Burke, B. (2014). Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to do Extraordinary Things. MA, Brookline: Bibliomotion Inc
Gamification in the Future (2020):
Motivation
Engagement
Game Design
“creates entirely new engagement models, targeting new communities of people and motivating them to achieve goals they may not even know they have.”
Combined trends (how we will interact with technology, maturation of other emerging technologies, augmented reality, participatory governemnet, massive open online courses, crowdsourcing, microcredentials) fundamentally change teh way we think about learning, problem solving, and personal development.
Gamification trend has skyrocketed
"... with hype comes inevitable failure, as organizations rush to implement a promising new solution without fully understanding the criteria for success"
gamification reached critical mass required to appear on Google Trends in the second half of 2010.
Coined in 2002 by British consultant Nick Pelling, it was created as a "deliberately ugly word" to describe "applying game-like accelerated user interface design to make electronic transactions both enjoyable and fast."
2011 word of the year
No broadly accepted definition of "gamification" exists: most definitions of the term share common characteristics
Gartner defines gamification as the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals.
Game Mechanics: points, badges, and leaderboards
Experience design: the journey the players take with elements such as game play, play space, and story line
Digitally engage: rather than personally engage - players interact with computers, smartphones, wearable monitors or other digital devices.
Motivate people: change behaviours or develop skills, or to drive innovation
Enabling people to achieve their goals - as a consequence the organisation achieves its goals
Pitfalls
Players will begin to suffer badge fatigue
Players will actively avoid poorly designed solutions and games
Gartner predicted in 2012 that by 2014, 80% of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives, primarily due to poor design.
Hype Cycle Tool to track trends and technologies as they mature.
Much of what is written about gamification today reinforces the perception that it can make anything fun.
Need to focus on how it can be used by organisations to motivate people to achieve shared goals.
How to leverage gamification to empower their customers, employees and communities to reach their own personal goals (not the organisations).
Sounds counterintuitive to many business people.
Personal goals are often aligned to organisational/business goals.
Two sides of a coin - different sides have different faces: Different views of the same thing.
Presents tremendous opportunity and can drive business results.
Can be used to change behaviours, develop skills and drive innovation to customers.
Player motivation is critical to its success
Need to engage children at a deeper, more meaningful level: Present them with practical challenges, encourage them as they progress through levels, and get them emotionally engaged to achieve their best.
Recent research indicates that engagement is not one-dimensional:
Transactional engagement: shaped by employees' concern to earn a living and to meet minimal expectations of the employer and their coworkers.
Emotional engagement: driven by a desire on the part of the employees to do more for the organisation than is normally expected and in return they receive more in terms of a greater and more fulfilling psychological contract
Engagement dimensions are not mutually exclusive, but rather combinatorial.
Organizations often rely primarily on transactional engagement strategies in their interactions. Need to shift our focus to emotional engagement if we want to truely motivate people.
Intrinsic
Extrinsic
Numerous studies show that extrinsic rewards are not sufficient to sustain engagement, and sometimes have the opposite effect.
Can deliver a short term boost but the effect wears off and can reduce a persons long-term motivation.
Autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives
Mastery - the urge to make progress and get better at something that matters
Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves
Gaming primarily uses intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards can be used but the motivation occurs at a transactional level
Instrinsic rewards sustain engagement because they engage people at an emotional level.
Players opt in to participate, and once they do, they make choices about how they will proceed through the challenges to achieve their goals. Some games have no paths at all. Players are given goals, tools, rules, and a space to "play" without being directed on the next steps to take.
Deep-seated need to improve in aspects of our own lives, but often lack motivation to take the first step. Provides positive feedback on easy on-boarding that can motivate people to start performing better in a chosen area. Never an end point.
Focused on changing behaviours, developing skills, or driving innovation. Starts and finishes with a purpose that is centred on achieving meaningful player goals.
Often fail to achieve goals because the path is too hard, takes too long, or we don't know where to start. Gaming outlines the path, but the user needs must be the primary design objective.
Player-centric design approach
Understand players needs and ambitions.
Game Mechanics
Motivation
Entertainment
Compensate
Primarily engage players on a whimsical level to entertain them.
Transactional level to compensate with rewards.
Gamification
The distinction is really the primary engagement model, incentive structure and purpose.
Not about fun (counter intuitive) but countless websites, blogs and news articles, including research improbably claim that "gamification can make work fun". Game Developers don't like this as they feel it "cheapens" the work they do.
Centered on the science of motivation.
Alficionados of gamification understand and promote it as a way of turning nongame activities into games.
"empower and enable youth to be agents of change." (March Kielburger)
Scale: digital interactions can connect to audiences of any size.
Time: digital interactions are not dependent on other people being available in real time
Distance: available anywhere
Connectedness - friends are always nearby with social networking
Cost: much lower cost than face to face models.
Gaming and learning
A natural fit
Mastery is a strong motivator: we all have innate desire to improve.
Building a skill
Developing knowledge
Define the goal
Breakdown the steps
Check theory/practice engagement loops
Recruit mentors and collaborators
Celebrate success
Provides clarity and purpose
When learning a new skill or acquiring knowledge, having a clearly defined goal is crucial to success
Journey balancing the skills they are developing with the level of challenge the game presents.
Progressive: over time, as the complexity of the material progresses, the player is building upon material learned previously.
Progress is marked with points and punctuated with levels and badges.
Check for dependencies
Ensure there are no gaps in learning that will hinder students in subsequent material.
Khan academy uses a knowledge map to identify topics and their dependencies.
