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2.1 Gamification in Context

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Gamification

University of Pennsylvania

4.8 (1,913 ratings) | 90K Students Enrolled

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.

Skills You'll Learn

Psychology, Marketing, Game Design, Gamification

Reviews

4.8 (1,913 ratings)

5 stars
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AG

Jul 02, 2017

It was an interesting learning session - it gave me a more structured approach to gamification concepts which I can further use in Human Computer Interaction / User Centered Design approach in UX.

SJ

Jan 04, 2016

Insightful course, widens your horizon of thinking. After completion of this course I was able to understand and create many engagement activities in my profession of a Human Resource Officer.

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.

2.1 Gamification in Context11:16

2.2 What is a Game10:12

2.3 Games and Play9:44

2.4 Video Games11:18

2.5 Just a Game?10:18

2.6 Ethan Mollick Interview with Prof. Werbach8:15

Taught By

Kevin Werbach
Associate Professor

Transcript

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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