Gamification: User's Perspective

Design Perspective: Elusive Definition 

Karl Kapp has a great post, "An Elusive Definition: "Gamification for Learning" on finding the definition of gamification in the context of learning. The breakdown on Structural Gamification (e.g., points, badges, leaderboards, achievements) and Content Gamification (altering the learning content such as adding a story, for example) is extremely helpful, especially for beginners, to understand the fundamentals of the process from the design's perspective. I wanted to build on that with a simple illustration but from a different perspective.

User's Perspective: Peter Fictitious

Let's forget for a second the design and implementation of gamification. Let's look at it from a user's perspective. Enter our hero, Peter Fictitious. Peter started at Glitchenland, an innovative start-up a year ago. Peter went through the Onboarding process, joined the Health club and completed tons of courses to grow his talent. He's the lead of the Innovative Group now. According to Peter, he's not a "gamer", but loves playing video games with his kids and friends. Peter is a hard-worker individual.

Playing is Working and Working is Playing

When asked about Glitchenland, Peter says the company's innovative approach attracted him in the first place. His innovative actions, completions of learning and development courses, his performance reviews and even fun, social interactions are part of an overall game play. These are not individual, isolated event of his work life, rather than deliberate moves he makes when faces challenges to make it to the next level. Glitchenland is a gamified system, where Peter is a player. He collaborates, competes and socializes with other players. Peter completes quests, both individual and group challenges. Playing is working and working is playing for him. 

Peter views Glitchenland as a system. A system he interacts with daily to complete Quests and get rewarded and recognized for performance. Gamification is the overall strategy that includes learning and development. In the L&D space, Peter considers individual courses (gamified or not) parts of his path to grow in order to complete a Quest he's working with his colleagues. Learning is not an isolated event, rather than an iterative process that fine tunes his skills as a player.

Actually, Peter probably couldn't even define what game-based learning, serious game, game-thinking or playful learning is. From his perspective, it's all part of the overall system. Engaging. Challenging. Rewarding. Fun. 

All characters appearing in this articles are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely a typo.