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.
