
Gamification is not entirely bullshit - panozzaj
http://22ideastreet.com/blog/2011/08/16/gamification-is-not-entirely-bullshit/ 
======
demian
1) Someone uses X (like game mechanics, industrial & visual design or
artificial intelligence) in a new or more generalistic way with great success.

2) A lot of people start using X to get the same results.

3) A "consulting" industry starts to rise around X.

4) Someone gets tired of the overused X and calls it bullshit.

5) Everyone that didn't succeeded with X, probably after some kind of
investment inspired by the new "consulting" industry, gets in wagon and calls
it bullshit.

6) Some time after the "bullshit" narrative sets in, someone finds out that X
can be useful. If he tries to defend it he either does it by carefully arguing
"I'm on your side but...", or just change it's name.

This kind periodic behaviour seems to deamplificate until it reach some stable
state, generally it's absorbed by academia and gets to be taught in schools.
From there it can get some amplifications, and if it does the pattern repeats.

~~~
mjn
With gamification of the workplace in particular, there seems to be a
repeating cycle. Each cycle does come with some shifts in focus, but it seems
mostly implicit ones, without a lot of reflection.

I've been doing some preliminary research trying to track down each of the
cycles and how they relate, but the fact that so much of it is ephemeral and
buzzword-heavy, and the studies are done by self-interested people with poor
documentation of results, makes it a bit difficult.

As far as I can tell, the earliest proposals for using game-like processes to
motivate and engage workers came in the Soviet Union, for the obvious reason
that they needed a replacement for _monetary_ motivation ASAP. Lenin called it
"socialist competition", and had this vision of friendly, game/play-like
competition as a replacement for cutthroat, loser-ends-up-homeless capitalist
competition. I wrote a little about that here, though it's more like a
preliminary collection of sources than a proper history at the moment:
<http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html>

Then sometime in the 1980s and especially the 1990s and 2000s, the idea of the
power of games and play started becoming a huge thing in management. There was
even a hilarious consulting job title for a while, "funsultant", someone who
would come into a company and help make it more "fun" and "gamelike". I
suspect there are similarities between today's "gamification consultants" and
1990s "funsultants", with the main shift being less focus on play and fun, and
a bigger focus on reward/feedback loops. In effect the '90s game/play
management techniques are merging with the much older behaviorist-
reinforcement management techniques. I wrote a bit about the funsultants and
some of the reactions to them as well ( _Office Space_ 's flair scene is
probably the most memorable example of a backlash to mandatory fun):
<http://www.kmjn.org/notes/funsultants_and_gamification.html>

So I guess what I'm mostly missing from gamification advocates is a clearer
picture of what's new here and how it relates to previous approaches. How much
of it is about Skinner-style behavior-loop reinforcement? How much of it is
about fun? About competition? How do the new approaches, whether we call them
"game mechanics" or something else, relate to existing research findings on
how effective each of these things are? As far as I can tell nobody actually
wants to mention any of those things, instead presenting it as something
totally new: game mechanics used to be used only for entertainment, but in the
2010s we realized they could be used to motivate non-entertainment things as
well. But I don't think it just fell from the sky with no relationship to
previous attempts.

~~~
demian
I believe this phenomenon it's characteristic of highly interdiciplinary
areas, mostly practical and technical but with a strong component of humanism.

The people that want to do work in industry tend to gravitate to some specific
fields. And half a decade in managment or engineering school can't teach you
the history of philosophy, anthropology, sociology or psychology. I believe
this to be the reason why "design" is a big hit nowdays, "managers" and
"engineers" are looking at humanism, and the practical humanists: the
"designers", for a competetitive advantage.

