I am guilty of making some tiny commits I wouldn’t otherwise have to keep my github green box streak up…
Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
51–60 of 61 posts
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A good example is the Odin project study paths, or Khan Academy courses. One other example that has a few of my friends hooked is Duolingo. Learning another language was something they'd wanted to do, and had tried to do in the past. They just had trouble sticking to putting the work in. But Duolingo's particular brand of gamification has got them doing the thing they always wanted to do, but never got round to bef…
Gamification definitely works better when it's in conjunction with something you already want to do, or feel like you should do. It gives you an excuse to push a little harder to keep on task. It mostly seems to not work at all when it's for something you don't care about.
But that goes against @devjab's experience upthread:
> [gamification] isn’t for good intentions. It’s a tool to make people spend time on something they might not want to spend time on, so why did we ever think it would be a fitting tool for our good intentions?
> [gamification systems] seem to fail to incentivise the development their creators want, unless that development is for people to spend a lot of money on video games.
(Unless Duolingo counts as a video game? But even so, I don't think people spend a lot of (any?) money on it?)
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#53Everyone learns differently.
I think the real problem is looking for a one size fits all solution, rather then adding gameification as yet another tool in our arsenal to teach the next generation.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#54I'm getting really sick of all the humble brag blog posts that make their way to hacker news.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For me gamification turns some things into a slog. same for me. i admit it still feels nice to "watch the number go up", mostly on content platforms with a social component to it (hn, reddit, stackoverflow) as you feel whatever you've said has either been useful to, or at least resonated with someone. as social creatures it's only normal to seek some sort of validation. i think the only gamification set of features…
I've been very skeptical of gamification ever since seeing a marketing agency constantly pitch it as a way to increase user engagement and sales. Now it's a red flag that makes me ask, "what are you trying to manipulate me in to buying or doing?" The experience has been impactful enough that even I stopped caring as much about "achievements" in actual games. Duolingo is interesting because it shows me I'll still enga…
You are on point I think - 10-15 years ago gamification became a generally fashionable thing to pursue to drive engagement, consumption and market shit. But most of it doesn’t really work because it’s not usually implemented very well. This is what we had initially with our medical training example - the developers just slapped some trophies and achievements and expected it to just work. Of course when we started user testing we found that people agreed with the general idea but didn’t really use it and found the clutter confusing. We’re still working on having gamification because we really do just want them to feel like it is a game, but it’s no easy feat to do it well. Thankfully with hard evidence from all the user testing we have the arguments to dial it back.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#56I know it's only semantics, but it kind of bugs me how the saying "level up your [regular life skills]" has become so prevalent the past few years. Mainly because it give this illusion that once you've "leveled up" in something, you'll stay at that level forever - like in video games. But the truth is that all skills need to be honed and maintained, or else they will falter. Anyone that's been active in sports, music…
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#57I know it's only semantics, but it kind of bugs me how the saying "level up your [regular life skills]" has become so prevalent the past few years. Mainly because it give this illusion that once you've "leveled up" in something, you'll stay at that level forever - like in video games. But the truth is that all skills need to be honed and maintained, or else they will falter. Anyone that's been active in sports, music…
I think it's not just gamification but it's also commodification. It's substitute acquisition for the process and goal. This approach would have you believe that if you accumulate enough life Pro tips you will have a happy and productive life. If you accumulate enough hot takes and quips, it will make you a philosopher or intelligent.
It feeds into and propagates a consumerist mindset. Human Experience in learning reduced to a process of shopping and acquisition.
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#58Self-promo: If you're interested in the rise of gamification, how it works (and doesn't work), and how it's being used in workplaces, schools, governments, and social media, I published a book last year called You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All . https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adrian-hon/youve-be... I've been designing games for twenty years, and I'm C…
Self-promo successful - just bought your book on Amazon! ;) I actually did Zombies, Run! over the pandemic and we had a great time doing it - honestly one of the few examples of gamification that works. Really it's so good that I didn't even think of it even as gamification, which is saying something. I also worked in the game industry for years and gluing on trophies or points onto some otherwise irrelevant task is…
Thank you!
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#59I think this article is written a bit like that cash register anecdote. There is no conclusion other than examples why you are this way. Why do you think you are like this? Not everyone is - I’m not. But I’m currently working on a rewards gamification system in a surgical-medical training device and we’re discovering in user-testing that while yes, medical students do fixate on optimizing their scores, the system doe…
I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark as a software developer, enterprise architect and later manager, and you wouldn’t believe the amount of gamification attempts that I have seen fail. I’m not sure where they come from. Ok, maybe I should clarify that. I understand how gamification is a very effective psychological tool to get people to spend a lot of time on things they wouldn’t otherw…
I’m not so sure that it won everyone’s minds, more that it’s something that sounds like a generally good idea in a meeting. Like, who would go against making unfun things fun by making them toy-like!
I’m similar to you, ADHD and whatnot. I was generally weary of using gamification in our use case, but surprise surprise - med students aren’t the rebel type! Only problem is - we would have to invest insane resources and research into figuring out how to have them do exactly what we want. Currently we’re leaning towards keeping gamification parts but only sparingly sprinkling them in just several key moments of achievement.
> Basically all good intentions, but the tool isn’t for good intentions. It’s a tool to make people spend time on something they might not want to spend time on, so why did we ever think it would be a fitting tool for our good intentions?
This is a great quote - we want them to spend time practicing, and our devices are somewhat cool but get boring pretty quick. So it helps to activate them, but now we also don’t want them to fixate on just the devices to get the perfect score ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark as a software developer, enterprise architect and later manager, and you wouldn’t believe the amount of gamification attempts that I have seen fail. I’m not sure where they come from. Ok, maybe I should clarify that. I understand how gamification is a very effective psychological tool to get people to spend a lot of time on things they wouldn’t otherw…
There is a good bit of research in the medical field. Eg here's a meta study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33128662/ I found this bit of the abstract interesting: > However, most studies lacked well-defined control groups and did not apply and/or report theory to understand underlying processes. This paper seems to be a good overview of the theories underlying gamification https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti…
Thank you for these - they will come in very handy!