Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. This course will teach you the mechanisms of gamification, why it has such tremendous potential, and how to use it effectively. For additional information on the concepts described in the course, you can purchase Professor Werbach's book For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business in print or ebook format in several languages.
10.2 Social Good Applications
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Gamification
ratings
From the lesson
Applications
This module describes particular challenges and opportunities when applying gamification in two contexts: within an organization, and in social impact or behavior change environments.
Meet the Instructors
Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
Let's look at some examples of gamification for social good.
They are in four categories.
Health and wellness, energy and environment, education, and government.
These are, by no means, all of the potential applications and, I'm
only going to give you an example or two in each category.
As a way to get you thinking about the potential in
these areas, and the different kinds of approaches that might be involved.
The first example is something called Zamzee,
that comes from an organization called Hope Labs,
and Hope Labs is a nonprofit that uses
games and game-like systems for better health outcomes.
So they do some wonderful work around,
using serious games for cancer patient recovery.
But what I'm going to focus on now is something that they may call the zamzee.
And the zamzee is a little device that, is, and accelerometer that keeps track
of how active you are, how many steps you take, when you walk up steps and so forth.
And so it measures your physical fitness activity, so
therefore it's similar to the Niky Plus system that
I mentioned earlier and also to the Fit Bit
system that some of you may be familiar with.
But Zamzee is interesting because it's targeted at low income teenagers.
There is a terrible problem in the United States about obesity
and sedentary life styles among low income communities and especially young people.
So Zamzee is an attempt to focus in on that problem, using this device and,
it works the way you might expect, you get your activity level tracked.
And based on that, you earn points, and you can
unlock badges for various kinds of achievements, you can level up,
and you can win various kinds of awards or earn
various kinds of rewards based on your points and so forth.
Standard kind of set of game mechanics that we've seen throughout the class.
But what Hope Lash has been able to show is that this device, which is
designed in a way that's focused in, again,
on this particular communities, actually produces real results.
So they did a randomized study of 350 teenagers.
In this community and found a 30% increase in activity levels with the Zamzee.
So, that's an example of something which again
the same basic device, the same basic mechanics get
used in commercial applications but it can be
targeted and focused in on achieving a social benefit.
We've seen several other health and
wellness applications already in the course.
The KIA system for wellness activities by people in enterprises.
Photogracy to get people to work out and go to the gym more.
Here's another one though that's a little bit different.
This is something called Super Better which, is, a product
of Jane McGonagall's company which is also called Super Better.
And Super Better is about improving people's life allowing people to overcome
illnesses and to motivate themselves around
these kinds of health challenges using gamification.
So, she developed it after she had a concussion.
That's why her character you see here is Jane the Concussion Slayer.
And she created her own little game for motivating her to engage with family and
friends and to go through the various
kinds of steps that she needed for recovery.
And super better is an attempt to generalize
that for all kinds of situations that people
have health problems that they are trying to
overcome or otherwise trying to improve their situations.
And it uses things like quests.
Where you set mission for yourself.
Or the game can set them for you.
You have your allies, your community.
Your power ups that you used to level, and there even are the bad guys.
Thing like, things like here caffeine and flourescent lights and, running.
I guess running in this case is a bad guy if you have a concussion.
So you can see this is a very game-like kind of approach.
As I may have mentioned earlier Jane
McGonall doesn't like the concept of the term
of gamification and wants to focus more on the truly game like side of the equation.
If you recall the chart that I put up, that there's
a more behaviorist kind of gamification in a more game based framework.
She's more on the game side.
And so this reflects that kind of framing.
but, it has many of the same kinds
of game elements that we've seen in other contexts.
just, structured, in a different way.
And not using quite the same simplistic kinds of point mechanics and
reward mechanics that we see in some of the shallow examples of gamification.
But, again an example of trying to help
people get better and do better using game elements.
Next category is energy and environment.
First example here is O power and this is a company that gives you
reports on how much energy you use in your house and what the patterns are.
And you see trends and some part of it here is just
a quantification, a feedback mechanism that lets you see how you're doing.
And you can see here you're doing good in this case.
But it also, shows you a bunch of relational data.
So this says, you used less energy than the
average person, but 55% more than your more efficient neighbors.
Part of what's interesting about O Power is that it creates
a social dynamic a friendly kind of competition with your friends.
So for example here's a report showing a comparison
with your neighbors where you see you and the
bar chart shows what all of your neighbors are
doing so you can see the worse of them.
The norm among your neighbors, but, really worse
off than the category of more efficient neighbors.
And what they've been able to show, and researchers have been
able to show in other contexts, is that, that social dimension.
That, peer pressure, if you will, is really powerful in getting
people to, engage in new behaviors, like using lec, less electricity.
And here we see the goals which is a similar
kind of structure that we've seen in other gamified contexts.
And the leader board, another way to compare yourself against your friends.
O power has been able to show roughly a 2 to
4% improvement in the communities where it operates in energy utilization.