In the case of gamification, there were people interested not in humanism per
se, but in building games. They found the power of some buried ideas for
social control either by getting to identify the problem and searching for the
answer in the field's body of knowledge, or by rediscovering it themselves,
bypassing the field's historical intelectual debate. Some wanted to "sell it",
so they needed an "angle" related to their profession.

~~~
mjn
I think that's definitely part of it, but I think there may be a bit of
deliberate amnesia as well, out of a desire to portray something as _totally
new_ , and perhaps to avoid any unwanted historical baggage.

You also see this in "serious games" and its variants. Even Al Gore was
recently talking about how the future of videogames is that maybe they'll be
used for things like education, too, not just entertainment. Sure, I even buy
that. But that's what everyone was saying in the Apple ][ era also! It's not
just about credit, but I think we lose something from the amnesia: some of the
Apple ][ games were actually _better_ uses of game mechanics for education
than much of the fairly shallow stuff being promoted more recently, and we can
even learn something from the examples that were more mixed successes (though
admittedly there was a lot of bad "edutainment", too).

~~~
demian
That's true, the process doesn't need to be 100% "conscious".

PS: Great insight on the article about soviet "gamification", I never thought
abut that in that way, thanks.

------
brandall10
In a more meta way, just about any innovation goes through a 2-steps forward,
1-step back cycle. The 1-step back is always due to wide-scale adoption where
the original message is somewhat lost in translation, but as a whole actually
moves things forward (ie. agile 'methodology').

I think when it comes to gamification it's perhaps better to reframe it as a
more targeted engagement structure. If you think about how big the actual
video game industry is, how much people are _paying_ to solve problems, that
there could be a better way to flip that script, because they are in fact
doing work in the guise of entertainment.

Right now the whole concept is in its infancy, but I imagine five years from
now it will be prevalent in most everything we do, perhaps in a very indirect
manner. It might even be the perfect cure for procrastination (ducks :)

~~~
gradstudent
> I think when it comes to gamification it's perhaps better to reframe it as a
> more targeted engagement structure. If you think about how big the actual
> video game industry is, how much people are _paying_ to solve problems, that
> there could be a better way to flip that script, because they are in fact
> doing work in the guise of entertainment.

\----

Disagree. Play is distinct from work because it is responsibility free. Work
is a chore that you do because you must. For this reason Gamification is and
will forever remain bullshit.

~~~
brandall10
I up-voted you because I like you directly teasing out this point.

This is what I meant by flipping the script. It's just a matter of perception,
and that itself can be changed. It shifts with culture. If you think work is a
chore then it will be a chore. If you think it is fun then it will be that, at
least some of the time. If innovations come around that make it more fun
regardless, culture will shift where less will think of it as a chore. These
things build upon themselves.

Keep in mind play is not responsibility-free - it has an associated
time/opportunity cost. Taking a trip around Europe for a couple weeks, I'd say
that's great. The experience can be life-changing... it can bring alot of
value for the time spent. Being locked in a room playing some online game for
a few weeks... not so great. It might be fun to some degree, but it can be
deleterious for one's health, personal relationships, work life, etc. It can
actually be harmful.

As a working engineer for the past dozen years I can agree that many times
work is a chore. But, and this is a big but, every once in awhile I get a
project that is so challenging, so meaty, so impactful that it is far more fun
than anything else I can imagine doing. Those projects are the kinds of things
I stay at work late for, when I get home even VPN to the office to continue
working until I pass out, then get in early to the office because I can't wait
to get back to it. YMMV, but I think quite a few HN folk can relate. Some
people this might describe their job entirely. The gamification is implicit in
the work itself.

I think there's a huge industry waiting to be tapped here, and once it finds
its footing human productivity will go up a few notches. The biggest problem
is what we currently have is a bit cheesy and too obvious, perhaps to the
point where it makes the user feel foolish/duped. That needs to be overcome.

~~~
gradstudent
For the vast majority of people work is _always_ a chore. It's a commodity you
use to barter with your employer; in exchange you receive money that allows
you to live.

You argue that sometimes work is "fun". I think a more accurate description is
that work can sometimes be engaging. Like when you're presented with a problem
that's right at the edge of your abilities but not out of reach. Yet it's
still work. Unlike play, work carries with it stress and responsibility. There
are consequences if you screw up. Worse if you stop entirely. None of these
are true for play.

Gamification is bullshit because it encourages the perception that these
differences don't exist or that they don't matter. It's a flat out lie. Work
is not play. Accept it. Move on.

