Gamification is not entirely bullshit

1) Someone uses X (like game mechanics, industrial & visual design or artificial intelligence) in a new or more generalistic way with great success.

2) A lot of people start using X to get the same results.

3) A "consulting" industry starts to rise around X.

4) Someone gets tired of the overused X and calls it bullshit.

5) Everyone that didn't succeeded with X, probably after some kind of investment inspired by the new "consulting" industry, gets in wagon and calls it bullshit.

6) Some time after the "bullshit" narrative sets in, someone finds out that X can be useful. If he tries to defend it he either does it by carefully arguing "I'm on your side but...", or just change it's name.

This kind periodic behaviour seems to deamplificate until it reach some stable state, generally it's absorbed by academia and gets to be taught in schools. From there it can get some amplifications, and if it does the pattern repeats.

With gamification of the workplace in particular, there seems to be a repeating cycle. Each cycle does come with some shifts in focus, but it seems mostly implicit ones, without a lot of reflection.

I've been doing some preliminary research trying to track down each of the cycles and how they relate, but the fact that so much of it is ephemeral and buzzword-heavy, and the studies are done by self-interested people with poor documentation of results, makes it a bit difficult.

As far as I can tell, the earliest proposals for using game-like processes to motivate and engage workers came in the Soviet Union, for the obvious reason that they needed a replacement for monetary motivation ASAP. Lenin called it "socialist competition", and had this vision of friendly, game/play-like competition as a replacement for cutthroat, loser-ends-up-homeless capitalist competition. I wrote a little about that here, though it's more like a preliminary collection of sources than a proper history at the moment: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html

Then sometime in the 1980s and especially the 1990s and 2000s, the idea of the power of games and play started becoming a huge thing in management. There was even a hilarious consulting job title for a while, "funsultant", someone who would come into a company and help make it more "fun" and "gamelike". I suspect there are similarities between today's "gamification consultants" and 1990s "funsultants", with the main shift being less focus on play and fun, and a bigger focus on reward/feedback loops. In effect the '90s game/play management techniques are merging with the much older behaviorist-reinforcement management techniques. I wrote a bit about the funsultants and some of the reactions to them as well (Office Space's flair scene is probably the most memorable example of a backlash to mandatory fun): http://www.kmjn.org/notes/funsultants_and_gamification.html

So I guess what I'm mostly missing from gamification advocates is a clearer picture of what's new here and how it relates to previous approaches. How much of it is about Skinner-style behavior-loop reinforcement? How much of it is about fun? About competition? How do the new approaches, whether we call them "game mechanics" or something else, relate to existing research findings on how effective each of these things are? As far as I can tell nobody actually wants to mention any of those things, instead presenting it as something totally new: game mechanics used to be used only for entertainment, but in the 2010s we realized they could be used to motivate non-entertainment things as well. But I don't think it just fell from the sky with no relationship to previous attempts.

In a more meta way, just about any innovation goes through a 2-steps forward, 1-step back cycle. The 1-step back is always due to wide-scale adoption where the original message is somewhat lost in translation, but as a whole actually moves things forward (ie. agile 'methodology').

I think when it comes to gamification it's perhaps better to reframe it as a more targeted engagement structure. If you think about how big the actual video game industry is, how much people are _paying_ to solve problems, that there could be a better way to flip that script, because they are in fact doing work in the guise of entertainment.

Right now the whole concept is in its infancy, but I imagine five years from now it will be prevalent in most everything we do, perhaps in a very indirect manner. It might even be the perfect cure for procrastination (ducks :)

> I think when it comes to gamification it's perhaps better to reframe it as a more targeted engagement structure. If you think about how big the actual video game industry is, how much people are _paying_ to solve problems, that there could be a better way to flip that script, because they are in fact doing work in the guise of entertainment.

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Disagree. Play is distinct from work because it is responsibility free. Work is a chore that you do because you must. For this reason Gamification is and will forever remain bullshit.

I think any time you can help people, even if it's just 140 characters, the more likely they'll do what you ask.