May not sound like much, but that's enough to
drive hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours of energy savings.
We are talking about people who use a lot of energy, and
potentially millions and millions of people
in cities, that can have this effect.
So even a small sustained impact on energy usage is a huge benefit for the energy
companies, in terms of pollution, in terms of energy sustainability and so forth.
Next example is Recycle Bank.
Recycle Bank has a gameified system of rewards and points and so forth.
For encouraging people to recycle.
So they partner with local communities that have recycling programs and
say if you or if you recycle in this program you earn
the points which you can then redeem for rewards and, and
they got a bunch of partnerships with retailers to redeem the reward.
Standard straightforward kind of gamified system, which they've been able to
use in a large number of communities to encourage recycling behavior.
Again, this is a perfect example that this basic structure could be about anything.
Could be about something that's commercial but it's using those techniques
to help improve recycling and create all those sorts of benefits.
Education is in many ways right for gamification.
Student motivation is a huge challenge, and we already have
scoring systems, and reward systems, and credentialing systems, and so forth.
The challenge is, for gamification to make the system better and not worse.
Because to the extent that the game elements
push students to focus just on those rewards.
And just on what it takes to optimize on the game.
And that's different from the true authentic, intrinsically
motivating learning that they should be engaged in.
The gamification system like a lot of educational reform
efforts might actually harm the educational process rather than help.
So that's an important carrier, but there still are ways that gamification,
if designed right can be used in many positive ways in education.
And there are range of different experiments and initiatives going on.
One interesting one is something called quest to learn which is an entire school.
There's now one in New York and Chicago built around
games and game structures as the entire foundation of the curriculum.
It's being led by Katie Salen who's a
noted game designer, and game theorist, and games educator.
So that's one dimension.
Two more dimensions to mention quickly which I've already talked about
in the class, one is incorporating games structures into an existing curriculum.
Lee Sheldon I mentioned earlier, he was the one who developed
the system in his courses at University of Indiana, and [UNKNOWN] Polytechnic.
That had the insight that normally you start with
an A and then depending on what you do, how
you screw up, the mistakes you make, you move
down towards an F and you settle wherever you are.
Let's say you get a B here.
Whereas Sheldon said, well in a game you start at
zero points as a newbie and you work your way up.
And so maybe we should do the system that way and see how
far you get and call this an A minus or something like that.
So that was one of the game structures
that he and others have put into their classes.
But there's a lot more that can be done and
in fact that people are doing, including using quests and challenges.
And, achievement structures and game narratives all in
the service of better pedagogy and better learning
and Lee Sheldon has a whole book out
called The Multiplayer Classroom which I commend you.
It talks in great detail, but what he has done, but also give a
variety of examples and case studies of both K 12 and higher education teachers.
That are applying gamification and game structures in really interesting ways.
Another dimension of education is the credentialing function.
The way that education says, yes we can confirm you have these skills.
Which then is useful for an employer or other
kinds of organizations that want to know what you've learned.
Traditionally we do this by giving you a diploma or
some sort of standardized test, but both of those have limitations.
And they're especially limited outside of the traditional formal educational system.
So I mentioned earlier the open badge
framework that the Mozilla Foundation is spearheading.
There's also a large contest that
some foundations are funding for interesting applications.
And again, this is a way to use the game elements of badges
as a way of showcasing and confirming.
Certain skills and accomplishments, wherever they come from, and allowing
students to take those and use them in different places.
So two dimensions of education which
gamification can potentially offer some solutions.
Final category to look at is government.
Government?
How can government use gamification?
Well, several ways.
First of all, government can act as an enterprise.
A government agency like the U.S.
Department of Agriculture has thousands of workers.
And so enterprise gamification makes sense for them just like any other enterprise.
Secondly, government in many ways interacts with citizens.
It provides customer service.
Anything from voting to getting a driver's license at the
DMV, to applying for some sort of license or anything else.
And there may be activities that government
is doing to engage with the public where
gamification could have some of the same
external benefits that we've seen in other areas.
But the third broad area is that government can use gamification
and games to promote its policies and to promote benefits for
the citizenry of the country or the other domain that the government oversees.
And interestingly, in the United States.
The White House has brought in a
woman named Constance Steincooler, Esquire, who's a
very well known professor, focused on games
and education at the University of Wisconsin.
In 2011 she took a, an 18-month leave of absence to go work as
a policy adviser in the office of science and technology policy at the White House.
Spearheading a project, bringing together work
at different government agencies, looking at
how games and game elements can promote policy goals of the government.
And here's a post that she made on the White House blog, talking about some of
the things that she's doing, and talking about
a meeting that was held in late 2011.
In, involving 23 government agencies in the United States.
Including the army, the park service, The National
Endowment for the Arts, NASA, Department of Energy,
all of which are doing interesting experiments using
games and game elements to promote their agenda.
So, that's just a taste of some of the
ways that gamification can be a tool for social good.
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