Guess what? You've reached the very last unit in the course. You know what that means. Yes, you've earned a badge. All right, it's the same old badge that I've given you several times before, and it happens to be the logo for the course. But you should feel a sense of accomplishment getting this far. Maybe I'll embellish it, make it a badge with a happy face here. Maybe that will make it seem a little more valuable to you. But seriously, we've come a long way. We've covered a great deal of ground in this course, many different aspects of gamification, and related areas that feed into doing gamification successfully. So in this final unit, I'd like to introduce the last set of material by looking a little bit at where we've come before. And then pointing in a direction of where we're going to go in the last few lecture segments. At the very beginning of the class, I gave you a set of learning goals, and I think it's healthy towards the end to review what we've done and how they match up with those goals. So the first goal was to talk about what gamification is. And I spent a good deal of time both defining what gamification meant and also positioning it around other kinds of concepts. Things like serious games and so forth, that have some similar aspects, but which should be understand, understood separately. So hopefully, you now have a better feeling when you hear about gamification. What exactly it means and how it's different from, for example, just playing a game, either for fun or in a workplace context. Second is why gamification might be valuable. We've looked at a whole bunch of examples, examples from marketing, examples from human resources, examples from enterprise context, examples from social impact. In all of them, I've tried to show how the game elements and the game design techniques feed into real business value or achieving real legitimate goals. It does not mean gamification works in every case. And I've also tried to show you very concretely limitations, concerns, areas where gamification might not be the right approach. And areas where there's some legitimate concerns and criticisms leveled against either gamification, in general, or specific ways that it's applied. But you should come out of this with an understanding of some of the areas, at least where we have some reason to believe that this is a technique that's not just really interesting or exciting, but that seems to be able to deliver real results. Third, how to do it effectively. As I've said, I've talked a lot about different forms of gamification. I've given you a full-fledged design framework to step-by-step apply gamification. It should be obvious by now that gamification is not any time a game is involved or any time points and leaderboards and badges are involved. It has to be done under a structure that lets you tie the particular steps you're taking to those objectives and understand the panoply of tools that you have available to apply gamification in the right way to the right situation. And finally, we've looked at lots of specific ex examples. Examples in many different domains to show the breadth of areas where gamification can be applied. All right. So that's what we've done up until now. Where are we going next? In this final unit of the class, I want to show you some aspects of gamification. Things to be done that relate to game elements or to game design. But that are broader than the that ones we have covered here before in the class. Each of them could really be an entire unit of the class, and they tie into much larger and broader debates in other areas, but they are worth touching on before we go to give you a sense of some of the other things we'll be doing with games and game-like structures. The first is prizes. So, the use of rewards, where the goal is to encourage people to, do something. And the mechanism is instead of picking someone and saying, all right we'll pay you to do it or some other mechanism, having a prize and saying, the winner is the one who does best, and they get some sum of money. So I call this competitive in that this is an approach that's trying to mobilize large numbers of people, but using their competitive instincts to try to win something as the mechanism to encourage them to participate. There's also a set of activities encouraging large numbers of people to participate in a collaborative way which broadly here, I'm calling collective action a lot of what it involves could be called crowdsourcing. So these are mechanisms to get people to work together on problems. Not necessarily people who are employees or participants already in an organization, but people coming in because of the interest level and the fun factor of the activity. The third one is virtual economics. And so I've all ready talked about virtual goods and virtual currencies in some context, but I want to take a deeper look at how economic pressures and techniques can be applied to virtual goods. And how gamifying things can potentially create a kind of functioning economy, which need to be managed in the same way that real world economies need to be managed. And can also provide some of the dynamism and benefits that the real world economies provide. And then, last but certainly not least, we'll look towards the future and think about a couple different visions about where gamification could go. Is it something that will be used primarily for good? Or something that primarily will be dangerous as it scales up beyond the kinds of applications that we've seen for today?
