Gamification is not entirely bullshit

I think that's definitely part of it, but I think there may be a bit of deliberate amnesia as well, out of a desire to portray something as totally new, and perhaps to avoid any unwanted historical baggage.

You also see this in "serious games" and its variants. Even Al Gore was recently talking about how the future of videogames is that maybe they'll be used for things like education, too, not just entertainment. Sure, I even buy that. But that's what everyone was saying in the Apple ][ era also! It's not just about credit, but I think we lose something from the amnesia: some of the Apple ][ games were actually better uses of game mechanics for education than much of the fairly shallow stuff being promoted more recently, and we can even learn something from the examples that were more mixed successes (though admittedly there was a lot of bad "edutainment", too).

Not entirely but Is gamification mostly bullshit?

For the vast majority of people work is always a chore. It's a commodity you use to barter with your employer; in exchange you receive money that allows you to live.

You argue that sometimes work is "fun". I think a more accurate description is that work can sometimes be engaging. Like when you're presented with a problem that's right at the edge of your abilities but not out of reach. Yet it's still work. Unlike play, work carries with it stress and responsibility. There are consequences if you screw up. Worse if you stop entirely. None of these are true for play.

Gamification is bullshit because it encourages the perception that these differences don't exist or that they don't matter. It's a flat out lie. Work is not play. Accept it. Move on.

Gamification is bullshit by design. Gameful mechanics may not be, but we're not there yet.

Point 1 is that Zichermann (who wrote Games-Based Marketing) misrepresents the research into motivation. Whether this is maliciousness or incompetence is up for debate (personally I think the latter with a dose of arrogance). You can see Deturding shred his O'Reilly book, where he goes into this in a lot of detail [1]. One point that is made in the blog post is that most people are socializers, according to Bartle player types. Nick Yee has already shown those player types to be largely useless outside of MUDs, and Bartle never claimed them to be otherwise. In addition, there is no evidence that most people are socializers, and Zichermann doesn't cite this claim. I've not been able to find anyone who's tracked down any research which shows that this is true.

It's odd that the author mentions Pink's Drive at the end, as it's pretty much the anti-thesis of Zichermann. Drive advocates intrinsic motivation, Zichermann is all about extrinsic. If you don't get a trinket, it isn't worth doing. Extrinsic motivation erodes intrinsic motivation. And that's why Bogost slams gamification in the first place: the trinkets you get are valueless, and present no expense to the company. At least frequent flier mile rewards do something.

Point 2 is that this post makes no mention of the quality of interaction. When you play with small percentages of large absolute numbers, you're going to find a small minority of people who respond to this. Enough to fill a leaderboard. But what are they doing? Are they really rating stuff? Are they just hitting 5 stars on everything? We know that HITs in the Mechanical Turk suffer from poor interactions, and those people are getting paid (an extrinsic reward worth more than a leaderboard place, no?). What about the other 99% that aren't on the leaderboard?

Point 3 is that, as gradstudent pointed out, context is highly important when discerning work from play. The research shows that artists, for example, make better work when they aren't being paid. Even if you change nothing in the environment but making the piece contracted, the quality of the work suffers. People know when they're working and when they aren't (this was in Drive). A leaderboard in Space Invaders might be fun, but a leaderboard at work is a really good way for middle management to find the worst 10% of performers, and becomes a tool for control, and people recognize this instantly.

So yes, gamification is bullshit. It's so much bullshit, that Jane McGonigal, who popularized the use of such things, has had to back away from the term as it's so poisonous, and she's using "gameful" instead.

What this all came about from was "People play games more so than doing other things, why is that?" Gamification took all the wrong elements. Games are all about feeding intrinsic motivation with tight feedback loops. Self-determination theory and Reiss' 16 Intrinsic Motivations provide much better frameworks for understanding games. Rigby and Ryan's Glued to Games looks at SDT, and Radoff's Game On has a section of the 16 motivations.

For anyone interested in achieving the stated goals of gamification, but is concerned on how to do it right, should probably read Radoff. It's the most honest, and legitimate, treatment of the subject I have yet found, by someone who actually wears the game designer t-shirt and the businessman suit with equal comfort.

[1]http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-cop...

The most bizarre bit of gamification I've run across lately was in Wells Fargo's ATMs. I deposited a check the other day and got an alert on the ATM screen:

  You've earned a new badge
  Express Depositor
  [Learn More]

Well! That should certainly help me gain status and reputation among my fellow ATM users!

Photo here: http://artlung.com/blog/2012/05/03/gamification-in-the-wild-...