One criticism of gamification is that it's ineffective because it only uses the surface mechanics and other elements from games and thus should really be called pointification. A second criticism is that gamification is potentially too effective. That it can be used to get people to do things. That aren't necessarily in their interest. And that criticism goes by the name of exploitationware. I've already shown you some examples in this vein when talking about enterprise gamification and the concept of playbour or coerced play. For example, the leader board for the house keeping staff at some of the Disneyland hotels. Where the employees felt like the gamification techniques were not encouraging and motivating them. In fact, they were controlling and manipulating them and forcing them to compete more aggressively just to keep up. That's an example of gamification being used in a way. That potentially is exploitative as opposed to encouraging and supportive of the employees. The term exploitationware was coined by Ian Bogost, who's a noted game designer and researcher at Georgia Tech University, in a post that appeared on his personal blog and also on the games industry blog Gamasutra. Here's the URL to the personal blog version of it. And he essentially made two arguments. One was that gamification if people like Margaret Robertson say it's an inadvertent kind, it's accidentally misleading people about the nature of games. Bogost says no, actually it's an intentional kind. Gamification is a way to try to make people think that their job doesn't suck, even when it does. So gamification, he says, is inherently a technique that can be used as a way to confuse people. And to make them ignore the real conditions of their workplace as opposed to focusing on the actual compensation and meaningfulness and rewarding aspects of the job. The broader point though that Bogost makes, in calling gamification exploitationware. Is that it fundamentally undermines the nature of economic and social exchange between workers and their employers. And his argument goes like this. He says, gamification proposes to replace real incentives with fictional ones. So in other words, if the idea is we can motivate people with shiny badges and points and all of these virtual techniques that lead to no tangible material rewards. That companies will start to do that instead of rewarding and incentivizing their employees. WIth things like money. Or better working conditions, or more job responsibility. And his argument is that essentially this undermines the bargain between both sides. Because the workers are still giving up their effort and their productivity. But what they're getting in return is something that is ultimately empty. Maybe for a little bit they feel like it's something motivating. But really what the company is doing is, again, an intentional con, is saying, instead of giving you something that we know is valuable to you, and which is costly to us to give. We're going to give you something that we think of as virtually free to basically trick you into thinking that you're getting a reward that's meaningful. And so that's the argument about exploitationware, and it's one that is worth taking into account. Bogost does have a point. And in fact there are examples we can see, including some of the ones that I've given you in the course, where gamification is not necessarily something that's done. To make workers better off. But, here, as with many other examples of gamification. The real question is, how are the tools being used? The same context can be used in exploitative ways, or in ways that are healthy for the workers. For example, in the call center space, there are examples of gamification that are about manipulation. That are about companies wanting to track, ever more closely, what workers are doing in order to manage them in ways that don't help the workers at all. That treat them as commodities. And that probably are not, ultimately, healthy for the companies themselves because they're so short-term focused. And the same time there are examples in the call center world of gamification systems that encourage people as call center operators to learn and to feel more engagement and more meaning in their work. So, the problem, I think, is not gamification, per se. The problem is use of gamification, either inadvertently, without an awareness that there can be a divergence between the player's interest and, at least, a short term version of the system designer's interest. Or deliberately as a trick, as a shortcut to force people to do something. This is something that's dangerous, that's harmful. And that gamification designers need to be careful to avoid. But it's something that could happen easily if you're not careful. Bogost himself designed a wonderful proof of the ease of reaching this conclusion with something he created called Cow Clicker. And Cow Clicker was something that Bogost created on a lark. It was partly a way to make fun of social games, like the Zynga games. That are so driven by virtual goods and virtual currency, and these appointment dynamics of trying to get people to feel like their crops are going to rot, so they have to come back right away. And so what Bogost did was created something like one of these social games called Cow Clicker, that had no point whatsoever. The mechanic of the game was, you have to click on a cow. That's it. You click on the cow, you click on the cow again, you click on the cow again. But, they're all different kinds of cows. The cows are virtual goods. So there's some cows that are more rare, there's some cows that you unlock by clicking a lot, or clicking at certain times. And the game is designed to show. At least to Bogost, the fundamental emptiness of these kinds of systems that rely purely on these engagement loops. And it turns out what happened was 50,000 plus people started playing this game, which again had no point what so ever other than to show how silly this idea was. People were actually doing it, people were clicking on the cows time and time and time again. And ultimately there were people topping the leader board with vast amounts of the game's virtual currency, which could only be accumulated if they had clicked hundreds of thousands of times on these cows. So, clearly people will do surprising things, things that. May, at first glance, make no sense if they are drawn in by these kinds of habit-forming, engagement-based systems. That's part of what can make them useful, but it's also what makes them dangerous. So, in designing gamification, the first step in the process, the first step in the gamification design framework that I gave you. Is to focus on the business objectives. What's the purpose here? What's the purpose of encouraging people to take some action, how does it really tie to a deep important business or other goal. And the second thing is, who are the players? It's critical to focus on the people who were involved in the game. And not to treat them just as automatons that are forced or suckered into participating this, in this activity, which doesn't really benefit them. So exploitationware, like pointification is a legitimate criticism. Is one that successful and thoughtful gamification designers need to take into account. And is one that should be part of your thinking whenever you try to understand how to apply these techniques that I've talked about to a problem that you've defined.
