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.
2.1 Gamification in Context
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Gamification
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From the lesson
Gamification and Games
Gamification is a new field, but games are ancient. In this first module, we'll look at what gamification is, why organizations are applying it, and where it comes from. While there isn’t universal agreement on the scope of the field, a set of concepts are clearly representative of gamification. The second lesson explains why the concept of games is deeper than most people realize, and how game design serves as a foundation for gamification.
Meet the Instructors
Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
I am going to say a great deal about what gamification is.
But, first I want to say a little about what gamification is not.
There is a tremendous amount of confusion about just
what gamification means, how it relates to different other game
related concepts and so it's important to clear that
up and put gamification in context before we move forward.
First point, gamification is not turning everything into a game.
I hear this a lot, oh, so you're saying we're
all going to be playing World of Warcraft at work.
Or, we'll all be in some virtual environment like Second Life on the job.
No, in fact, gamification, in many ways, is the opposite.
Gamification says you're still in the real world, you're still at your normal
job, you're still on a website because you want to buy a product.
Gamification says, let's make that experience better, learn from games.
Find elements from games, that can enhance the experience that you're having.
Find the meaningful core of those experiences and make them more
rewarding, create greater motivation, but not pull you out of the real world.
Similarly, there are many situations involving
games and work, that aren't gamification.
So, you know what the most successful video game of all time is?
It's Windows Solitaire, as you see there on the screen.
9 billion hours that people played this game in 2003.
That was the latest data that we have, and that was a long time ago.
Where do you think they play it?
Much of the time people play it at work.
It's something people do when work is boring.
Gameification is about finding things that are not boring
in work, and using game elements to enhance them.
So, it's very different than just saying there's games at work,
that's gamefiication or we're going to make work more game like.
It's also different from using games in a business context.
So I mentioned earlier the Cracker Jack toy surprise,
as a game like approach to selling a product.
Wel and good, not gamifacation.
Similarly, the McDonald's monopoly game is a
very successful promotion for them for many
years and it involves playing a scratch
off game when you're at the MacDonald's stores.
Again, not about changing the experience of a McDonald's, not
about learning things from gamesm and taking pieces from games.
And putting them into the business process itself.
It's about using a game to make people feel like they're more
willing to come into the store because they're going to get some kind of reward.
So it's a cousin to gamification.
But it's about using actual games, as opposed to breaking games
down, thinking about what games can teach us in those contexts.
Another example of using entire games,
which I've already mention, is serious games.
Serious games, as I've said, can be extremely powerful, for
simulation, for systems thinking, for education, but again, they are games.
They are purpose built to create an immersive
experience that puts a person into an environment.
And that's different from thinking about what can
be taken from games and put into the
existing environment to change it to make it
feel more engaging and to create better motivation.
Now gamification is also in some ways broader than many people think.
The previous examples were contacts where gamification is more specific.
Here, I'm going to talk about how
gamification is bigger than people sometimes talk about.
Gamification is sometimes thought of as
purely about marketing, purely about getting
people to buy things or getting people to be more engaged with companies.
Similarly, it's often thought about as just point, badges and leaderboards or
PBL's as I like to talk about them and I'll explain in a later session.
So here is Samsung nation which is an offering on the Samsung
website and you can see it's got various badges and awards you can
win, it's got points that people get, it's got a leader board, it's got rewards,
all standard gamification elements, this is clearly an example of gamification.
The point I want to make is not every example of gamification looks like that.
We already saw when I gave you
three examples in the last segment, the Microsoft
language quality game and the speed ticket
lottery in Sweden didn't really look like this.
So gamification is much broader than these kinds
of examples, although they do fit within Gamification.
The danger is thinking that there's something
magical about points and leaderboards and rewards.
And that thing is what Gamification is, it's actually only a subset.
Finally, Gamification should be distinguished from Game theory.
Now, Game theory has a deep relationship to games and therefore to Gamification,.
But it's something different.
Game theory is a set of algorithms and formulas
and quantitative techniques for analyzing strategic decision making.
The Wikipedia entry that I put up here says game theory is the study
of strategic decision making, using mathematical models.
So game theory uses stylized concepts of
games, people competing or agents competing against each
other but they aren't typically real world games like Call of Duty or Angry Birds.
Or checkers or football which have that
element of fun and enjoyment and engagement
to them so certainly there are things that can be learned from game theory
that are relevant for gamification for example one of the most famous game theory
examples is the prisoners dilemma a scenario
where two prisoners would be better off.
Both of them if they cooperated but the way the rules are set
up the incentives are for them not to cooperate those kinds of models
can be useful in thinking about gamified systems but game theory is more
about defining formal models and mathematical
structures to analyze those kinds of behaviors.
Which is different from what we're going to be doing in this course.
Alright so I've told you all the thing gamefication is not what is it then?
I gave you the definition use of game
elements and game design techniques in non game context.
Here are three other things that gameifcation does,
the first is gamefication is about listening to games.
In other words, gamification means the recognition that games are powerful.
That games can teach us things, that games are designed in sophisticated ways.
That if we understand what those mechanisms are,
and we understand how to apply those same techniques.
We can achieve powerful business results.
Secondly, Gamification is about learning, learning from game design but also
learning from fields like psychology and management and marketing and economics.
It's a way in to understand things about motivation.
About human behaviour whether that's in a workplace context, a
marketing context, a crowd sourcing context or behaviour change context.
Learning deep things about what makes people act in a certain way.
And design patterns to activate those aspects
of human behavior, that's what gamification can do.
And finally, gamification fundamentally is about fun.
Fun, that difficult to define concept, which
I will talk about in a later segment.
Gamification recognizes that fun is powerful, that
one of the things that makes games.
So important and so significant throughout all of human
history is that they're more than just mathematical models.
Yes, a mathematical model can be used to play the game effectively.
But the game is somehow more than that in large
part because the game creates this sense that we call fun.
Let me give you one additional framework for understanding gamification in context.
This comes from some articles by a group
of authors led by Sebastian Deterding, an influential
gamification analyst based in Germany and here's the
url to one of these articles right here.
See if you want to find out more.
They use a 2 by 2 matrix to explain gamification
and to position it vis a vis other related concepts.
On one axis is the difference between whole
games or whole artifacts and partial ones.
Or parts on the other axis they distinguish play
from games and this is a distinction that I'll explain in more
detail in a later segment but for now think about
games as things involving rules and structures and winning and loosing.
Whereas play is pure exuberant fun, pure
release of exuberant energy in that kind of context.
So what they do in this article is
they distinguish along those axes four different quadrants.
So the quadrant here involving.
Play in whole artifacts they say well that's toys
when you play with something and it's a thing that's called a toy and if
you play but were not making it an entire thing they say well that's called
playful design it's about designing.
Using the notion of play making things feel a little bit more playful a little
bit more fun but not systematically structuring
them with rules and goals and so forth.
On the top left quadrant is something is
a game and it's a whole artifact well that's.
Games, but specifically, for our purposes, that's where we would put serious games.
Because again, serious games are full blown games to address non game uses.
And that distinguishes them from gamification.
Which of course, goes here, in the top right quadrant.
Gamification being using parts of games
to address non-business excuse me, non-game challenges.
It fits in this quadrant, right here.
And if you can't read my scribbling, here's the original chart
from the article that they provide, which shows these four quadrants.
And so, this should give you a sense of how Gamification fits
in with some other concepts that are related but variable to distinguish.
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