~~~
evanwolf
Play is a frame of mind, not a contractual relationship. If it weren't, nobody
would take mmorpgs seriously, and they do; the consequences may not involve
your paycheck but it's harsh when you let your team down.

Playfulness shows up at work all the time, although not necessarily in ways
that promote the bottom line.

Play mindsets can be encouraged in the workplace when they don't emerge
spontaneously. Whether those efforts are successful for a given person on any
given day...? It's still pushing a rock uphill.

Game design and reward systems are trying to find a path that doesn't suck. It
may take another decade of experimentation before ten thousand failed attempts
show the obvious and elegant ways to make more workplace leaders look like
your favorite camp counsellor, recess organizer, or dungeon master.

~~~
gradstudent
> Play is a frame of mind

It's more than that. The environment matters. Real play is risk free. You can
do whatever you want and there are no consequences. This is not true for work.

At the end of the day business doesn't want their employees to treat work as
play; they just want them to be more engaged while at work. But instead of
looking at why their workers are _disengaged_ they hire people who set up cute
little games and contests and tell people to pretend they're not actually
working. Which is all well and good until somebody drops the ball and they get
fired. Whoops. Sorry Bob. I guess you didn't understand we weren't actually
playing after all.

Gimme a break. Gamification is just bullshit newage snakeoil.

------
heyitsnick
Off topic, but that inline 'tweet' button to tweet a choice quote from the
article was an interesting touch. I hadn't seen this technique before.

~~~
callil
I think it would be even more awesome if the tweet button was even more inline
with the text, almost like a citation link in wikipedia, except you could make
it an actual twitter bird character!

------
Stratoscope
The most bizarre bit of gamification I've run across lately was in Wells
Fargo's ATMs. I deposited a check the other day and got an alert on the ATM
screen:

    
    
      You've earned a new badge
      Express Depositor
      [Learn More]
    

Well! That should certainly help me gain status and reputation among my fellow
ATM users!

Photo here: [http://artlung.com/blog/2012/05/03/gamification-in-the-
wild-...](http://artlung.com/blog/2012/05/03/gamification-in-the-wild-wells-
fargo-badge-earned/)

~~~
Lewisham
Oh goodness.

Have you seen this at any other Wells Fargo ATMs? Do you know if there's a web
interface? The only mention I can find of this is the linked image.

------
Lewisham
Gamification is bullshit by design. Gameful mechanics may not be, but we're
not there yet.

Point 1 is that Zichermann (who wrote Games-Based Marketing) misrepresents the
research into motivation. Whether this is maliciousness or incompetence is up
for debate (personally I think the latter with a dose of arrogance). You can
see Deturding shred his O'Reilly book, where he goes into this in a lot of
detail [1]. One point that is made in the blog post is that most people are
socializers, according to Bartle player types. Nick Yee has already shown
those player types to be largely useless outside of MUDs, and Bartle never
claimed them to be otherwise. In addition, there is no evidence that most
people are socializers, and Zichermann doesn't cite this claim. I've not been
able to find anyone who's tracked down any research which shows that this is
true.

It's odd that the author mentions Pink's Drive at the end, as it's pretty much
the anti-thesis of Zichermann. Drive advocates intrinsic motivation,
Zichermann is all about extrinsic. If you don't get a trinket, it isn't worth
doing. Extrinsic motivation erodes intrinsic motivation. And that's why Bogost
slams gamification in the first place: the trinkets you get are valueless, and
present no expense to the company. At least frequent flier mile rewards do
_something_.

Point 2 is that this post makes no mention of the quality of interaction. When
you play with small percentages of large absolute numbers, you're going to
find a small minority of people who respond to this. Enough to fill a
leaderboard. But what are they doing? Are they really rating stuff? Are they
just hitting 5 stars on everything? We know that HITs in the Mechanical Turk
suffer from poor interactions, and those people are _getting paid_ (an
extrinsic reward worth more than a leaderboard place, no?). What about the
other 99% that aren't on the leaderboard?

Point 3 is that, as gradstudent pointed out, context is highly important when
discerning work from play. The research shows that artists, for example, make
better work when they aren't being paid. Even if you change nothing in the
environment but making the piece contracted, the quality of the work suffers.
People know when they're working and when they aren't (this was in Drive). A
leaderboard in Space Invaders might be fun, but a leaderboard at work is a
really good way for middle management to find the worst 10% of performers, and
becomes a tool for control, and people recognize this instantly.

So yes, gamification is bullshit. It's so much bullshit, that Jane McGonigal,
who popularized the use of such things, has had to back away from the term as
it's so poisonous, and she's using "gameful" instead.

What this all came about from was "People play games more so than doing other
things, why is that?" Gamification took all the wrong elements. Games are all
about feeding intrinsic motivation with tight feedback loops. Self-
determination theory and Reiss' 16 Intrinsic Motivations provide much better
frameworks for understanding games. Rigby and Ryan's Glued to Games looks at
SDT, and Radoff's Game On has a section of the 16 motivations.

For anyone interested in achieving the stated goals of gamification, but is
concerned on how to do it right, should probably read Radoff. It's the most
honest, and legitimate, treatment of the subject I have yet found, by someone
who actually wears the game designer t-shirt and the businessman suit with
equal comfort.

[1][http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-
cop...](http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-copy-and-
paste/)

