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.
2.6 Ethan Mollick Interview with Prof. Werbach
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
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'm here with my colleague Ethan Mollick from the management department at Whorton.
Who's done some really interesting work looking at games in business.
So first Ethan just you know, tell us a little
bit about how you got interested in this set of topics.
So, first of all.
Like I think a lot of people are interested in games.
I started off, gamification, I started off being interested in games.
So I played games for a long time. And that brought me
into sort the early days of what was then called serious games or gamification.
I did work helping do game design for, the military, to teach cultural understanding.
I got pulled into doing games for education, to teach
things like financial literacy with the Doorways to Dreams Foundation.
And that led me to doing more serious work on this, including
writing a book on games and business, and studying gamification much more seriously.
So your book Changing the Game, came out
in 2009, right, so it's several years ago now.
How do you think that the market has changed, and
do you think understanding of these kinds of questions has changed?
>> So, first of all, we were just too early
for the invention of the word gamification, which I eternally regret.
We called it, like, serious games or games for innovation or games for work.
so, I think there's been a massive take off of this idea.
I think that
in some ways we're a little bit stuck where we've
been over and over again, in the world of gamification.
Which is not matter what name it's been called, there's always
been this difficulty breaking out of just enough into the mainstream.
Just figuring out how to get people to use this.
Sharing information with each other about the
best approaches And coming up with answers that
are supported by evidence that games actually
work and do what there suppose to do.
So, while I'm really encouraged by the number of ways people are using the
gamification right now I still think we have
a ways to go in establishing best practices.
As part of what I'm excited about with this class
is that you have a leading role in doing that.
Well, we're trying, but, so, let me just, let me just ask you to
follow up a little on some of the things that you said, I mean,
I tend to think of serious games
and gamification as being different, that, that
one is about these, kind of, full-blown
game-like environments and one is about the elements.
Do you agree with that?
Or do you have a, kind of, different take on it?
>> Yeah.
I think that part of this is the eternally shifting definitions here.
So, gamification can mean something as narrow as taking
ideas from games and applying them to real life.
Or, it can mean using games for some sort of non business, non entertaining purpose.
So, I'm happy with that division, if you want to call it that.
And the warning I would sort of put out to your
students is that the vocabulary means different things to different people.
So, if you want to consider serious games to be full blown simulations,
that's fine by me.
But I think the, the definitions aren't commonly shared across every group.
>> So, when you're, when you're talking to people,
you know, businesses, you know, military, government, and stuff
what do you find most effective to get them
to understand the potential of these game like techniques.
>> So I think once they understand the scale of gaming that often
helps right, so be it a number of hours spent playing Angry Birds last
year was somewhere north of eight or eleven billion hours
which is about thee equivalent of building the Panama Canal everyday.
Right.
Once you start getting that workload, the idea that non-games
have to understand how big this is, that can help.
I also think understanding that there's a linkage between
gamification, and what we know about psychology and sociology.
These are not new topics. Right.
The idea of designing incentives to get people to act properly is not new.
So if you can link it to these ideas of behavioral
economics, of social psychology, I think that's also a very helpful technique.
>> Mm-hm.
Okay.
You mentioned the need for more best practices and so forth.
What do you think is mostly missing
right now in gamification that could be improved?
>> So I think a few things. I think first of all.
Mistakes tend to get buried.
We're in a situation where most people creating games are only sharing the
success stories.
They tend to share these cases with vague details.
And it's very hard to build on only successes,
when we don't know about the failures that are happening.
And it's hard to build on only
vague details, if someone's not sharing information.
So I hope we move past this sort of
rah, rah, gamification is great, and defensive community where
we're trying to show everybody that this is a
great thing, to actually sharing both successes and failures.
Because I think that's how things advance.
I think having common tool
kits to work with, sensitive techniques that we know are good or bad.
Those things will all be helpful.
And more basic research also. >> Mm-hm.
Okay, so you're a, a management scholar what, what do you think that, that
you or, or people like you can, can bring to the table in this area?
>> So, as I think I told you, the study of games isn't even that that new.
So there has been evidence, and scholars writing about the importance of games
at work since the 1920's.
There is evidence that during the building of the pyramids games were
used as one of the motivating factors for competing teams of workers.
I mean these are not new phenomenon and as
a result people have been thinking about these things
for a long time, and they've been thinking of
them in the context of what motivates people to act.
All these other factors that affect when games work and when they don't.
So, competition, compensation, gender, social status.
All these things come into play.
So I think recognizing there's a long tradition of looking at how people are
motivated in the management world, understanding how
these many factors play against each other.
And how they can be used for good or for bad purposes, can be very helpful.
So what do you think is new, potentially?
>> I think what's new about gamification is that it separates
out the work somebody does from the work they think they're doing.
So,
oftentimes compensation is about, your job is terrible.
Let's pay you more to do it better.
Or let's figure out a way to make it less terrible.
Or let's give you more control over the aspects of your job.
And I think these are all still areas we're
working on and figuring out how to do better.
What makes the gamification interesting is you can be playing
a game where you're labeling images online but you think
that you're playing some sort of you know competitive game
with other people where you're playing a word guessing game.
You could be diagnosing code within the Department of Defenses
computers and you think you're identifying alien species on Mars.
So the idea that you could actually make that the work appear to
be more interesting even without changing
the underlying factors, I think is exciting.
I think the other thing that gamification does is leverage the art of games.
Right?
So, we have some cold hard facts about what motivates people
and what doesn't, but games are much more art than science.
So, the idea your bringing
together elements like graphics, like leader boards,
avatars, things that are beyond what are
basic descriptions of gamification are in the
literature I think is really helpful too.
>> What would you say are some of the open
research questions that we still need to learn more about?
>> So, I think there's a understanding or
at least the belief in the gamification world.
That games are generally good.
People like them, and that's because a lot of people who do,
who do gamification like games. Right?
The fact is, most people don't like games, or every kind of
game; and even people who love games don't like every kind of game.
Right?
So the idea of trying to understand
when this is motivating, when this is demotivating,
when it's who you're turning off and who
you're turning on by gameplay matters a lot.
I think also understanding which of these
features matter in which kinds of ways matter.
And I think also in a more
largely social point trying to understand when this
is moral to do and when it isn't.
Right?
So something coercive about having people play games.
Instead of giving them other forms of
compensation that are even more direct, right?
Giving them virtual rewards instead of real rewards.
At it's best that's really great and uplifting.
At its worst it's exploitative.
And you think about the idea of you
know, distancing people from the implications of their job.
I find that a bit troubling. And there's some
interesting work going on with that as well.
>> Mm-hm.
Absolutely.
So.
Any final words for our students out there in the course?
>> So I think we're in a very exciting time right
now and you're coming into gamification at just the right moment.
So the initial sort of everybody's excited about this
is still happening but is maybe dying down slightly.
And we're now in a stage where we have to figure out
how this works and there's almost limitless potential to get this right.
And there's a really interesting chance to explore.
And I'd urge you as you move forward in
gamification to make sure you're sharing, communicating, and viewing
this as a community that's trying to get results
together, rather than an individual who's trying to succeed.
>> Great, Ethan.
Thank you very much for joining us. >> Thank you.
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