Provide players with instruction, a challenge, and feedback on their attempts to complete the challenge.
Breaks the learning process into small, achievable steps, and provides constant feedback and encouragement throughout the process.
Engage students through doing - experiential learning
Many different learning theories that can be implemented in a gamified solution, but the ,ost commonly applied method is the conceptual learning approach described in Khan Academy.
Learning is best done in a collaborative environment.
Most gamified learning solutions encourage learners to develop a network of peers or enlist a tutor to engage and enhance the learning process.
Khan Academy enables teachers, parents, tutors or peers to become "coaches", who can monitor a student's progress, see what badges they have been awarded and to encourage them to continue learning.
Recognizing achievements is important for maintaining engagement.
Gamification as an effective methos to engage people in learning will become more important as more learning activities move to digital delivery.
Just one of a number of forces that are reshaping the way we learn.
Training and education are primed for a transformational change.
Leveraging the wisdom of the crowd brings many perspectives to the innovation of challenge, and each represents a unique point of view that sees the problem differently.
People will optimize their condition within the constraints of the environment. Scientists call this "Emergence"
The collective actions of many individuals, constrained by rules, who self-organise into complex, adaptive systems, often with radically novel results.
Gamification can provide the structure to engage, motivate, and focus the innovation activities of the crowd.
Gamified innovation solutions provide players with the play space and create the objectives, rules, rewards and other aspects of player engagement model, but they don't define the outcome - players are free to innovate within that space.
Enlist players
Solicit ideas
Select ideas
Develop ideas
Get to launch
Get the crowd engaged, motivated and focused. Developing a critical mass.
Management must provide strong support to encourage people to participate.
Idea generation is a creative process, and the target audience must be encouraged to submit bold ideas.
Players who submit ideas play a special role in innovation solutions. They are typically seen as the "owner" of the idea, and are the ones who drive support and development of the idea.
Organisations may consider putting boundaries around the ideas. It is generally a good plan to have a broad innovation space and audience with some boundaries to focus the ideas.
Ideas are evaluated and bubble to the top. Invest in the ideas they think are most promising. Evaluate and select ideas from a large number of submissions.
May lack many of the skills required to develop an idea to the point where it can be considered for launch. Contribution of talents.
Community-driven development enables people to contribute to ideas that are not their own and build a better proposal.
Design thinking: leverated best approaches in design and applies them to myriad problems.
Tim Brown CEO of IDEO "Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's tool kit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success".
NOTdecomposition (commonly used in software development): Takes a big problem and breaks it down into much smaller individual problems that can be solved. It then aggregated the small solutions into a larger solution to address the larger problem.
"Design thinking is a deeply human process that taps into abilities we all have but get overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognise patterns, to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional, and to express ourselves through means beyond words or symbols.
Player Engagement Model
Collaborative > Competitive
Intrinsic > Extrinsic
Multiplayer > Single player
Campaign > Endless
Emergent > Scripted
Playspace
Player Journey
The environment that yo provide for the players to enage with the game and with one another.
The path the players take through the solution.
Game Economy
Incentives and rewards: Leaderboards, achievement of badges for early participation: increase the challenge level quickly. Portfolio performance (linked to user name),
Fun - makes up a large part of the game economy.
Things: Tangible items that can be collected and sometimes exchanged within the solution.
Self esteem: The provision of challenges, feedback on progression, and recognition of achievements with praise, leveling up, access to exclusive services or badges of achievement. Work to build the player's self-esteem and maintain engagement in the game.
Social capital: People are motivated with others within their social circles recognise their achievements.
Failing to manage the game economy
Jumping to the endgame
Being inappropriately competitive
Creating skill/challenge imbalances
Targeting the wrong audience
Mandating motivation
Adding work to the work
Gaming the system
Gamification would be better called "motivication". A problem in how the majority of people understand gamification.
New models will evolve that will become a treat to the status quo for traditional educators, public policy developers, and personal coaches of all kinds.
Developing skills
Driving innovation
Changing behaviours
Digital Access: Prohibitively expensive and available only to the elite in developing countries.
University degree remains the badge of choice for entry into the workforce, but this is changing.
Employers are more interested in the skills you bring to the table than where you are from or the university you attended.
Many ways to learn, and gamification, along with other trends in education, is changing the way people think about learning, advanced education, and recognition of skills attainment.
Engaging students in learning
Seen gamification applied to training and education in many different ways to increase the engagement of students in the learning process.
In its simpliest form, it is being applied as a game layer to course material to accelerate feedback loops and provide social recognition rewards that increase student engagement in learning, resulting in better outcomes
More sophisticated gamification approaches will develop over time.
Access to advanced education: MOOCs and educational resources such as Khan Academy are changing the face of education.
Recognition of skills attainment: Key component of education is the broad recognition of the skills that have been attained.
Gamification and Innovation
A great combintation.
These types of innovative solutions will continue to grow, but in the future gamified solutions will also start to take on really hard problems (Wicked Problems: Rittel and Webber - Cannot be tackled by scientific approaches)
Smartphone becomes your personal coach: Introduction of gamified applications to modify personal behaviours.
People haven't changed. We have always been motivated by the same things. What has changed is the world we live in, and how we interact with it. We are no longer surrounded by just our family, friends and community. We are now connected in real time to all kids of communicities through technology. Our connections have shifted from the purely physical to the digital, eliminating barriers of scale, time and distance.
Gamification is not new. Game mechanics and design have been used to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals throughout recorded history. Gamification is about rethinking motivation in a world where we are more often connected digitally than physically. It is about building motivation into a digitally engaged world.