Thoughts on Gamification
Gamification, which means “using game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts”, has been hot over the years. Love for games is part of human nature, so it sounds plausible that turning a boring daily stuff into a game is effective to change people’s behaviors. I personally like the idea “making a boring thing fun to do”, but I’m still not that convinced that gamification is a life saver for all industries.
In most cases as I know, gamification is implemented through incorporating all the game components like tasks, levels, earned points, badges, and virtual products. Sometimes, it could be a good thing since it’s motivating your behavior in a playful way. Here’s one of my personal examples: I attempted to learn French, at least 4 times in the past, but every time I gave up after 1 month. And now with the help of Duolinguo, a language learning app embracing the gamification philosophy, I just stick to it for 6 months practicing French 15 mins literally everyday, and made much bigger progress than ever before. To be honest, sometimes the real reason for me to get to the app and practice is no more than, to keep my 59-day streak going, or to catch up with my friend on the leaderboard. It’s simple but sometimes effective. Another example is Code School, which rewards me badges during my R coding learning journey. Anyway it gives you a sense of achievement and self-expression, it satisfies your desire to compete, it enables you to show off among your friend circle, it simply makes you feel good, just like you play Fruit Ninja on your smartphone.
Other than educational application, gamification still works in many fields such as environment and marketing. Here’re two great examples of how gamification could be applied to converse people into a more environmental-friendly lifestyle. The two videos linked below are both short and interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbEKAwCoCKw
So far it seems like gamification is such a powerful tool to solve almost every problem right? But as I saw on Quora, tons of game developers are strongly opposing this idea, raising many good points through out the argument.
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-so-many-game-developers-opposed-to-gamification
“Gaming is all about fun, but gamification is about incentives and rewards, it’s only borrowing game elements”, “You can’t just improve users engagement only with gaming techniques”, a lot of people think games and gamified activities are inherently different. Also some people point out that “achievement can suck the fun out of activity”, which make great sense psychologically. Even some people who are very pessimistic about gamification’s future predict it will “slowly die”.
Gamification is great, but never the leading role on the stage, it helps people to do things they want to do, but it can’t encourage them to do things they don’t want to do. Let’s go back to the Duolingo case, if language is not what I’m interested in, no matter how many points or badges it offer to me, I won’t spend any time on that. If you have a visceral desire to do something, but sometime lack perseverance to follow your plan everyday, gamification can help you to carry on by providing incentives in a fun way. That’s the only way gamification can help.