~~~
oskarth
Seeing as you seem to be well-read in the area - what's your opinion of the
"gamification" on khanacademy?

~~~
Lewisham
The reason I've been reading it all is because I'm writing my thesis on it :)

I haven't spent too much time with Khan Academy, so can't say too much about
it. There are two things to keep in mind:

1\. Extrinsic motivation erodes intrinsic motivation. The most obvious example
is asking a kid to take out the trash. Once you pay him/her, they'll only do
it for money again. While this example is silly because no-one has any
intrinsic motivation to take out the trash, it gets really dicey when you add
rewards to things like reading. Are they reading to develop a love of reading,
or for the carrot you put at the end? What happens when the carrot goes away?
The research suggests that once the carrot disappears, so does the reading.
The psychology isn't completely cut-and-dried on this, as no psychology seems
to be, but it's compelling to me, at least.

The problem is that some scholars, particularly Alfie Kohn, would say that
things like gold stars are rewards, and thus you're eroding things that way.
However, you have to balance that with providing legitimate feedback for
knowing how well you're doing, as people want to feel competent. Both these
come from self-determination theory (read up on it, it's neat). The trick is
to make sure the reward doesn't try to control behavior, but rather provide
feedback on behavior. eg. "you did x 5 times" (good) vs "you did x 5 times as
required" (bad). It's a really fine line.

As far as I can see, the main goals in Khan Academy seem to be informational
and are good.

2\. Badges are game systems themselves (I heard this from Nicole Lazzaro [1]),
and they will result in increasing behavior of certain things for people that
pay attention. They do not necessarily result in increased behavior of
_value_. eg. a badge for posting 5 times is earned whether your posts are
insightful, or whether they simply say "first post". And, again, these are
extrinsic rewards, and once they dry up, people stop caring. There's also a
strong possibility that rewards suffer from inflation, and you have to hit
people with bigger and bigger rewards once they start relying on them.

The badges at Khan Academy make me wary [2]. Check out this one: "Quickly &
correctly answer five questions in a row." What's the goal here? Khan
Academy's goal, one would think, is to encourage students to think deeply
about problems and arrive to correct solutions. It spends a lot of time saying
students are able to work at their own pace, and this is a benefit, but then
we have a badge which encourages quick, possibly slap-dash, behavior. It's
more controlling than informational, requesting the student do something not
necessarily natural to him/her in order to achieve it.

The ones given out for achieving proficiency are better; they align with what
they want students to do and provide informational feedback that students have
done it, increasing their motivation.

====

Now, this is not to say that all achievement systems are bad or doesn't work.
Stack Overflow's seems to do really well. If it was doing poorly, we'd expect
a large drop off of people when the extrinsic rewards dry up, largely at
reputation 10,000, when you get moderator tools. The current data from Stack
Overflow indicates only about 5% or so of users drop off once they get the
tools (I can dig out references if you're interested). Upvotes and
achievements provide useful feedback about your mastery of SO, so with that
low attrition rate, it indicates they are doing things right.

The elephant in the room that Stack Overflow presents is that it may indicate
that gamification does work in its entirety, and that all this motivation
theory is invalid in this domain for some reason. This is possible, but such a
strong statement would require much harder evidence than we have. Right now,
it's more plausible that Stack Overflow is simply doing things well and seems
to be aligning with the recommendations of the research, rather than
indicating a wider problem with the applicability of this stuff.

[1] <http://www.xeodesign.com/founder.html> [2]
<http://www.khanacademy.org/badges>

