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Gamification is not entirely bullshit
- demian 14y ago1) 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.
- rmATinnovafy 14y agoWell put. Gamification does indeed work. It is a marketing tactic that translates well to a certain type of product. Once the dust settles we will see gamification in a lot of unusual places, such as our work. I can imagine a world where everything is either upvoted or downvoted (although I'm not saying it migh be pleasant).
- mjn 14y agoWith 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 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 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.
- demian 14y agoI believe this phenomenon it's characteristic of highly interdiciplinary areas, mostly practical and technical but with a strong component of humanism. The people that want to do work in industry tend to gravitate to some specific fields. And half a decade in managment or engineering school can't teach you the history of philosophy, anthropology, sociology or psychology. I believe this to be the reason why "design" is a big hit nowdays, "managers" and "engineers" are looking at humanism, and the practical humanists: the "designers", for a competetitive advantage. In the case of gamification, there were people interested not in humanism per se, but in building games. They found the power of some buried ideas for social control either by getting to identify the problem and searching for the answer in the field's body of knowledge, or by rediscovering it themselves, bypassing the field's historical intelectual debate. Some wanted to "sell it", so they needed an "angle" related to their profession.
- mjn 14y agoI 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).
- demian 14y agoThat's true, the process doesn't need to be 100% "conscious". PS: Great insight on the article about soviet "gamification", I never thought abut that in that way, thanks.
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- brandall10 14y agoIn 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 :)
- gradstudent 14y ago> 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. ---- 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.
- brandall10 14y agoI up-voted you because I like you directly teasing out this point. This is what I meant by flipping the script. It's just a matter of perception, and that itself can be changed. It shifts with culture. If you think work is a chore then it will be a chore. If you think it is fun then it will be that, at least some of the time. If innovations come around that make it more fun regardless, culture will shift where less will think of it as a chore. These things build upon themselves. Keep in mind play is not responsibility-free - it has an associated time/opportunity cost. Taking a trip around Europe for a couple weeks, I'd say that's great. The experience can be life-changing... it can bring alot of value for the time spent. Being locked in a room playing some online game for a few weeks... not so great. It might be fun to some degree, but it can be deleterious for one's health, personal relationships, work life, etc. It can actually be harmful. As a working engineer for the past dozen years I can agree that many times work is a chore. But, and this is a big but, every once in awhile I get a project that is so challenging, so meaty, so impactful that it is far more fun than anything else I can imagine doing. Those projects are the kinds of things I stay at work late for, when I get home even VPN to the office to continue working until I pass out, then get in early to the office because I can't wait to get back to it. YMMV, but I think quite a few HN folk can relate. Some people this might describe their job entirely. The gamification is implicit in the work itself. I think there's a huge industry waiting to be tapped here, and once it finds its footing human productivity will go up a few notches. The biggest problem is what we currently have is a bit cheesy and too obvious, perhaps to the point where it makes the user feel foolish/duped. That needs to be overcome.
- heyitsnick 14y agoOff topic, but that inline 'tweet' button to tweet a choice quote from the article was an interesting touch. I hadn't seen this technique before.
- Macsenour 14y agoI think any time you can help people, even if it's just 140 characters, the more likely they'll do what you ask.
- callil 14y agoI think it would be even more awesome if the tweet button was even more inline with the text, almost like a citation link in wikipedia, except you could make it an actual twitter bird character!
- diminish 14y agoNot entirely but Is gamification mostly bullshit?
- FuzzyDunlop 14y ago"people were rating thousands of deals for free to get on an anonymous leaderboard in a small game universe" This was something I observed on a project of my own (albeit slightly differently), and it was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, these people would increase their activity on the app so as to get more points and rank higher. It wasn't long before we got people trying to game the system (we didn't do a great deal to prevent it, there was nothing at all clever about our implementation), or trying to spam a few of our API endpoints. The result of this was the impression of increased popularity. Our counters would rise, and we'd look busier. Score. On the other hand, we got a massive bump in superfluous activity and little to no insight into real user behaviour (other than suggestions we had a bunch of spammers). This created an unusual situation where we didn't want to block the spammers, because it made us look good. But we wanted to block the spammers, because they were spamming us to get on the leaderboard (which offered financial incentives for placing highly on). But, other than that, this sort of 'gamification' was, to someone who'd never implemented or truly observed it, a revealing insight into what lengths some people will go to just to see their name at the top of a table, or on a page as the last active user, or whatever. I think I find my own experience has a fair bit in common with the author of this article's.
- Lewisham 14y agoGamification 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-copy-and-paste/ http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-cop...
- Stratoscope 14y agoThe 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-wells-fargo-badge-earned/ http://artlung.com/blog/2012/05/03/gamification-in-the-wild-...
- Lewisham 14y agoOh goodness. Have you seen this at any other Wells Fargo ATMs? Do you know if there's a web interface? The only mention I can find of this is the linked image.
- butongo 14y agoAt dinner the other night, our five year old and his five year old friend wouldn't eat their broccoli--until I told them that broccoli was worth 2000 points. The points had no reward attached, other than getting "points", and making sure the other guy didn't have more imaginary points.