thought I knew what 'gamification' meant.
For those brief few weeks the term meant - to me - the turning of some task into a game to engage people more fully and thereby more effectively guide them towards the result desired by the person providing the 'game'.
The first place I saw this term, which is what defined my understanding of it, was in marketing for Concur's travel expense product/module. In that, staff are given the flexibility to book their own travel but are given a 'price to beat' with scoring and rewards and leaderboards so they can compete with one another to see who scores the highest (i.e. saves the company the most).
To me, it seemed quite manipulative and a way to treat travelling employees poorly via a side door - get them to do it to themselves.
If a company is booking travel for an employee, they will generally book flights at reasonable hours, arrange accommodation in reasonable-quality hotels (at convenient locations) and provide a realistic food budget.
What this 'gamification' of travel expenses is aiming at is having employees fly out on a Sunday instead of a Monday morning (thus taking their own personal time), getting the smallest, most plastic-y hire car, staying at a cut-rate hotel and eating somewhere cheap. In other words, encouraging the employee to sacrifice their own time and comfort to save the company money.
But, a term like 'gamification', that is (evidently) far more nebulous than I originally thought, is just too good for politicians not to love.
I'd like to gently ease in my tuppence worth about this article and also the format of the event from a broader perspective.
Two days of my life I gave to the 'Battle of Ideas' and they are days I wish I could re-capture. Arguments in perpetuity. No positive outcomes. Just a weekend of medieval battle re-enactment.
Re-hashing of the old and not getting anywhere new.
Shouldn't the focus be ideation? Positive change?
It seemed an hour was way too little a slot to really explore the subject of 'gamification,' which led to a speedy devolution and a frenzy of spears. Those throwing the spears couldn't offer any real solutions or ideas. It was really disappointing.
In terms of this article, it threw me off-piste at the start with a superfluous character attack.
Pulling apart a presentation style or that someone used slides? So what! Tell me what is wrong with a visual aid? I would have liked to have seen more during the sessions.
Criticising someone for saying hi and livening-up the audience? At least someone did!
It would have been great to see the panel really throw it out to those sitting before them. We may as well have been separated by a electrified fence.
The premise of the event should have been about inspiring action, engaging and involving the audience more.
I'm off to the depths of the seabed.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