~~~
Estragon
For me, Stack Overflow's most rewarding feedback is social recognition for
having been helpful, which is largely independent of the formal rewards it
offers. I bet it's the same for a lot of other people too.

~~~
Lewisham
Yes, pretty much. The other open question is what Stack Overflow would be if
they removed the reputation system entirely.

The literature on motivation from people that subscribe to self-determination
theory indicates I think they would mostly prefer the system gone. Any reward
system you put in place is bad, it's just there are certain degrees of bad.

My gut tells me that Stack Overflow has benefitted from the reputation system
as another explicit feedback on how well you are doing. I think the badges are
largely unimportant, save for being a more fun way of saying "here's what you
can do on the site" than another tedious FAQ. If the badges _were_ important,
then we head down a nasty extrinsic motivation road. I think it's done better
with the rep system than without.

That said, I sometimes wonder how many people are put off by the built-in
competitive aspect of Stack Overflow; any writing you do is evaluated and
measured against others. For competitive people that end up bumped down all
the time, that seems like it would be disheartening, for social people always
been graded it might be disheartening too. The winner-takes-all set up, rather
than, say, a wiki answer that people are constantly tweaking, seems like it
could be problematic. I know that I stopped bothering answering questions very
quickly as I felt I had no mastery of the art, other people were getting the
upvotes, so I felt like my answers were largely ignored.

------
FuzzyDunlop
" _people were rating thousands of deals for free to get on an anonymous
leaderboard in a small game universe_ "

This was something I observed on a project of my own (albeit slightly
differently), and it was a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, these people would increase their activity on the app so as
to get more points and rank higher. It wasn't long before we got people trying
to game the system (we didn't do a great deal to prevent it, there was nothing
at all clever about our implementation), or trying to spam a few of our API
endpoints.

The result of this was the impression of increased popularity. Our counters
would rise, and we'd look busier. Score.

On the other hand, we got a massive bump in superfluous activity and little to
no insight into real user behaviour (other than suggestions we had a bunch of
spammers).

This created an unusual situation where we didn't want to block the spammers,
because it made us look good. But we wanted to block the spammers, because
they were spamming us to get on the leaderboard (which offered financial
incentives for placing highly on).

But, other than that, this sort of 'gamification' was, to someone who'd never
implemented or truly observed it, a revealing insight into what lengths some
people will go to just to see their name at the top of a table, or on a page
as the last active user, or whatever.

I think I find my own experience has a fair bit in common with the author of
this article's.

------
butongo
At dinner the other night, our five year old and his five year old friend
wouldn't eat their broccoli--until I told them that broccoli was worth 2000
points. The points had no reward attached, other than getting "points", and
making sure the other guy didn't have more imaginary points.

------
diminish
Not entirely but Is gamification mostly bullshit?

